News

Gerry Anderson & Christopher Burr's Terrahawks - The Bray Studios Production Sale. Auction 30/11/20

I saw this shared by my friend and master model builder; David Sisson.
Without that, I would've never come across it.

This is a great video. If you watch to the end, you get a great look at the MEV, which is completely different to the Captain Scarlet MEV.
This intriguing vehicle is used about twice in the show; to my memory; and only briefly. The only close-up shots you get are from the side.
You can see here that the crane arm (with laser cannon) is rail-mounted, so it can travel to the front of the vehicle and pick something up in-front of the cockpit.
I remember that the gun on the crane arm is gobsmackingly powerful; creating absolute havoc among the enemy with only a few shots.
Also, you can see that the vehicle must come in two variants; one with caterpillar tracks as seen in "To Catch a Tiger" and then with skis, like you see here.
They must have a few of these machines on SpaceHawk, since the one that you see is marked as #4.

I like the space tank as well, with the rows of zeroids on either side, which would've presumably worked like phalanx guns for suppressing fire or missile interception.

These models have held up surprisingly-well, given that nearly 40 years have passed by.
Updated Nov 27, 2020, 10:45 AM

With the working from home extending on forever, I thought I needed a bigger chair.
So I went looking online, saw this one, and that was me finished.

I call it the hypnochair because you can stand and watch the light patterns for ages.

256 Booby Trap: Human Factor (Unused Cue) - YouTube

My friend Bruce shared this ace unused track by Ron Jones, that was done for the TNG episode; Booby Trap, which was a good and memorable episode from reasonably early in the series.

This version has a lot more power than the version that was used, and it stands up much better on its own but it might be that the final version fits the quiet tension of the show better.

In the scene where the finished version of this track was used, Picard schools his crew by manoeuvring the 642m Enterprise D through an asteroid field with practically no engine output; only a single burst from the impulse drive and a few corrections from the RCS thruster quads.

This was one way Picard was an absolute chief; something they completely forgot when they made the new Picard series.

Here's a scan from one of the magazines that I got from Japan, last week.
It's interesting that they headed up a 1997 article on the works of Go Nagai with a huge CGI Dai-X.

You can find the lossless version, plus a couple more details here:
http://xbomber.co.uk/?dir=Star+Fleet%2FArticles+and+Scans%2FB-Club

I'm going to watch Earth Final Conflict through again.
It's been many years since I struggled through all 5 seasons of it.
But the series does have a lot of really excellent weapons and equipment...
The skrill bio guns, the below Beretta 92F with an under-slung attachment and illuminated ammo counter ...
The pull-out global link communicator is another great idea, which makes me think of the flexies from Andromeda.
I noticed as well that the character; Augur has a great wrist-mounted, full-colour portable computer; a bit like a Psion or Nokia communicator.
I seem to remember that this show gets extremely wild and crazy after the first season, but we'll see again how it goes ...

Here's a bit of inspiration for us on a Monday morning;
... a ship that the ASDB refers to as 'The Beast'.

The saucer section detaches as a separate ship, with its own nav deflector and warp engines tucked in underneath, and can perform a planetary landing.
The ship has 3 shuttlebays and is armed with type XII phasers, a limited magazine of transphasic torpedoes, as well as a full complement of quantum torpedoes; giving it vastly more firepower than a starbase or planetary defence array.
The triple hull is protected with adaptive shields and a self-replicating ablative armour. 

The engineering hull has two giant, horizontal warp cores and a further, miniaturised warp core is located on the saucer section.

With a length of over 900 metres, I wanted this ship to bridge the gap between the Sovereign and Galaxy class ships, and re-introduce all the holodecks, cetacean ops and science/exploration/humanitarian elements that seemed to be removed from the Sovereign class, while retaining all the agility and firepower.

Meanwhile, the ship has 32 holodecks, which can run any program, but the default program is always golf.
There are 2,000 gold-pressed latinum, self-cleaning toilets onboard.

Not gonna have time to finish this in Photoshop tonight, but it looks almost alright, the way it came straight off the scanner.

Here's a lovely illustration of the Dai-X by Japanese artist; Shiba, which I found on Pixiv.

I got two Japanese magazines with some material on X Bomber delivered today, along with an old copy of the UK Fantastic Films magazine, which covers the show.
It'll take me a while to scan the relevant bits but we should have some updates for xbomber.co.uk soon.

At the same time, I managed to get the November and December 1980 instalments of TV-Kun magazine, featuring the first two of the six parts of one of the Japanese X Bomber manga stories.
 They're sitting in a warehouse in Tokyo, but they are legally mine.

I had a chance to get instalments 3 and 6 from the same seller this week but I was deluged with work and it completely slipped my mind to snipe them.

A while ago, I came across pictures of a nice little Japanese guide to the series from twitter user; ruchishogun...

The X-Bomber Super Manual (B6 size / 72 pages) was published in August 1985 and a 2nd edition was released the following month.
The publication was apparently prompted by the rebroadcast of the series on TV Saitama that year.

 

It's another old thing that I found and coloured;
I think it was supposed to be a Romulan ship; half-way in size between the TNG scoutship and the Nemesis Warbird.
I have a couple of other Romulan ships here:
http://xbomber.co.uk/?dir=Other%2FSketchbook

Please don't hesitate to get in touch. I'll be glad to hear from you and I'll reply as quickly as I can.

Email me at:
... or contact me via the SFXB Forum contact page.

Profiles: SFXB Forum