Here's a little taste of what some fans get up to when you're not keeping a careful eye on them. I've been asked to name a starship simulator and to provide some tongue in cheek names for some airships, which I'm glad to do. The starship simulator could so easily be Schrodinger's Box out of The Engineer (esp. when you look at that caravan). I'll hand over to Paul Mackay now:
HMAS Absence of Gravitas is a 1969 Carlight Cassetta
caravan with a ‘victorianised’ interior. We have used a back projection system to project from outside
onto the interior front windows so it actually looks like you are in the gondola
of an airship with the horizons:
The control linkages use miniature potentiometers to feed
control inputs into the sim which runs into a PC running Flight Sim 2004 with an
airship mod. There is a navigator’s station (uses a real map as location
is real world correct and can plot routes using it). The engineers panel has 4 separate throttles which can all be
set independently, useful if you want to chuck in a failure or fire
scenario. The helmsman controls the nose pitch and engine angle (as
they rotate up and down in modern airships). There is usually a captain as well.
Big brother is moving towards constructing a second sim that
will be able to run several different software packages – i.e submarine,
starship or airship. The problem with the caravan sim is that we can’t bring it
indoors whereas the second sim (that we would like you to name) comes in
collapsible sections that can be erected in pieces.
The second will run a package called Artemis
http://www.artemis.eochu.com/ which is
a multi station starship bridge simulator hoping you might be able to come up
with a name for the starship sim. (see diagram above, its only half
finished).
As I said earlier, we we run a gift shop at shows...we make
and sell merchandise related to the sim – mostly my steampunk jewellery but also
things like pewter cast airship keyrings, badges etc. We are also hoping to commission a poster of lots of scale
drawings of various ‘ships of the line’ – all imaginary airships as if we had
this whole alternative historical backstory, with the ‘Absence of Gravitas’ as
just one of the fleet. We were wondering if you wanted to give us a few tongue
in cheek bombastic airship names as well – think I might have to call one of
them ‘Penny Royal’ if you don’t mind.
Anyway, just thought you might be interested in the sort of
stuff your fans get up to when we aren’t waiting for the next
book.
We have some masters getting 3D modelled in Holland at the
mo, then we make silicon moulds from them and use them to cast models in pewter
to sell to punters. The sims have to pay their way in the diesel etc. to get
it to shows, we don’t profit much but it pays its way.
Regards and can't wait for more writings
Paul