F is for Five! . . . Four! . . . Fire Main Engines! . . .

A while ago . . . February last; Bill 'Wotan' Bulloch, informed the members of an eMail group that a lot was on eBay "Too Good to Miss!", he was right and I didn't miss it, but with no other bids I rather stole it from someone, not that it was 'bargain-basement' but it often goes for twice what I paid, or more, so I was very happy.

I only need the cake-decoration boxed set and the space-station now! Although carded I've  a few gaps still in the Triang cards and still have one US Golden Astronaut card to find. We are talking Triang Spacex today, and Set 1172/16 Mobile Launching Pad, although this set was branded to Raphael Lipkin, not Triang! They were both part of 'Lines II' Triang by that time.

Looks good huh? Nice bit of cartoony psychedelia - with the electric colours and black background it's getting into back-light poster territory! And referencing the Apollo 8 launch, dates itself, or its sales-meeting conceptualisation to sometime in 1968, although the design wasn't registered until November 1969.

Instruction sheet has suffered a tad from atmospheric damp over the decades and got a bit crinkled, but if Putin is preparing the West bank of the Kerson Oblast for a nuclear strike, it may well be incinerated in the next few weeks - too close to Aldershot for comfort in a populist's Armageddon!

1. This is a constructional toy!

Five-stage rocket components; harking back to pulp space-ships rather than the NASA launch vehicles they should have been familiar with at the time. If a man is supposed to occupy the chromed spaceship at the tip, scale is about the same as an Apollo launcher though? And the Russians were using launch rockets with fluted engine-venturi arrangements.

The base of the 'MLP', properly a Missile Crawler Transporter Facility (now just called a crawler-transporter) is a simplified affair, but a stunning thing for what would have been a 1960's pocket-money price, OK, probably a "Save your pocket-money for a few weeks darling and we'll see - your Birthday's not that far off" price, but Raphael Lipkin weren't noted for top-end toys!

The gantry-tower comes in three sections (the top is photographed from both sides) which you won't be surprised to hear are called bottom, middle and top around here!

Added to the tower are a crane visible on the original (see end) and two service walkways scaled around N or Z-gauge compatible.

Start putting them all together and realise it's a perfect scenario for a .gif image, so go and make a .gif image . . .

. . . which goes like this! Forward and reverse; it's very hard to get these .gif's 'just right', I tried slowing it down by a few hundredths of a second, and it became too slow and jumpy, but as it is, it seems a little fast, however it's quite mesmeric, so you can lose a few minutes waiting to catch the exact moment the walkways disappear . . . they appear quite obviously, but disappear in the blink of a fast eye!

And a still image of the crane preparing a Swizzles Matlow sherbet-stuffed Spaceflleet 2000 supply-ship for launch! Although with that ring on the deck of the launch vehicle, it looks like it's about to suffer a drop-test . . . gotta' get the sherbet out somehow!

The outer liner of the box is a slip-off, which always carries with it the danger of losing small components, so it was extra luck that everything was in the box. Also a close-up of the little space-craft which sits atop the giant firework!

End panel of the inner box, not terribly exciting, but it's one of those posts where I'm showing/covering everything, or trying to, if you want more though, Paul Vreed's got it all here!

The real McCoy courtesy of Wikipedia! The crane is quite good, but look at that plethora of service gantries and walkways! Sorry Mike; it was't Bill, it was me, cheer Bill for telling us!