Fast Packet

Last year I spent an awful lot of time working on ships for a film and then refinishing some ships back from a film. Coupled with the state of my work area, I got almsot nothing built for the year. Over the holidays I spent a couple of weeks going through all my parts, consolidating them into 34 32"x16"x4" bins, separating them into several bins each of cars-and-trucks, SF-and-spacecraft, 1/72-aircraft, all-other-aircraft, and military-vehicles. A better organization might well be part-size alone, but divided this way I can keep all the parts to specific kits together, where I'm used to seeing them. This is the first ship to be built after this massive organization.

One of the parts I found was a remote control to an ancient Packard Bell 486SX25 computer. It was supposed to turn The Slowest 486 Computer Ever into a media player, hence all the buttons. I thought all the parts except the buttons could make an interesting ship along the lines of last year's Alien Freighter, which I'd quite enjoyed building.

I first put a styrene cylinder along the inside of the battery slot. Then, the batttery cover was flipped over and slipped back to provide most of the lower fuselage. Oversized plasticard sheet ran along the sides the cylinder. The plasticard was trimmed to be nearly the same size as the flaps from a 1/48 scale B-17. Abaft of the battery cover a toothbrush holder became an engine module. Atypically, the engine exhaust is not cylinders or bells, but the tracks to a Space Shuttle platform.

After that it was all detailing, collecting parts from only two of the parts bins. One of the bins had to have all the big parts pulled aside so that I could look at all the small ones, but the process was far easier than looking through the handful of model kits I could still get to for all the clutter.