CHRISTMAS GREETINGS TO ALL SCALE MODELLERS


Best wishes to you all from the SMN Crew, and here's to some great scale modelling in 2013. We'll be showing some tasty stuff this week before model news starts again after the festive break.







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SCIENCE FICTION B-MOVIES WERE A STAPLE OF CINEMAS in the 1950s. Many were appalling, such as Plan 9 from Outer Space . A few were extremely good, such Forbidden Planet , and Destination Moon . Others sat in the middle, the so-so zone occupied by the likes of Rocketship X-M . Mat Irvine:  The plot of the 1950 movie Rocketship X-M was based around a Moon mission, hence the X-M name, short for Expedition Moon. However, the X-M ship didn’t actually land there. Instead, the screenwriters included a meteoroid storm that blew it off-course and on to the planet Mars, despite the enormous difference in distance between the two worlds. Otherwise, the design of the Rocketship X-M spacecraft was a reasonable one, being based on a science-fact article ( below ) that appeared in the Life magazine of January 1949. This had given an accurately-conceived depiction of such a trip, with paintings and diagrams to back up the text. The somewhat phallic Life spaceship design became, more or less, the R...
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