Starship Modeler

By Dave Longey

The history behind this model goes back to my late high school years. I built a lot of scratch/kitbashed spaceships and made super-8 movies with them. This one was intended to be my piece de resistance, with fully articulated landing gear& hatches, lights, etc. I wanted the ultimate special effects minature.To make a long story short, this one model became the sole focus of all my spaceship obsessions. It has been repeatedly built to a nearly-done state, and then I'll get dissatisfied and rip out sections and redo the whole thing over again, but always built around that one ship I started over twenty years ago. All that is left of the original is some heavy sheet plastic buried in the middle of it. I should have chronicled the changes, it's had so many, but I didn't... It's gotten less military-looking over the years. Originally it would have been around half the length of this current version, slab-sided, with a big vertical fin and a lance-like probe out the front, and a single big nacelle out the back. The shape has been pulled out and smoothed, the canopy turned into a domelike bubble instead of an armoured window, the double gyroscopic devices on either side of it added. I'm making modifications to them now so they'll be able to swivel forward like airplane propellers-another mysterious "gravity drive" technology, perhaps.

The body has been built up of cut bleach bottles and evergreen styrene sheets that has been heat-stretch molded around parakeet feeders and model battleship hulls. A Haagen-Dazs container and the back of a battery-powered robot's head make up the main engine. The back panels from an old car model make up part of the forward hull. I like to think of it as being a beautiful old secondhand rocketship that has seen better days, in the garage being "restored". I had to think of a name for it, and "Daytripper" happened to be synchronous with stuff that was happening, so that's what it's called. It's function would be that of a kind of souped-up old interstellar space boat for hotshots who like to tinker. Just the right vehicle for a film....