Jul 162022
 

It looks pretty doom-laden for the Tomy 1/350 scale die-cast Enterprise… with one week to go, they’re still at only 63% of their funding goal. If, as seems likely, this doesn’t come to pass, a bunch of potential buyers will be disappointed… but they won’t be too likely to be *angry*. This is not the case for *all* buyers of large scale Enterprises, however.

In December 2020 Eaglemoss announced their 27-inch long Enterprise D model. I posted about it HERE. This is a large and complex model kit, not a finished product. And Eaglemoss has an unusual way of releasing these things… instead of one big box with all the parts, you get a packet every two weeks with *some* parts. It’s a subscription service, you pay as you go. And the cost of the model stacks up… looks like over the length of time it takes to get all the packets, you’ll end up spending over $1700. Youch. But I’ve been watching some YouTubers as they’ve been getting the bits and gradually assembling the thing, and it looked promising (with some issues here and there).

*Looked.* Past tense.

Part Works publisher Eaglemoss goes out of business

It seems Eaglemoss is in a bad way. Due to Covid lockdowns in merry old England, their ability to do business was massacred and they are in a deep, deep hole… one it looks like they might not climb out of. They seem to be already out of business.

That’s bad.

It’s especially bad not only for their employees and stockholders, but those working away on the Enterprise D (and other subscription kits of similar scale and cost). Because the Enterprise D is distributed over *30* *months.* Which means if you started in January of 2021, you’d currently be about 18  months along… with 12 months to go on your kit. Twelve months worth of parts it seems unlikely you’ll get. You won’t be charged for those parts, of course… but you will have spent over a grand for sixty percent of an Enterprise, plus however much time you spent on a model you’re now unlikely to ever finish, display or sell.

This looks to be about the current state of the Enterprise. It’s… sad.

 

I’ve never liked getting big, expensive things via subscriptions spread out over years. This only reinforces that.

 Posted by at 10:23 pm
Jul 142022
 

For a long time we’ve known that the supposedly “all about the science” political Left thinks that guns are evil. But they’ve expanded the field of non-sentient mechanisms that they think have unfortunate personality traits:

Homophobic Telescope Reveals First Hi-Res Images of Deep Space

Huh.

 Posted by at 12:21 pm
Jul 112022
 

A piece of artwork attributed to the DoD (1984 or before) depicting a large structure being built in space. Since it’s DoD, it is most likely a surveillance or mapping radar system of some kind, or an electronic listening system. Since it doesn’t seem to have either large PV arrays or a nuclear reactor – at least not yet at this stage in construction – I’d lean towards it being a listening system. Of course, a great deal more stuff may have been added to it after this… assuming it’s an actual design and not pure art.

 Posted by at 9:51 pm
Jul 052022
 

Tomy has announced two new things about their 1/350 scale die cast Enterprise:

1) The 5,000 backers needed has been reduced to 2,500 (they currently have 1061)

2) The deadline has been pushed back to July 24.

These should make it more likely that the effort will succeed, and for a few reasons. Chopping the number of needed backers in half not only makes it easier to achieve, it also makes the thing more desirable to collectors: instead of there being 5,000 of them in the world, now there will be 2,500. The secondary market in years to come will probably make the price balloon substantially. Additionally, Comic Con International in San Diego is July 22-24, and I imagine Tomy will be there. I suspect that if they have their prototype on display for the thousands of nerds with fat stacks of disposable income, they should rack up a good number of new backers. I can’t immediately dream up another reason to end the campaign on the 24th.

I still remain a little annoyed that Haslabs $300 “Hiss tank” has nearly 13,500 backers with more than a month to go. Hmmmph. At least the Haslab “Reva” (the disliked character from the Obi Wan Kennobi series) light saber looks likely to fall far short of funding. It’s $500 with 1300 of 5000 backers with six days to go. I don’t *know* why that one is failing; maybe there’s a cutoff just north of $300 that people are willing to spend these days. Or perhaps Reva is just not intriguing of a character. Or perhaps the Star Wars fans with cash are no longer in the mood to keep funding a franchise that keeps insulting them.

 Posted by at 12:34 pm
Jul 012022
 

Recently APR Patrons/Subscribers and I were able to successfully crowdfund the purchase of a lot off ebay that included a few folders of vintage lifting body work. The chief prize from the lot was a *giant* blueprint of a “GTV Structure,” a manned Model 176/ FDL-7 lifting body test vehicle (“GTV” was not explained, but I suspect it means something like “Glide Test Vehicle,” designed to be dropped from an NB-52). Scanning of the lot is underway; the crowdfunders now have access to the blueprint in several forms (full size, halfsize; full color, grayscale).

 

If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.




 Posted by at 6:46 pm
Jun 262022
 

Prior to Challenger, one piece of technology that was often touted as something that would be deployed by the Space Shuttle was the “beam builder.” This was a mechanism that would take rolls of aluminum “tape” a millimeter or less in thickness and automatically chop, bend, deploy and weld said aluminum into truss structure beams. These beams would be arbitrarily long… useful for building all manner of things, from space stations to radar satellites, on up to solar power satellites. The technology got fairly far along… but once Challenger exploded, the idea of actually using the shuttle to build vast constructs in space kinda vanished, with ISS being the only example of that. And in the case of ISS, very little actual “construction” was carried out, instead the ISS was simply assembled, with parts like the solar panels deploying rather than being built.

But while it lasted, beam builders featured in a lot of concept art, such as the one below depicting a beam being extruded from the Beam Builder in the rear of the Shuttle cargo bay. Irritatingly, I’ve misplaced the book I scanned this from and cannot immediately confirm who to credit it to.

 Posted by at 9:16 pm
Jun 232022
 

Halfway through the crowdfunding effort, Tomy only has 14.9% of the backers needed. Unless there’s a big surge, I can’t see how this is going to happen. And it’s a damned shame, it looks like a nifty thing. So if you have an extra $600, give it some consideration. If you have an extra $600 but don’t want a big die-cast Enterprise, buy it anyway and send it to me. I’ll give it a good home. Or you could just send me $600 directly. I’d be fine with that too.

32 Inch Star Trek Enterprise – Die Cast Metal Replica

They’ve recently updated the description to include three shuttlecraft as well:

I think they just butted up against some historic bad luck. An expensive luxury item in the middle of Bidenomics? That’s just tragic; they’ve likely been at work on this project for a few years, and the timing just plain sucked. I just hope that if this doesn’t go through they don’t throw it all away, but store what they need to safely and try again when things are better. Not sure when that’ll be… maybe year two or three of the DeSantis administration?

 

 Posted by at 8:08 pm