Guilmette Interceptor
This ship was the most fun I've had in a while. I wanted one a little like the JKRANK Interceptor but a little more novel. Hithertoo my construction strategy has been to glue a few big pieces together, add whatever else it takes to give it an interesting shape, finishing up with detail parts. I pretty much followed that script but with a couple of differences. I used a couple of unusual parts, like that disk and football helmet on the starboard side, and the bell-shaped, well, bell, in back. The big divergence was that I took a box with some A-6 Intruder, Stuka, Spitfire, and sundry other parts, and used as many of the parts as I could bring myself to, ignoring any other box of parts. The ship came out pretty well for it, and, this is the best part, it went fast. One weekend. All I had to do is relax and take some chances. Nirvana.
Painting was like JKRANK and the USC Fighter but with a basecoat of dark-olive and dry-brushing with SAC Bomber Tan. Decals were by JTGraphics, the same guy that does John Lester's. I would normally have gone for white lettering or, better, orange. Or yellow. Or red. Or anything but black, but black was all I'd ordered, so I stuck with all black decals, except for a red bird overlay from John's decals, Nose Art Series 2 (Animals Small).
The real Guilmette
Ron Guilmette (RFG) is the only anti-spammer I've named two ships after - This one, and the RFG Special. He earned it by... Ok. You know how trojans and virus' get installed. You use MS Outlook to read mail, and it helpfully runs all attachments, and the ones that are trojans get installed on your Windows PC faster than you can say, "Hey, Gates - How about a secure mailreader, you greedy SOB!" Well, spammers hired trojan-writers to write trojans which, when a broadband-user "installs" it, turns that Windows PC into a spam-cannon. In other words, the spammers, by remote-control, hijack OUR COMPUTERS to send their spam.
Back to Ron. He ran a huge network of "honeypots" - Machines that looked to the spammers like trojaned spam-cannons, but when ordered by the spammers to send-out spam would instead tell Ron who was sending the honeypot that order. In other words, Ron knew who the spammers were. And he could prove it. All Ron had to do was publish a list of what IP address gave which "Spam!" command and when, and pass that list along to the spammer's internet hosts, and the hosts could identify the spammers and give them the boot. A list like this one.
Keep in mind, the spammers were hijacking people's computers - A federal offense. Some of the hosts booted the spammers. Most hosts didn't, though, but instead warned their lucrative spamming customers. Before you could say, "Spam ends this week!" the spammers turned their zombie army of spam-cannons towards Ron's little corner of cyberspace and DOS'ed him right off the net. They flooded his connection with so much traffic that he couldn't do business, get e-mail, surf. And it affected his host similarly, too. Ron had to announce he was closing-down the honeypots and getting out of the anti-spam business before the spammers turned their attention back to spamming us.
What Ron did was courageous and pretty damn clever, and could have ended the spam problem in a month or two. Instead, his service to the internet community has cost him time and money and made him the target for every spammer and greed-pig spammer-hosting company trying to hide from the anti-spammers. Thank you, Ron Guilmette, for your generosity on our behalf.
3/4 Starboard - 35kb
Starboard - 26kb
