Love, hate and the AMT Enterprise model
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As a boy in the '70s, I enjoyed both building two of the AMT 1701 kits and playing with them with friends.
I did the same thing. The apartment townhouse where my father and I lived had a two foot wide globe lamp suspended over our dining table and was controlled by a dimmer switch. I'd dial it to a faint glow and "orbit" my assembled Enterprise around it, pretending the lamp was a planet. Turn the lamp brighter and it became a star. Have my buddy Kyle oscillate the dial to make the lamp "pulse" and it became the flagship Fesarius of the First Federation.
Shoot, has it really been 40 years?!
Sincerely,
Bill
As a boy in the '70s, I enjoyed both building two of the AMT 1701 kits and playing with them with friends.
I did the same thing. The apartment townhouse where my father and I lived had a two foot wide globe lamp suspended over our dining table and was controlled by a dimmer switch. I'd dial it to a faint glow and "orbit" my assembled Enterprise around it, pretending the lamp was a planet. Turn the lamp brighter and it became a star. Have my buddy Kyle oscillate the dial to make the lamp "pulse" and it became the flagship Fesarius of the First Federation.
Shoot, has it really been 40 years?!
Sincerely,
Bill
It was fun being a kid in the '70s.
Jay Chladek's article on the history of the model kit:
http://culttvman.com/main/?p=3665
http://culttvman.com/main/?p=3665
Okay, the one I had was the Small Box Version One.
It feels a bit anachronistic to see the article writer referring to the nacelle caps as "Bussard collectors," a terminology that wasn't applied to Starfleet nacelles until TNG (courtesy of Rick Sternbach, who'd worked with Dr. Bussard before becoming a technical consultant on TNG). I think back then we just called them nacelle caps or domes. I recall a Cinefantastique article saying that they were referred to behind the scenes as "ball power modules."
It feels a bit anachronistic to see the article writer referring to the nacelle caps as "Bussard collectors," a terminology that wasn't applied to Starfleet nacelles until TNG (courtesy of Rick Sternbach, who'd worked with Dr. Bussard before becoming a technical consultant on TNG). I think back then we just called them nacelle caps or domes. I recall a Cinefantastique article saying that they were referred to behind the scenes as "ball power modules."
Agreed! Back in the day we never knew what the #*$%& was going on behind the domes. I thought at the time (and still prefer to think) that all the blinkies showed the actual matter-antimatter interaction. It sparkled, even on color sets, and the spokes barely and only infrequently showed. It was a whole lot more fun not knowing all the Trek-nology.
I started a thread on this before, but did anyone else ever make starships out of paper plates and paper towel tubes? And here's a tip -- you can make a communicator very much like the ones in the Gold Key comics by taping two cigarette packs together and painting them red. You even get the flip-up antenna (much smaller in the comic books.) So much more fun to make things than buy them as a kid, even if wildly inacurrate. My broken AMT nacelles later became phasers (the pylons were the pistol grips). And long before Franz Joseph, I glued parts of broken models all over, to make new hybrid ships.
I started a thread on this before, but did anyone else ever make starships out of paper plates and paper towel tubes? And here's a tip -- you can make a communicator very much like the ones in the Gold Key comics by taping two cigarette packs together and painting them red. You even get the flip-up antenna (much smaller in the comic books.) So much more fun to make things than buy them as a kid, even if wildly inacurrate. My broken AMT nacelles later became phasers (the pylons were the pistol grips). And long before Franz Joseph, I glued parts of broken models all over, to make new hybrid ships.
Thanks for the link Forbin.
My dad bought and built me the Long Box version #2 kit (Kit # S951-250), I was too young to build it. It must have been either the Spring of 1970 or 1971. It took 2 "C" or "D" size batteries in the secondary hull to power the 4 lights; 1 light for the green clear bridge dome and 1 for the green clear lower dome on the primary hull and 1 light behind each of the orange translucent nacelle caps/domes. You turned on the lights by turning the cylindrical Sensor Dish Mount, located at the front of the secondary hull which had the antenna dish sticking out of it, clockwise.
When I got the Enterprise and the Klingon battlecruiser kits in 1975 for Christmas, the Enterprise no longer had the lights, but it was still fun to build them both on my own.
Navigator NCC-2120 USS Entente
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Edit: The culttvman article above states that the model kit took 2 AA batteries but I have always remembered them as being either 2 "C" or "D" size batteries. Maybe my memory is faulty, anyone else remember what size batteries their kit used?
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I love the idea of the deflector dish assembly being the knob to turn the lights on.
It's also anachronistic to speak of the TOS Enterprise having a "warp core," or to refer to TOS landing parties as "away teams." A lot of Trekkers do it, though.
No, it was definitely two AA batteries. If you happen to have an unassembled kit and some C or D batteries lying around, try and see if they fit. (They don't.)
Unfortunately, no Enterprise models with me these days. Guess my brain has atrophied worse than I thought.
I had one of the originals with the top and bottom hull lights, too. I replaced it at one point with one with the 3 piece stand (crappy), but followed the error made by others and painted it a powder blue, based of a pic I'd seen of Shatner holding a big E and thought, "That has to be right." My modeling skills had improved by then, but it since has been superceded by the polar lights kit.
I can't speak to the "proper" historical use of terms for each iteration of Trek, and we can't ask Matt Jefferies about the nacelle caps, but since Bob Bussard's original ramjet concept goes back to 1960, the use of the caps as collectors seems to fit. I don't have a copy of Franz Joseph's plans handy, but didn't he label them something like "space matter intakes"? This might have been his own take on what they could have been, and not something intended by Jefferies. More science fiction archeology.
Well, in-universe, we don't know that the fictional characters didn't call them "Bussard collectors," since we never heard them call them anything else. So that's not really the problem. But if you're writing a historical article about artifacts created in the 1960s and 1970s, it's misleading to talk about them using terminology that wasn't applied to them until the late 1980s, unless you specifically point out that the term wasn't in use at the time. Nothing wrong with the modern interpretation, of course, but if you're chronicling the history of a thing, it's best to make the chronology clear.
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I don't have a copy of Franz Joseph's plans handy, but didn't he label them something like "space matter intakes"? This might have been his own take on what they could have been, and not something intended by Jefferies. More science fiction archeology.
FJ labeled the front end domes as "Space Energy/Matter Sink (Acquisition)" and the rear end domes as "Space Energy/Matter Source (Restoration)." IIRC, the idea was that all of the universe's "Energy/Matter" would be sucked into the engines on the front end and restored on the back end and that this process would have the effect of pulling the engines (and the starship attached to them) along at FTL speeds. It's not quite the same as Bussard's idea of collecting hydrogen as fuel (at least as I understand it...).
However, personally, I feel that the Sternbach/Okuda model of dome=Bussard collector and rear end=subspace field generator makes more sense and I happily retcon it over the TOS episodes. It doesn't really present any conflict to what was seen on-screen.
(Though I wonder why Cochrane's Phoenix would have needed Bussard collectors when his ship was only meant to jump less than an AU in a test flight. Maybe that was just the maiden voyage... after all, what seems like it must have been a disposable launch stage was never dropped and presumably the whole thing wound up in the Air and Space Museum, so what do I know?)
--Alex
Again, I have no objection to the Bussard-collector idea itself. I'm just saying that I think a historical article should be clearer about what ideas and terminology come from what period of real-world history.
Thank you for the link to Chladek's article. According to his descriptions, I had the "small box" kits. Thank Heaven there were kits with lights included... I thought everybody who had that must be smarter than me! I am NOT Montgomery Scott and was never able to make a homemade light kit.
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