MOONBASE CENTRAL

Tuesday, 6 September 2011

Valigursky Ship 3

Ed Valigursky

THE 100TH MILLENIUM

Ace Double 362

1959

[Edge of Time art by Ed Emscwiller]

Monday, 5 September 2011

Hard on the heels of my earlier post, I uncovered a few more mystery items in the box with the previous Kinder toys. One of the joys of buying loose lots of toys on ebay are the oddball items which appear along with the main event. After several such purchases, ive accumulated a fair few little toys or parts thereof which I have no idea where they are from. Among these cheap and cheerful little toys are Thunderbird derivatives and some elements which could be straight from Star Trek. Can anyone shed any light ? Also Ive posted a few Kinder space items including my all time favourite, the blue 'gemini' capsule. This should have four legs, but one has snapped. From the same sequence comes the white saucer and what must be a third item, the 'venera' like space probe. I actually picked up this hull in the street and recognised it as a Kinder toy. The saucer originally had silver legs and the Venera probe is clearly missing several items.

Hong Kong space vehicle - missing canopy missiles and radar. No TM 3" long


Thunderbird 5 'Space Station' Right and Space Cruiser, missing canopy, missiles No TM

Kinder 'Gemini' Missing 4th leg (carrying spacex pilot)

Kinder 'Venera' Missing accessories

Kinder Saucer missing ladder and legs

Kinder Space Truck and Laser Mole

Kinder Ice Sleds

Kinder Alien Fighters with 'Overlord' http://projectswordtoys.blogspot.com/2010/06/loving-alien.html

USAF Space Vehicle pilots

Indisputably female space Pilot! Britains Stargard (For Toad)

SHRUNK WORKS: SWORD in Miniature

Wote's cool post about Kinder toys set me off thinking about Miniature SWORD again. Much of the fleet exists in miniature, at a scale much smaller than Spacex, as pictured above [collage not to scale]:

Probe Force 3, Task Force 3, Task Force 1, Scout 2, Dyna Soar - Unknown Japanese maker, hard plastic [top right]

Scramble Bug, Space Glider, Probe Force 3, Scout 2, Probe Force 3, Scout 1 - Takeuchi UFO, rubber pencil erasers [top left, from centre of picture. right hand fleet]

Zero - X - Morinaga - hard plastic sweet premium [centre right]

Scramble Bug, Moon Prospector, Moon Crawler - Aoshima [re-issued Imai] hard plastic snap together models [bottom, top left to right in picture]

Notable exceptions are Probe Force 1, Scout 3, Nuclear Ferry, Moon Ranger, Moon Bus and Booster Rocket. I have blogged before about possible passable substitutes for the Cape Kennedy set and Apollo Saturn. There is also a small Booster Rocket found in the TB7 [Beetle] Imai kit but none of these are precise enough to be passed off as SWORD.

It is possible that there are more miniatures to be found in Japan. Wote's hard plastic fleet of five seems incomplete and Takeuchi may indeed have issued their missing vehicles as another set of pencil rubbers. But this is pure conjecture on my part. Anyone know?

Finally we come to scale. Having not grown up with any technical capacity whatsoever, scale might as well be the fourth dimension. I have no idea what scale the above miniatures are but more enlightened minds have included some points of reference: the golden astronaut, the coin [100 yen?]. I haven't a clue as to the size of the Aoshima models as I've never seen them in the flesh but I've assumed that they are smaller than Spacex. I would love to see all the SWORD miniatures pictured as a single group and maybe one day it will happen.

P.S. Miniaturising Gerry Anderson vehicles is not just a Japanese pastime. There are many examples in the West old and new and I've included a smattering of pics above:

Thunderbirds - 1990's game [top left, from centre of picture left hand fleet]
Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet 1960's cereal premiums [centre left][thanks to Andy B]
Captain Scarlet SPV - Adventure game 1990's [centre right, slanted][Board Game Geek]

Any more mini Andersons out there?

Sunday, 4 September 2011

I'm Pink, therefore im Spam

Its a strange thing about aliens, by they're essential nature, they must be different, A lot of common sci-fi aliens are humanoid, Star Trek Next Gen was especially guilty of this as almost every alien race was fundamentally humanoid, but with something wrong with their nose. Farscape and Babylon 5 went a bit further, using some nice alien physiology and adding extra limbs etc. But as Arthur C Clarke pointed out that eventually technology will advance to the point where it will be indistinguishable from magic, alien intelligence would be so radically different as to be incomprehensible to us. The motivations of an alien being might be impossible for us to understand, let alone the language. Sci Fi often bridges the communication gap by wheeling in the 'psychic' connection or the telepathy card, thereby obviating the necessity for doing the donkeywork of practically communicating and examining the alien perception. Gigers Alien for example, whilst being physically unique, is purely inimical in intent while displaying a base animal intelligence. In the Andromeda Strain, the alien lifeform was almost microscopic and crystalline in form, but did not display any sign of intelligence that we might recognise. Star Wars uses a galaxy of alien forms, but again the majority of these are humanoid. Ron Cobb, production designer on the first film suggested an ambulatory plant as a cantina alien, but it never made it to the final cut. The TV series, the Outer Limits had a huge cast of aliens some of which such as the Chromite and the Glob really made good use of the alien form. Dr Who is a serial offender for humanoid aliens as most of the creatures are actors dressed in suits and makeup. The Daleks manage to break this trend, even though they look like robotic dustbins, they still manage to exude a cold alien intelligence and even after years of exposure, still manage to scare. The Quatermass Xperiment had an early example of a truly different alien, which by the end of the film had metamorphosed into a shapeless mass of life, which for 1957 even managed to suspend disbelief and look real.

Lazee Sundea Caption Comp

Like over at Mars Base, where many a film is being viewed this autumnal Sunday [are there leaves on Mars? hee hee ] Moon Base is equally sleepy. Moon Mutt is fast asleep dreaming of the Ocean of Bones and I'm manning my post dreaming of Night Nurse and listening to the Witch Queen of New Orleans by Redbone on Moon Tube. They'll put a spell on you!

I'm waiting for a party of new SWORD astronauts to return from an all-night sesh at the local cantina luna. I can just see them on the visiscreen but can't hear them. What do you think they are saying?

American Apocrypha

Maverick from Small Scale World sent me the above photo of a cake decoration version of the LP Lunar Module and attendant astronauts that he put together for a magazine article, some ten years ago. I love the craters in the sand and low angle lighting! Timely indeed, as I watched Apollo 18 last night, the latest sci-fi flick in a current trend of movies. Taking the premise of a 'secret' NASA mission taking place two years after the official final Apollo flight in 1972, its a really good mix of surprise and excellent technical detail. Well worth seeing.

By the time Apollo 17 flew, public interest in the space programme had waned and funding for future missions was pulled, but the film does make you wonder if there was in fact other foray to the moon that were never officially publicised. Lots of projects never made it off the drawing board and the soviet plans to land a man on the moon were hampered by the loss of several N1 launch vehicles, the destruction of one of which almost eradicated the entire launch base, killing hundreds in a devastating launch pad fire. The secrecy enshrouding the soviet programme only began to disperse many years later and details of projected russian missions became clear. A fabulous website devoted to the 'black' space programmes during the cold war is available here: http://www.deepcold.com/ Another site which purports to have information on earlier failed soviet space missions, which were tracked by amateur radio is the Lost Cosmonauts. The recordings of what are allegedly actual transmissions are quite chilling and distrurbing and the accounts of the desperate measures used by the russian agency to get a man in space first are little short of frightening.

The recent resurgence of interest in space flight and a return to the moon, plus the many conspiracy theories which abound about crashed ufos, artefacts on the moon and life on mars, does make me wonder if there is in fact any truth out there and the large proportion of humanity are actually being kept in the dark about government activties...

A Stately Pleasure Dome Decree

This fabulous HG Toys Space Wars set recently sold on Fleabay for the bargain price of £12. Alas it was the $40 shipping from the US that put me off having a punt. However, all wasn't lost as the listing did offer the chance to view it's Spacex style snub-nosed Pleasure Cruiser close-up including it's hollow undercarraige. There's also an instruction sheet in the box but it appears to include the silver spacecraft rather than the Cruiser lookalike. Anyone got this set?