Peter,

being out of date doesn’t matter here. As you may notice, my top pics are all from the previous millennium. Newer is not necessarily better. It sometimes seems to me that an inverse correlation may be closer to the truth…

Rob, I’ve no idea how I missed this! Great build and I think we have a LOT in common. Thanks for this, Rob, much appreciated.

@asekular - I love your first two choices of movies, particularly Brazil (the director's cut only - not Universal Studios fakakte disaster).

Even nowadays, where the audience is visually literate enough to realize most of the SFX of 2001 are matte overlays, the story is powerful enough to overcome that knowledge quickly.

Of course, the best "insider story" of the movie is Arthur C. Clarke telling of how Stanley Kubrick had 120 feet of 16mm film to "burn off" in his hand-held camera after a day shooting the "fight at the water hole" and he threw the bone in the air and shot it, repeatedly. He and Clarke had been arguing for weeks of how to get from the water hoie to a space station, and that night they were watching the "dailies" (all the film shot that day, developed and screened) and saw the bone, and they both realized at the same moment that they'd found the answer to their argument - the 2-million year "flash forward" in which the bone becomes a satellite (and one with the Chinese communist insignia on it to boot) - that footage in the film is Kubrick's 16mm "burn off".

Back in the mid-60s, when the two of them were starting to work on the movie, they wondered "what will the world be like in 2001?" Kubrick decided to ask scientists who were "on the cutting edge" of technological development what they foresaw. Among the scientists they contacted was my father. Among his 150 independent patents is the patent for determining if a pre-stressed concrete structure is solid, without breaking it open - which is why you have never ever worried about the freeway dissolving beneath your tires. It's a free patent that transformed the concrete construction industry, because he did it as a government employee. As he said "If I hadn't been working for the government, we'd be billionaires, but if I hadn't been working for the government, no one would have ever asked me the question that led to it."

Anyway, my dad, a lifelong s-f fan he (introduced me to the genre I ended up writing in when he gave me a copy of "Foundation" at age 10) was very happy to get asked "what will things be like in 2001?" And he always loved telling the joke on himself about what his answer was: "I told them that by 2001, solid-state electronics would be released to civilian use - something that happened two years after I told them that."

Just a quick update; did a little work on the upper saucer nav lights and a couple other LEDs.

Aleks, you can High Jack the thread anytime. Love your writing and it’s always entertaining!

@tcinla - I think the contributions you are making to this group are just brilliant. Exceptionally insightful, touching, and a real boon to the guys here. You are an absolute gentleman, Tom.

No, I’ve sourced the lights on my own, bagged them, tagged them, and have a lot to do in terms of wiring and hot gluing, etc. It’ll take more time sorting the lights out than the actual build. It has to be said that you were at least partly to blame for the inspiration!

You gotta be Vulcan kidding me !
🙂
Love it... those lights will look amazing my friend.

So Spock walks on to the bridge one day with a prosthetic ear in the middle of his forehead ,Kirk says (you have to do the voice) "My god ,Spock what.. have.. you ..done?" and Spock says (voice again) "Well it's really quite logical captain, this is my right ear, this is my left ear and this is my final front ear..."

Oh dear me ,even by my standards that one is scraping the bottom of the barrel, Dave I don't know if I missed a bit but could you run through the rules again ,can we include already finished builds as I have already built my real screen hero's ,the X wing ,the Eagle transporter and the Austin K2 katy ambulace from "Ice cold in Alex" but there is loads of stuff I could go at.

N.