Din

Hello all. So I've been seeing this asked for for a while, a need for a "UK shapeways" meaning the ease of marketplace etc and at least a mild variety of materials. Initially I'd offer printing in resin, PLA, ABS and Nylon with an eye to expanding offerings at a later point. (In effect a relatively standard printer farm using commercially available machines in resin and FDM printing initially). I'm also currently investigating the possibility of lost wax casting using 3d printed resins after a suggestion by a recent acquaintence... What I would be looking for, is interested volunteers initially just designers who would want to test the useability of the website and give feedback on improvements and other alterations, such as how the custom storefronts are set up and other features you'd like to see as a designer/seller. At present the website is not yet ready but gaugeing interest and volunteers is, as I am advised by my business partner, a good idea. As most orders are likely to fall in the small parcels range, P&P would be a flat £4.50 (1st class) and £3.50 (2nd class) respectively and I shall simply eat the cost on any unusually larger parcels as I do not initially expect them to be all that many. If folks are interested, private messaging me on here should be fine for now, if not, I'll sort out an email address. ~Din

So thanks to Ebay I have a Pannier, and a spare body. 8743 didn't make it into preservation, so will retain its number as a fictional preserved engine. The other body is 5775, which rather famously lives on the KWVR. I also now own a natty airbrush now. So after a quick waft over with the red oxide primer, it got blasted with the Red-brown after thinned down. Then, I broke out some more paints. Some enamel gold, enamel grey and some acrylic flat black. End result before the final touching up of spots covered by the masking tape to protect the glazing. Reckon it's coming along rather nicely. Bit more flat black, and some transfers for the railway's name along the side and done.

Discussing Khan.... In Carey Wilber's original draft of "Space Seed", the character that ultimately became Khan was of Scandinavian ethnicity and named Harold Erickson, and the backstory was slightly different in that he was placed in stasis aboard the Botany Bay as a means of getting rid of prisoners during an overpopulated era of Earth's history. Gene L. 's rewrites then transformed the character into Ragnar Thorwald, the genetically-enhanced leader of the "First World Tyranny", who hides behind the pseudonym John Erickson. The casting of Ricardo Montalban as Khan prompted the writers to change the character's name to Sabahl Khan Noonien, after Kim Noonien Wang, a friend of Gene Roddenberry during the Second World War. Roddenberry had lost touch with him and hoped that his friend would see his name on television and contact him. (This was also the origin of the name of Noonian Soong.) NBC suggested changing the character's name to Govin Bahadur Singh, due to the racial implications of the name "Khan", but Roddenberry insisted on keeping Khan and Noonien. "John Harrison" would be a partial reuse of the original character concept for Branglbert Cucumber's portrayal of the character as his pseudonym. They kept "Khan" because actually making an original idea or concept escapes the lazy hacks they hire on for the films and shows. The one thing I am genuinely enjoying about Picard is it's finally giving the Borg the budget to make their ships outright creepy which the soft lighting and corridors just couldn't quite give in Voyager and the movies. EDIT: Also, every time they screw with a core character's being (7 of 9 turning into Anne Oakley IN SPACE) or randomly kill them off (Hue, Maddox) I can feel Alex Kurtzman's sticky, angry fingers because nobody likes or remembers any of the characters in his own awful, awful take on Star Trek.

So as my plan is to create a preserved railway layout, I've bought a couple of bits and bobs off of Halden's Yard/Rustyrail. These are an Ivatt and an austerity tank, a wagon and coach. However, I wanted stuff that was either part way through restoration or had the "paint slapped on to stop it rusting" that projects on various heritage railways often do have when they're higher up the priority list. So, I bought a couple of Great British Locomotives models, a Standard 4 tank and a 3F Jinty. So the Standard 4 is on the edge of return to traffic, with the boiler having extensive work done and painted in red oxide, while the tanks etc have had a black undercoat applied ready. The Jinty meanwhile, has been out of traffic for longer, wheels rusting up (might need toning down) cover on chimney and bunker which has muck on it. The Red-Brown is the early livery used by the preserved line during the back end of the days when preserved railways had to adopt their own liveries.

Well I've just spent a chunk of the morning catching up because I had forgotten it'd been moved to Friday Night Prime Time! Good series as always, well aimed at the general public.

Ahhh, I see you've gone into the scrap business too!

You know, it's strange. I've seen this before, almost like..... Deja vu

I later changed to an Electrotren 0-6-0 chassis, as I have several other triang bodies I'd like to use for the Junior chassis, including the "dock tank" style locomotives. You can see what I changed to on my workbench thread

Meadow Side Flood defences in Burton On Trent are being breached at the time of writing.

Season 4 nudged it back a bit, but it was due to come back in a big and well written way alongside the Romulan-Earth war as the main body of the plot for Season 5, as that was going to be the big (and by then obvious) reveal who the main antagonists were in the Time War, the Romulans. The problem was the first two seasons stumbled (as all TV shows often do) before the writing team found their feet and had hit the audience figures relatively hard, so instead we had the (rather amusing) concluding episode in which they tried to "salvage" a by then solid show by dropping Frakes and Sirtis in on the last episode, in which we had to pretend this older and fatter Riker was totally the same one in the TNG episode The Pegasus which aired a good 11 years earlier...

Stop it! Or I'll make of of them next!

They felt vindicated with the amount of public support they were getting with their layout on display at Warley. Lots of people said the same to them, apparently.

Nope, Star Trek: The Next Generation was CGI from all the way back in 1989, and was why the show nearly got cancelled as the visuals were so expensive and the early script writing so poor. Roddenberry trying to push the ridiculous looking Ferengei as the new Klingons representing the excesses of corporate capitalism nearly did the show in as audience feedback was they were just too ridiculous to be a proper "bad guy". Feedback lead to the writers having to "up their game" and create both Q and the Borg. Scary Cyborgs saved the show and as the writing improved also convinced Patrick Stewart to actually stay on the show. Originally he was supposed to be lost forever to the Borg when he became Locutus in Best of Both Worlds and Jonathon Frakes was supposed to take over as showrunner. Stewart changed his mind with the actual decent scriptwriting and now here we are, 31 years on with him donning the uniform once again. It could be argued the technology didn't "mature" until the Dominion War and could be cost effective enough for the ridiculous scale space battles that an actual war required and could be done on a TV show budget, rather than the big screen movie battles we saw in Wolf 359 in First Contact. Edit: In fact an interesting tid-bit, modern Star Fleet ships were supposed to have the saucer section with all the civilians in it be able to run off to safety while a "battle core" of the Galaxy Class and other cruiser-types went into a battle mode. This is seen in a couple of episodes, but was so expensive a shot to make that the whole concept was quietly dropped and "separating the saucer section" instead became a huge, dangerous move to make only seen in a few episodes.

So things to consider. In the Great Model Railway Challenge normal people who'd talk to me about it, knowing my interest in trains, would always talk about the more "interesting" and unconventional layouts made on the show. The more realistic ones were rarely talked about and boy howdy, does everyone have a slight bug bear with how they treated the Loco Ladies for their brilliant crochetted trees which were apparently in support of Breast Cancer UK. Heck, even my now dearly departed mother watched it with me, and once shushed me while we watched it one night! Others close to me enjoyed watching it and have zero interest in railways whatsoever and I've known this. But they all liked the show. Its cheesyness appealed and anything that wasn't boring realism was far more interesting to general audiences than the rest of us. The other thing to consider is that these people are not going to be like Edwardian, or Laurie and other many great modellers on this forum. Buying something, and then promptly pulling it apart to modify it is an anathema to a lot of people and daunting to those who want to try it anyway. Hornby's doing the right thing by getting Laurie on board and making them look a bit like the stuff that was seen on the Great Model Railway Challenge and the stuff which "stuck" in people's minds who aren't railway modellers. As Laurie's noted, he's had to do this within confines related, namely that he's had to use existing products on the cheaper end of the scale of Hornby's range due to the large expense involved in any new tooling (I beleive £100k minimum?) and Hornby will have been well aware of their 2012 Olympics flop and likely considered any such moves with a new range accordingly. You also see this in other matters of Hornby's actions with the rest of their range. A lot of the 2020 celebratory products are very limited in number and priced accordingly, with only "sure bets" such as the Rocket getting a limited special edition and a more wider release. This is because 2017's financials still shows significant loss to Hornby and while Simon Kohler has said Hornby's in "a better position" it's not out of the woods yet and likely still a few years from posting profits. Best way to do that? A cheap brand revival which appeals outside of its core market without breaking the bank. Though as a suggestion, making a version of the Singles painted in something "steampunky" livery for a large sprocket or tea company might be a good idea.

It's usually a sign you don't have much of a budget to play with. You just slap some LED lights on stuff and go "THA FUTUREEEEEEEEEE". Firefly was the worst for this with the WW2 ship mounted .50 Cal AA guns in the opening scene which just has a set of blinking LEDs down the side. One thing to note, it actually how cheap feeling and light a lot of these expensive looking props are. I've handled a TNG Phaser and phaser rifle and they weigh absolutely nothing.

Sonic's enjoyed a $100m opening global weekend, knocks the (apparently god awful) Birds of Prey pap into a cocked hat and returns DC to its usual losing streak when it comes to movies and is being hailed as Jim Carrey's best performance since his heydey of the 1990s because he was apparently allowed to ad lib again, something many directors stopped him from doing in his recent film runs to the point he barely did anything. I might go see it with some friends for the nostalgia kick as we all grew up with Mega-Drives and playing it.

Friends of mine in Hilton had to stay in all day as the Egginton Brook and River Dove burst its banks by the sounds of things. A lot of roads remained shut and the list from Derbyshire plod ran to some considerable length. (20 road closures within the Dove/Trent plain area). Even Soggy Swad saw a couple of roads closed or at least diverted.

Johnathon Frakes is also due to turn up at some point alongside Mariana Sirtis. It's nice seeing a number of the old cast members replaying these roles. It's weird seeing Star Trek updated like this. It's only a few decades after TNG, but the change in our own technology has lead to a change in the tech depicted in the show. Going with simple touch screens now would seem quaint and antiquated when we're probably less than a decade from holograms depicted in Picard now. Personally I'm enjoying it. I think the plot is slow and interesting enough to be worthy of a trekkian show. Hearing the Irish Romulan Lass speak technobabble for two minutes straight in previous episodes was a joy when compared to the more "nicking Star Wars boots" Discovery.

Fshhhhkoff, fshhhhkoff, fshhhhkoff, fshhhhkoff, fshhhhkoff.... I remember when they last ran the repeats of Ivor the Engine, it was in the 90s on Channel 4 and I used to wake up early every day to catch it! Which probably explains my preference for being a morning person.

It tends to only break the PC side of things generally, but as a lot of developers are now pushing hard for cross-party platform support it can potentially cause future issues as you can push the PC side of things and its specs a lot harder than you could on the consoles.

Fallout 76 is a hilarious mess and remains so. The Internet Historian did a pretty good video on Bethesda's utterly atrocious attitude to the whole saga of its troubled first year. The main reason Fallout 76 breaks every time Todd Howard sneezes near a keyboard is because it's just the Gamebryo engine with a bit of shoddy net code slapped on top. It's why its so prone to being modded, hacked and everything in between. It has none of the protections that are normally built into a dedicated online game.

So with a bit of thunking, I decided to turn these guys not into 2-4-0s (because getting more Junior chassis is currently difficult, and I have another idea for it anyway). So I've gone with a slightly more Corbs/Neilist 0-6-0 class of useful shunters instead. The whole class will have wound its way to the Fictional Preserved Railway of mine when they finally got rid of their railway network some time in the mid-late 60s. So, the "first" of the class will be as perhaps initially built, with a (slightly) too tall funnel and older style of buffers. The second would be the primary life of the class, and pretty much as intended body-wise. Final one would be a rebuild at Derby at some point, receiving a somewhat LMS/MR boiler, this might require another go, I think as it's not stuck as level as I'd hoped, also extensive rebuilding the footplate is required.

I love this show. Did make me laugh though. One bloke where I volunteer grumbled about how the show "made us all look like idiots" to which I replied "We are!"

It was marked as "permanently closed" just the other week on google after displaying the opening times just the day before as I'd planned to go drop in. Nothing's been updated elsewhere and looked rather shut when I did pass by the other day. Didn't realise that's where the other Barry vanished to! Yikes.