Nuclear Physics

From the atomic WOTAN: In researching the background of the Sword line and finding out about one of my favourite vehicles, the Nuclear Ferry, I recalled an illustration from about 1969 that I had seen as a boy in Look and Learn magazine. Recently, the bulk of the magazine has been converted into a fantastic searchable database on the web, and keywords in hand, I dived in and within seconds found the very picture I had been searching for all these years - top picture above! The article was one of a regular series on the emergent space race and showed the fantastic ship in all its glory, with cut aways showing how the craft worked.

It may not be visible in the text, but the description gives the length of the main fuselage as 125 feet and notes that the shuttle is held on the frontal dome in flight, and swings down, 17 feet to connect to the base of the freight module. This then detaches and is flight capable. (This feature also seems to be apparent in the Century 21 toy - middle picture above - as there is a visible seam at the rear of the conical front section of the toy, but does not appear on its tiny Spacex cousin - bottom picture above.)

Near the bottom of the illustration is a signature - McCall - Robert McCall, being a renowned NASA and space illustrator and fellow blogger and publisher Rob Godwin aka DARTH told me that he once met Mr.McCall and he was quoted as having "just dreamed the craft up" and it was not one of NASA's future projects. Looking at the illustration and comparing it to the box artwork from the SWORD toy (middle picture above), obvious similarities can be seen and again on the Nuclear Ferry Watch Backing Card spotted on ebay the image is blatantly plagiarised once more. It could be confidently suggested that Mr.McCall is the father of the Nuclear Ferry and all its future imitators.

Nice one WOTAN! Watch this space for WOTAN's fabulous scratch built Nuclear Ferry!