1/144 scale Space Ship Two

Watch out for this guy...he's a cat-owning pagan Saxon dog... I'm warning you. Actually, he's one hell of a brilliant resin model kit designer also - and you _will_ be getting your money's worth. That's the upside of the innately mentally warped...they are inevitably driven towards putting forth the best possible effort in everything they start upon, like lemmings competing to see who can do the fanciest dive off of the cliff into the sea. :-)

Pat

One does not own cats. You join their staff.

I would think that their natural curiosity could be a major source of lost parts regarding your models. And I've warned you about this before:

I've got hay fever and am allergic to them, which really sucks, as I think cats are great and a lot of fun. A dog will pretty much love anyone; if you can get a cat to think of you as _its_ best friend, you've really accomplished something. BTW, I went looking for your new flying wing atomic-powered-bomber model last night, and couldn't find anything on it on the web; is it still in production? Whatever happened to the Spiral-50/50 model? Wotan bless you for making the X-Jet; I took one look at it in "X-Men II", and fell head over heels in love with that aircraft. And you know... you've _got_ to do the WT-715 from "Things To Come" sooner or later: a plane! I was the guy who put that website onto those aircraft a few years back. Starlog did a book around 25 years back about sci-fi-vehicles that has a side-view photo of the original model of it in it.

Pat

Surprisingly, no.

Right here:

Too big and complex (i.e. expensive) for the limited interested expressed. Sits about 1/3 completed.

later:

What a plane!

Looks more like a cat parasite.

God, did they do a great packaging job on that space fighter:

would be worth a cutaway model in its own right. Of course, I've never seen a cutaway of our X-24 based SAINT II, which could have been damn near as slick.

later:

> What a plane!

Just for that, you get a "Gas Of Peace" bomb on the head, like the Pope fatally did in the book. You should really read that book - the movie looks like your worst nightmare of a UN controlled world; in the book everyone gets fed up with that shit in short order, and tosses "Wings Over The World" out on its ass, ending up with a decentralized world government based on a common economic system with only a minimal central authority telling people what to do and think. The bad guy in the movie - Theotocopulos - who wants to blow up the space cannon - is the _hero_ in the book, in best Ayn Rand tradition. Things go the way Karl Marx predicted, and the government _really does_ whither away once he verbally kicks it in its decaying ass, giving all the people of the Earth a maximum amount of freedom for each of them, providing that they don't set out to do obvious harm to others. In the movie, it's "Wings Over The World"; in the book it's "The Air Dictatorship"...and it's pointlessly tyrannical, inefficient, unimaginative, and suffocatingly hidebound and bureaucratic. Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand" is then made manifest, and in a world free of war, fear, and defense spending, everyone can set forth using their individual abilities and effort to increase the overall abilities and possibilities of humanity as a species, benefiting not only themselves as individuals, but bettering the entire society they live in as a whole

- so that everyone's life is getting a bit better, day-by-day through everyone's efforts. You don't come up with new ideas to make a buck, but rather to be honored both in the present day and in memory as the person who helped out the whole world...which is one hell of a ego trip when you think about it, and probably a lot more fun than Bill Gates' tens of billions of dollars.

Pat

fighter:

That would be worth a cutaway model in its own right.

later:

>> What a plane!

Not *my* fault you posted the wrong link.

A common delusionary utopian future amongst late Victorial sci-fi/ social commentary writers. I've read a number of books like that from that general time period, looking forward to a day when people work not for their own benefit, but for the "common good." The thing you take from each of these books is that they're not exactly describing

*humans,* but brainwashed robots. Such systems would never work with large numbers of real people. People like to see rewards for their efforts. people don't like to see lazy bastards living like ticks... unless they *are* the lazy bastards in question. Plymouth plantation taught us that centuries ago.

.which is one hell of a ego trip when

I'll take a billion dollars over unpaid ego-stroking, thanks. With a billion dollas, I can build new industries. With accolades, I can't do anything but try to avoid paparazzi and crazed stalkers. Witha billion dollars, I can build an orbital tourist craft and orbitting hotel. With "memory" and "honors" all I can do is dream about such things and in the end eat a bullet as a lifetime of unfulfilled dreams crash down on me.

Especially Wells - his later stories were basically "Something amazing happens and then the world turns socialist." What Wells basically wanted to happen was a world government of some sort to evolve (didn't have to be a good government either; he was fond of Napoleon and Stalin) then after that occurred and ended the necessity for war, it would evolve with time into a more benevolent form.

I think it would cost more than that to do.

Let me take a wild guess that that spy satellite is going to fall on your house in the next couple of months. ;-)

Pat

His later stories were basically unreadable.

Doubtful. $300 million would get you the ship. The hotel would be purchased from Bigelow.

There's a story about how that happened; he was trying to do social commentary with his stories. He thought people would realize that the Martians in The War Of The Worlds getting destroyed by germs despite their superior technology was very similar to British forces getting walloped by things like malaria and sleeping sickness in the far flung reaches of their empire and that The First Men In The Moon was poking fun at the White Man's Burden concept of showing up one day to civilize the natives, who in the case of the Selenites had at least as much of a civilized society as the Earthmen. But people didn't get it (he should have seen this coming after Swift's "A Modest Proposal" was taken seriously by some as a way of solving the Irish overpopulation problem), so he started laying the social commentary on with a trowel.

Although Bigelow is having pretty good luck with their inflatable habitat prototypes so far, and I'm sure the Russians would let you send a Soyuz to one for $300 million, actually "building" a space tourist craft is probably going to cost in excess of $300 million by the time everything is said and done. It implies the use of one of the private space entrepreneurs, and outside of Orbital Sciences they haven't been noted for producing workable hardware to back up their claims of new orbital spacecraft at low prices. SpaceX is already building their first Falcon 9 before they even have had a Falcon 1 work right.

Pat