Saturday 6 September 2014

Starship Modeler and Scale Modeling

I used to assemble a lot of model kits. I wasn't actually very good at it, I didn't really put that much effort into most of the ones I built, and I spent a lot more money on them than I should have. Before I got involved with building model kits, I had started writing what must have been insanely bad science fiction stories on the family computer. I still entertain delusions of grandeur of writing a trilogy of science fiction novels, and building a series of model kits to illustrate the various spaceships. Maybe I'll do both someday.

One website that I've enjoyed looking at is Starship Modeler, and I love their Reader Gallery, where they display submissions from readers who have built a wide variety of science fiction models (of varying type and quality). A couple of years ago, a guy called Jeff Polizzotto submitted five of his creations, all built from copies of the same kit: the starships Archer, Conner, Dykstra, Vincent, and Vinton, all based upon the Oberth class from Star Trek. (I've never liked the Oberth class because its size and design doesn't make sense, but I do have fond memories of piloting the Oberth on the Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Starship Bridge Simulator Super Nintendo game with my friend Jeff when we were kids.) I had lost track of the actual URLs, but was able to do some creative searching to find them again.

One of my other favorites is Andy Swenson's USS Tripoli. When I was a kid, and enamoured with Star Trek, my friends and I were always fixated on the biggest, newest, flashiest ships. Over the years, I've gotten more interested in the story potential of older or smaller ships, like Swenson's Tripoli. The big, fancy flagships are obviously cool, but there's more drama and intrigue to be read (or written) if your characters' options are limited, forcing them to employ ingenuity to overcome disadvantages in size or capability.

For now, my own scale modeling ambitions shall have to wait...

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