Paul's Spaceship Pictures

UA-42883514-1

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Enjoying Star City but Rhys Ifans playing Sergei Korolev with a Welsh accent is distracting. Plus he doesn't look like Korolev.

Philip Madoc, the Welsh actor who played Moonbase Alpha's Russian Commander Anton Gorski in "Breakaway", he looked a bit like Korolev.

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I seem to be in a minority in liking it, but this (by Technouveau) is my new favourite fan design

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Another AI-generated clip of an old Bryce render

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"Generational loss" is when you copy a copy and the image loses quality over successive generations.

1) Norman Rockwell's "Freedom of Worship", 1943, published in the Saturday Evening Post, one of his "Four Freedoms" series;

2) Rockwell's "Apollo 11 Space Team" , commisioned by Look magazine, 1969;

3) NASA Artemis publicity video.

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Guess the Somalia/Space Exploration Initiative one is a bit of a stretch.

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Space disco!

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Vince Gilligan's definitely read Methuselah's Children by Heinlein.

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Space: 1999's Space Dock seems to have been based on NASA's proposed Phase B orbital refuelling depot.

Moonbase 3's lunar shuttle seems inspired by the Phase B LM-B spacecraft.

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Moonbase 3 - the forgotten twin of Gerry Anderson's Space: 1999.

The Welsh commander of Moonbase 3 was played by Donald Houston. Moonbase Alpha's commander prior to the arrival of John Koenig was also played by a Welsh actor - Philip Madoc as (the presumably not Welsh) Anton Gorski.

Special effects were by Mat Irving, doing his best with a BBC budget. The lunar transport craft seem to have been based on NASA's proposed LM-B space tug.

The final episode of the six-part series saw life on Earth wiped out by a nuclear accident, leaving the Moonbase personal isolated and adrift (but metaphorically).

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The many lives of the Matt Jeffries-designed Leif Ericson model kit:

The OG Leif Erikson

The UFO Mystery Ship

The Pegasus from Gene Roddenberry's proposed but never made War Of The Worlds TV series

The INSS MacArthur from the Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle novel The Mote In God's Eye, as illustrated by Rick Sternbach

I reckon (with no evidence) that Chris Foss based this ship on the Leif Erikson

Bob Larkin book cover

...and I reckon the Defiant is the Leif Erikson with the wings and forward fuselage ripped off.

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Pentyrch Incident Halloween costume. A multi-generational effort - my granddaughter rapid-prototyping, my daughter on CAD, and my Mam looking bored, and me in my daughters garage looking like Blair in The Thing.

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Just chilling, not much pursuing to be done

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Was in London, went to the Cartoon Museum's "The Future Was Then" exhibition.

Original art by Frank Hampson, Sydney Jordan, Cam Kennedy, Rons Turner and Embleton, Carlos Esquerra, Steve Dillon, Dave Gibbons...

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Captains Britain always seem to get killed.

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First they put crocheted ducks on postboxes

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a postbox.

Then they zip-tied flags to lamp posts

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a lamp post

And anyway it's the Welsh flag, right,

Which genuinely is objectively the best flag in the world

It's got a dragon on it.

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So in the MCU, the "Museum of Great Britain" (the MCU's British Museum I guess) has a Vibranium axe in its collection.

But in the MCU Wakanda is the most technologically advanced nation on Earth. So how would the (presumably Victorian, steam-powered) British Empire aquire the axe? Wakanda is an isolationist nation, it seems unlikely we were gifted the axe, or that they'd be willing to sell it to us. So Killmonger's statement that it was stolen seems accurate.

Did Wakanda's Industrial Revolution and subsequent rise to technological preeminence happen fairly recently and rapidly? So the British could take the axe by force in the late 1800s, but by the early 2000s the Wakandans had leapfrogged them?

That seems unlikely too. The Wakandans had the advantage of their vibranium deposits but 1) the axe is explicitly a vibranium axe, so it's not like vibranium is a recent discovery for them, and 2) they're a nation of Tony Stark-level super-geniuses, why would their Industrial Revolution be delayed until the 1900s?

Maybe they were technologically advanced, isolationist super-geniuses AND hopelessly trusting and naive before first contact with Perfidious Albion.

Maybe an unpleasant first contact with the British Empire was what prompted the Wakandan Industrial Revolution. A bit like Japan, following the Meiji Restoration.

Or maybe a courageous Victorian explorer infiltrated 1880s Wakanda to obtain Wakandan tech, so it could be shared with the rest of the world. Richard Francis Burton, maybe, he's got form. And even though they were successful, without a Stark-level super-genius to reverse-engineer the tech - alongside an unquestioning Victorian confidence in British superiority - it came to be seen as just an axe?

It would be an axe with unusual physical properties though - seems unlikely that the Royal Society would just ignore it, systemic racism or not.