Futures Past: Off-brand brick set retro junk spaceship!

 

As I'm writing this, I've realized I'm at a milestone: There's more of a backlog of toys and collectibles I've been meaning to write about than there is for movie reviews or fiction. So, I decided to try to get something out of the way that's been backlogged a while. Over the last few months, I've made several ill-advised purchases of building sets and toys, both old and new (see the Bristle Blocks). Here's the one that's ended up using up the most time, a set I purchased with the promise that it could assemble into a space station thingy. Here's a few more pics of the glorious packaging... which actually is pretty good.

For the backstory, I ordered this at the end of last month after another, entirely disappointing purchase as a 1980s-retro spaceship/ space station/ thingy. It was a consideration that certain elements resembled my still-mutating designs for the Neptune-ship Janus conceived for the Space Guys adventure. I ordered it for a ludicrously low price that actually went down a little more after my order was in. It was advertised as a set that could be assembled as smaller ships then assembled mecha-combiner style into something vaguely resembling either a space station or a long-haul starship. What I didn't expect was that they came in a carton with eight individual boxes, as if this was planned to go to stores as cases of sets for kids to collect. What interested me was that it was pretty easy to arrange these end to end, which really came closer to a "realistic" design. Here are a few of my initial experiments, on a set of shelves I just recently assembled. Yes, those are the Truckstop Queen and the Evil Space Guys.

I took long enough assembling these that I had already tried several variations of the ship before I had assembled the last of them. Initially, I tried to modify some of these, particularly a module with a radar/ satellite dish attached, which is "supposed" to orient with the dish sideways. There were a couple that just don't fit in. One of them is the space shuttle, which simply doesn't look on scale, especially in comparison to the "gravity ring" segment, which would be at least 20-30 meters wide if it is what it looks like. The other is a particularly awkward satellite/ probe thingy, which doesn't look much different from the rest. When assembled, however, its individual sections are prone to rotating in different directions. It's also almost impossible to keep on a stand. Here are closeups of the offending ships.

After a few days of experimentation, the ideal configuration that emerged was 5 or 6 "modules", with what I think of as the wing ship up front, the ring towards the back, and the fattest segment around the middle. I settled on removing the nose of one ship to make the connections easier. I also had to deal with the fact that the front of the fat one wasn't properly moored to anything else. Here's the "ideal" ship, which is something like 2-2 1/2 feet long. (Oh, and there's the packaged Spiff ship...)

And here's the winged ship and the one I modified in original configuration. The latter has an ingenious sort of hangar bay and a raising satellite dish, which naturally jam or come loose with any amount of handling.

And here's the ring. It's worth further note that the instructions usually show this perpendicular to the central axis, exactly where it would make the least sense.

Now for the fun part, in the course of this post, I finally broke up the  wonkiest ship for extra parts. It was enough for an extra mini-module and several stabilized connections. Here is my upgraded ship, viewed from the other side.

All in all, this is a very good set for basically nothing. It has just the right combination of "retro" and realistic. The crowning irony is that ships that look like collections of junk were always the closest to real life. I am choosing not to link to where to buy it, mainly because there are a few different sources out there. Do comparison shop a little, because I've seen at least one listing for twice the price I paid, which is not worth it. To rap this up, here's one more shot of the shelves. Hello, giant Predator! And the City Predator! And Connie...

That's all for now, more to come!