Quite Elevating

Woodsy,

Further to Wotan's Fireflash post, attached are a few pics of my Fireflash items which may be of interest. First is the contents of the Aoshima kit which, like far too many of my kits, is sitting in the "to be built one day/year" pile. Then I have some photos of the Konami Fireflash with its attendant Elevator Cars. I've included a pic with my giant finger in shot with the Master Elevator Car, just to give an idea of how small it is!!!

P.S. - I like the way the Konami Elevator Cars are numbered 1, 2 and 4, representing the "team" that brought the Fireflash in safely. Number 3 was, of course, the one that careered off the runway and exploded amongst the parked aeroplanes off to the side. As you probably know, the wayward Number 3 was an unintended accident that occurred during shooting but it looked so good that the producers kept the shot in and wrote in the Number 4 replacement!!!!

For completeness, here's Konami's larger scale Master Elevator car, with the tiny one alongside for comparison. I think Konami also did a mid-scale version to go into their Thunderbird 2 hangar set, but mine's packed away somewhere and not available for photos.

Cheers

Tony Panther

Battersea Flyby

SWORD Dyna Soar Glider.

Battersea Power Station in London

[made famous by the album Animals, Pink Floyd]

Crossing Paths

 I make no secret that im a huge Lego fan and regularly follow whats happening in the Building Community. One of my favourite sites is the Brothers Brick which regularly showcases the work of custom builders. Now and then though, the models manage to gather in so many of my favourite concepts that i'm totally blown away. Among this months offerings is a special deep sea research vessel designed to navigate the depths of the seas on Enceladus, one of Saturns icy moons, Herschel-Lazerev Submarine.

Next up, combining my fascination of the Soviet space race and a Molab type vehicle to boot is this nifty retro style rocket diorama.

What's The Matter?

I had yet another senior moment today! Since my childhood in the 1960's I have been safe in the knowledge that my world was made up of three reliable states of matter: gases, liquids and solids. Alas, my reliance on this holy trinity was shattered when I discovered that there is indeed a fourth state of matter, that of PLASMA! Now, like most people, I've come across the term in various guises such as blood plasma, plasma drives and more recently, plasma TV's, but I'd never associated the term with a new phase of matter. On further investigation online I further discover that Plasma is not only everywhere but makes up the vast majority of the Universe!  People's lexikon Wiki even describes countless-more non-classical states such as Strange and Degenerate Matter! The mind boggles!

No doubt readers will now inform me that world of Sci-Fi and the Anderverse, if not SWORD itself, are full of references to Plasma! Doh!

Flash Crash

Here's the great Fireflash crash from the Thunderbirds episode Trapped in The Sky
courtesy of You Tube. Century 21 Toys should have made one of these to go with their
Zero-X!

Destination:Gutter!

Reading Mikes Fireball story recently put me in mind of the countless summer days when i'd come back from holiday with some kind of flying toy or rocket. Out on the beaches in the wide open spaces, catapult launched toys were great fun and easy to track as they came in to land. However, when I got back home and tried them in the yard or garden, it was always a recipe for disaster. The Topper Cape Canaveral set had been responsible for disabling the fairy lights on the xmas tree and the Merit Water Rockets had disappeared into oblivion over a garden wall several times. Woolworths was always a safe bet for cheap toys and one such was a neat little Cape Kennedy set like the one pictured above. The gantry itself is about six inches high and has a small wheel for moving the tower back and to and also a handy lift on the side for loading up the crew. The detachable launcher was fitted with a powerful spring and the plastic rocket was made with a sliding nose cone. Included in the pack were two fan shaped satellites and the idea was to attach a string to the base of the rocket fin and tether it to the gantry. When the satellites were sat on the nose of the rocket and it was launched, the string paid out, stopped the rocket at its set height and jerked the nose forward, sending the satellites flying on. Naturally, I never used the string and was content to blast the whole lot as far skyward as I could manage, invariably losing a satellite in a tree or in the gutter! Years later I found a sealed carded set in the states via ebay and although it was comparatively inexpensive, ive no longer any desire to try it out in the garden!

Fireflash Down

During our time out at Mars Base on Friday, conversation turned to Anderson models and Mike B commented that there is a dearth of Fireflash kits and more notably toys. Given that the Fireflash airliner features heavily in Thunderbirds and even makes the end credits, J21 or any of the other big names never produced a toy of the iconic aircraft. In fact the only real source is a the recent Aoshima release in diecast. Im not desperately up to speed with japanese kit releases, but does anyone know or own a kit version of the plane ?

Zero Moon

I was thinking about the Space 1999 pilot Break Away. If I remember rightly, after some high jinks at Moonbase, the moon leaves Earth's orbit. What would the effects be if this actually happenned? Would it be catastrophic for us here on the mainland?