Shuttle Service

August continues to be a favourable month for vintage plastic for me as quite by chance I spotted this lovely red shuttle recently. Its another chicken and egg situation, as this and the many variations by Blue Box and AHI among others, seem to depend from the small red shuttle in the Imperial and Apollo Moon Exploring toys sets. As to which toy is the earliest, is hard to say, however this red friction version has some very interesting details. 

Firstly, it has a swordesque sticker on the hull reading 'Payva'. This could be either spanish or russian, but seems to suggest foreign manufacture. Although there are no makers marks at all, the manufacturer seems to have made an effort to distance the toy from its other iterations.  

Most notable is the double exhausts on the rear as opposed to triple on the small toy and all succeeding versions such as Blue Box. This panel design on the upper hull has one large rather than two separate squares, a design which AHI neglected to change on their purple chrome version. Unfortunately, that and the carded rocket left the Wotan archives during a cash flow crisis and ive only got the old auction photograph left.

The Blue Box version, which is considerably more easy to find has a different styling again on the top and also opts for slim nacelles on the wingtips to either avoid copyright infringements, or to just modernise the toy slightly. However, I much prefer this odd red version which matches the cleaner lines if its smaller cousin and sports an interesting new engine layout.