Gilyeat-class Interceptor
I was asked one day to build a ship for a Christmas present. This was July, but the customer would be picking it the following Saturday. Yikes! So I looked through my stash of spaceship pictures for something that looked good without being complicated and found this picture of a ship from one of the Wing Commander games, and noticed that, basically, the major look of the ship came from the wings. Well, it's easy enough to make wings out of sheet styrene, especially in a size to match the fuselage of a 1/72 scale F-15. I made two, dry-brushing the customer's barely in time. On the other I spent a little more time.
Undecided what color to paint it, I was perusing news.admin.net-abuse.email one day, when I saw several newbie spam-fighters, having gotten A Single Spam from somewhere in Alabanza netspace, wondered if Alabanza was thus spam-friendly. Sheesh.
Back in the summer of 2000 Alabanza empowered Jerry Gilyeat to mallet the spammers that inhabited the different ISP's that had come to be bought-up by Alabanza. Working 80-hour weeks and putting-up with the inevitable "You're not working fast enough" complaints of some pseudo-spamfighters, he turned Alabanza's reputation as a spamhaus into a squeeky-clean place for spammers to avoid. So, here's to you, Jerry. The newbies don't know any better, but the people who matter remember your accomplishment, and are grateful.
Jerry's also why the ship is orange. It matches the color I associate in my news-reader with his posts. The two-tone paneling was a result of having two bottles of similar color and some Scotch tape. All the different stripes and such just help break-up what would be a featureless surface.
