The Third Reich was jam-packed full of ridiculous notions. Genocide. Invading Russia. Declaring war on the US. Superstitious claptrap. Dreams of world domination. Government programs that favor one ethnic group over another. Collective economics. But perhaps the *goofiest* idea was one of Hitler’s favorites: the P1000 “Ratte,” a 1000-ton *tank* packing the turret from a battleship, with two 280mm cannon and diesel engines from U-boats. There is zero chance that it would have worked worth a damn,and had one popped up on a battlefield every tactical bomber in a 500 mile radius would have competed to bob it into oblivion.

I’ve often thought that what the world needed was a good scale model of the Ratte, but I’ve never gotten around to it. But it seems someone else has; TAKom Models has recently released a 1/144 kit of the P1000. It includes two “Maus” tanks for scale. I would have preferred 1/72 scale, but I imagine that would have been a bit spendy.

The box art is fairly epic. Not only does it showcase the ridiculous scale of the Ratte… it also includes Nazi flying saucers because, hey, why not.

A while back Horizon Models, a new injection-molded model kit company in Australia, sent me a copy of their first kit, a 1/72 Mercury spacecraft in return for a review. So, here goes.

The kit includes parts to build not only the orbital capsule (with abort tower) but also the earlier “boilerplate” test articles. The results are small… but then, the Mercury capsule wasn’t exactly a Winnebago. Also included are photoetched steel detail parts, and stands for the two kits. The engineering of the parts seems to be quite well done, with the corrugations nice and clean and fricken’ tiny. On the whole this looks like a spiffy kit.

As an engineer, there is one aspect of the kit that makes me scratch my head a tad. The sprue as shown below includes the parts for one complete Mercury capsule, one incomplete Mercury capsule and one stand. In order to make this a “two capsule kit,” Horizon used the simple expedient of including two copies of the sprue. It seems to me that it would have been more efficient to include all the necessary parts (for one flight and one boilerplate) on a single sprue; but in doing it this way the kit builder winds up with a bunch of extra bits to be used for other projects.

The Mercury capsule kit is available from the Horizon Models website for $35.

Horizon has also just released a companion kit, a 1/72 Mercury-Atlas. I haven’t seen that, but it seems promising. And it’s available through Amazon.

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If you have a product you want me to review… hey, why not. Feel free to send me a copy or two. I’m particularly interested in reviewing gold bullion and the like.

Thought some of y’all might be interested in a current project… CAD model of the Mars Ascent Vehicle from “The Martian.”

The fact that I made the master CAD models for these, I’m sure, plays no role in my recommendation…

Anybody have experience using this, or something similar?

20 oz. Chroming Spray Paint

At this very moment I’m watching “All American Makers,” and there’s a couple guys flacking almost exactly this, claiming they invented it. It sure looks like they are claiming to have created something you can buy off the shelf.

Years ago I bought a Saturn V blueprint off ebay. I then scanned it and sold it on my site. One buyer was Randall Munroe of XKCD,who used it as a basis for his “Up Goer Five.” I suggested to him that he should sell large prints of the UG5, which he did (I imagine I was hardly the only one to suggest this to him). Someone bought one of these prints and stuck it up in a restoration facility at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum’s Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center, where it was photographed in the background during the restoration of the original starship Enterprise filming model. See here:

Star Trek NCC-1701 Studio Model Restoration in 2015

So, yeah, it’s a stretch to lay claim to any value here… but whatever there may be I’ll take.

A photo (dating from the 1950’s sometime) showing Dr. Abe Silverstein and Edward R. Sharp, Director of the NACA Lewis Research Center, Cleveland, Ohio, looking at a model of a ramjet equipped supersonic fighter concept. Unclear if this is a NACA design, but it does resemble something out of Lockheed.

Link to the full-rez HERE.

A poor-quality photo of a display model of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, made partially of plexiglas to permit a view of the interior. Appears to have been made by or for Air Force Space Systems Division. Image published in the February 17, 1964, issue of Missiles & Rockets magazine. This would have been an early design of the MOL. It’s difficult to determine size/scale of the model, but it looks reasonably large… probably at least 1/24 scale. Note that the transstage is shown attached, but it represented at low fidelity.

For the past few months, companies have been cranking out “Star Wars” branded merchandise. While I am kinda by definition the target market for the new Star Wars movie, having seen the original Star Wars in the theater three times at the age of seven, the vast, vast bulk of the Star Wars merchandise means precisely *nothing* to me. Plates and dishes and underwear and cups and soap and sex toys and breakfast cereal and board games and pop-up books and hats and socks and napkins and posters and whatnot, all plastered with the image of Kylo Ren or Finn or any of the other characters I know squadoo about? Meh.

On the other hand… toy spaceships. Those occasionally cause me to pause and take note. Probably shouldn’t come as too much of a shock. As money-sucking vices go, I imagine picking up the odd five-dollar toy spaceship is pretty minor compared to getting regularly likkered up or smoking like a chimney. So… new Star Wars spaceships. Woo!

The spaceships for the new Star Wars movies look like they follow in the best Star Wars design tradition… they look cool and don’t make a lick of sense. One of the craft featured in several toy formats is the “Kylo Ren Command Shuttle,” which is apparently a personnel transport for the main bad guy. The Shuttle, like the Imperial Shuttle from Return of the Jedi, features inexplicably large wings (what does a spacecraft equipped with antigravity need with wings of *any* size?) that fold up vertically for landing (just when wings might be most useful). The oddity is that all of the Command Shuttle toys or models I’ve seen any reference to all feature the wings in the vertical, landed configuration. I’ve not seen any with the wings in the “flight” configuration, which you’d think would be most interesting to the kiddies.

The die cast Disney Store toy.

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The Lego kit

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The tiny Micromachines toy

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The Revell model kit

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And here’s the Hasbro “Titanium Series” toy. These are small, but reasonable quality part-die-cast, part-plastic toys:

Oddly, these are painted white, while every other available depiction of the ship shows it black. Hmmm.

Starting as a kid, I found enjoyment and even a little income making models; I have a little talent in that area. But in recent years I’d started ramping back on working on models of all kinds; hobbies are less important when you’re trying to figure out how to pay the mortgage. And at the end of 2013, an attack of bronchitis truly trashed my lungs for several months; chemicals and dust seemed like *really* bad things to be around. So for going on two years now I’ve not really spent any time working on something I’ve long loved to do.

Some time back I picked up one of the Hasbro Command Shuttle toys. I was disappointed at the fixed-landing-configuration, but it seemed to me that with some effort it could be modified to show the vehicle in flight configuration. So far, there have been few clear images of the shuttle, so it’s unclear just what angle the wings are at in flight. The best bit of video so far shows the wings already in the process of folding up, so all that can be said is that the wings fold down *at* *least* this far:

So, I thought I could replicate that at some point. Never had any hard plans… like many modelers, it was one of those “one of these days I’ll get around to it” sort of things. Well… then came this last Sunday and Monday.

Sunday Raedthinn was injured and taken to the vet. Didn’t get to sleep until ridiculously late that night, and woke up relatively early, so I was a tad tired Monday. I spent the day sort of puttering around waiting to hear something, trying to be productive. But creative writing proved impossible. CAD modeling proved disastrous. CAD diagram work proceeded with some success… couldn’t draw worth a damn, but some make-work projects of scaling up some images to go on 11X17 pages proceeded well, because it required no real thought. And at some point during the first part of the day, I converted one of the Command Shuttles into flight configuration.

The weird thing: I’ve no recollection of actually doing that. Later in the day Monday I picked up Raedthinn from the vet, brought him home, took care of him for a bit and then collapsed on the couch… to find the Shuttle sitting there, completed. Nothing magical about it; it was surrounded with the tools and epoxy and such I used to make the mods, I just somehow failed to install any of the relevant memories into long-term storage. It is, I suppose, a bit of artistic creativity, but it was clearly so straightforward that I did it without putting a great deal of hard thought into it.

A little odd. But… shrug.

I’ve a few more that I’ll convert the same way, and then likely paint black. Then… probably put ’em on ebay, I suppose. Anybody interested?

Here’s a process I was previously unaware of… the use of easily available hydrogen peroxide-based consumer products and ultraviolet light (or just sunlight) to restore the original bright white color of old plastic. While the guy doing the video focuses on old computer equipment, this process might be of particular interest for old unpainted display models and the like that have turned yellow or brown due to UV exposure over the years or decades.

Something I don’t know: does this process restore the structural properties of the old plastic? With years of UV damage, not only does white plastic turn yellow, it also becomes brittle. While I really rather doubt it, I suppose it might be just barely possible that this process will reverse that embrittlement. And if it works on plastic, what else might it de-yellow? Paint? Paper? Hmmm…