X-Bomber the GameIntroduction »Welcome to the home of X-Bomber the Game: a vertical-scrolling spaceshooter for Windows, based on the Japanese sci-fi TV series: Star Fleet
It features lots of arcade action, weapons and explosions.
News »  I came across this interesting article on Sixties City, which is a fascinating site: a real labour of love by its creator.
This article lists the later Gerry Anderson productions - some of which made it all the way to fruition, while some didn't.
What I found very interesting was the 1984 T-Force attempt to reboot Thunderbirds.
In particular, the base was a huge carrier sub.
While we never got to see this in connection with anything to do with Thunderbirds, I like how the idea was held onto and used later on in Firestorm with the Ocean Storm, which is a similar, huge carrier sub, but which is also a bit tidier, more streamlined and less sprawling than the concept shown on this page.
I tried loading the forum earlier today and the built-in session throttle stopped it from loading.
Once I increased the limit a bit, it loaded and we had 500 simultaneous 'guest users' on the forum, which wasn't putting a very big demand on the server.
The vast majority of these bot users have always originated from Singapore.
I traced a number of these IPs back to a network provider: ByteDance, that is actually Chinese-owned.
One thing you notice about their website is that it has no means of reporting any abuse of their network (assuming that the bot traffic actually is an unauthorised use of their network).
You can find all sorts of other interesting things about the company, here.
The second thing I notice from their website is how non-Chinese the company's board of directors is.
In any case, I blocked all IP ranges for this provider, along with the long-standing block for Alibaba Cloud.
That brought the number of sessions down to about 200.
My problem with excluding all IP ranges for specific providers is that, for every request, the server has to evaluate a huge number of lines in the htaccess file.
I decided to block all requests from Singapore to the forum, which, to me, is the least-bad of a bad range of options.
There is an extension for phpBB that handles this kind of geo-blocking.
However, I was sad to see that the creator of that extension: Mark D. Hamill had died last year.
Mark seems to have contributed hugely to phpBB and its users.
Rather than relying on an extension that probably can't ever receive any updates, I looked into doing it at the server level.
Lightspeed and Apache have the same mechanism as the phpBB plugin where they can use the GeoIP plugin or MaxMind database to evaluate where the agent's IP provider is located.
Anyway, after enabling this, the number of guest users on the forum is down to low double figures, which we'll run with for the time being.  Dear Star Fleeters,
I set the upcoming Star Fleet Teams for Tuesday 28th April at 8PM (UK).
Please check out the Star Fleet Teams page for the meeting link.
Anyone who wishes to join is welcome to join.
We will probably be chatting about ... Star Fleet and other things.  Keith was kind enough to provide me with these photos over email.
I particularly like the silver sword on this action figure.
Also pictured, are the Mark model kit of the Alliance battlecruiser, the Dynamite Action Dai-X figure, as well as the Moderoid Dai-X kit.
It would be great to see more pictures in future if this collection expands.  New article by Suzy on Ben's X Blogger site ...
It's great to see a walkthough of the build on this model.
The article has very good photos.
You can get great results out of this kit without painting it.
I've been wanting to get one of these for a while.
But trouble in finding the time to build it has always been the off-putting factor at the moment. You can always find these Moderoid kits relatively cheaply on FROMJAPAN.
I don't think you'd need to paint the entire model like I'd though about doing originally. I think it would be fine to leave it mostly as-is and touch up a few areas with Gundam markers.
I have a feeling that using a black oil marker with the red/white to do panel lines might look a little excessive. Grey or brown will probably be the way to do it. As a search engine, google still has its uses.
Check this out:
ArtStation - Gerry Anderson models., David Tremont
ArtStation - Fireball XL5., David Tremont
ArtStation - Thunderbirds 2065 SkiCopter., David Tremont
ArtStation - Thunderbirds Helijet., David Tremont
ArtStation - Thunderbird 5, David Tremont
ArtStation - Thunderbirds Elevator Car., David Tremont I came across this interesting page on the website of design company: Mister.S.
Firestorm - Mister S
It shows a lot of graphics for unreleased toys that would have been based on the reboot of the Gerry Anderson show: Firestorm.
It's nice how they planned to re-introduce the Thunderbolt, although the design isn't as striking as in the original show.
I like the Blizzard vehicle as well, which is clearly the surrogate to the Combat Cruiser in the original show.
It looks to me as though the graphics were made using photos of the unfinished Ocean Storm carrier sub. The conning tower and various details on the top seem to be missing.
In any case, the images are really well put together and, if Anderson Entertainment got the money to do a full-on attempt at re-making the series, I'm sure it would turn out well.
On the other hand, one thing that Anderson Entertainment could do to present Firestorm to a Western audience is to see if the rights could be bought out from the (presumably) Japanese rights holders.
It would be a great series to see released in decent, albeit not necessarily HD quality, with either proper English subtitles or a well-produced dub into English. .jpg) I gave up completely on work at about lunchtime today - what an absolute farce.
I spent the rest of the day scanning and photomerging the Starlog December 1980 poster.
The "geometric distortion correction" option is very useful for this, because, due to the image overlapping the edge of the scanner, it isn't 100% flat on the plate.
I got a slightly disjointed result the first time, without that option enabled.
The V750 has a way of developing some little discoloured rings on the underside of the scanner plate.
They come from lubricants off-gassing under the heat of the fluorescent light.
It has a visible effect when scanning documents with large, dark areas.
It had a minor impact on this scan originally but Photoshop fixed the problems with its healing brush.
I need to find somewhere non-dusty and remove the glass to clean the underside of it someday.
After that, I got a bit further playing Overload, which is quite a blast for anyone that enjoyed any of the Descent series of games. My little care package has arrived from FROMJAPAN.
So, I should be able to start scanning the poster from the 1980-12 instalment, which is the white-on-black Dai-X cutaway.
This instalment doesn't contain anything else about Star Fleet: just like the 1980-11 one didn't (in fact it doesn't even mention anything about X Bomber on the cover).
It does cover a lot of stuff, however: Buck Rogers, Battle Beyond the Stars, Gundam, Space Battleship Yamato, Flash Gordon, and a whole range of other things.
I chose the cheapest shipping option that wasn't "surface".
In this case, it was "small packet airmail" and it wasn't tracked but I also wasn't expecting it to arrive within a week.
The people at FROMJAPAN have really packaged these magazines up well. They always do a great job of preserving the integrity of my scanning operations. 😀
The other thing is that I paid almost nothing for these two Starlog magazines.
The cost was really, really minimal and yet each one is beautifully packed and in absolutely pristine.
These magazines are 45 years old and yet it looks as though nobody's ever even opened them.
There really is something to be said for Japanese culture and how meticulous and exacting the people are.  The server bill is paid up for the next two years and the xbomber.com domain has been renewed.
I spotted that the site's search wasn't always returning the results that I was expecting.
I found that the indexing process was running aground part way through and that has been fixed.
Also, the HTML of the site has been fixed in a few areas.
I started scanning the Star Fleet material from the Figure King magazine 296, which has a huge amount in it about Star Fleet.
It has about 50 or 60 pages, which is about half the magazine, given over to nothing but Star Fleet.
Scanning the whole lot goes a bit beyond fair use and will probably take quite a while, but I'll try and scan the whole lot gradually, to save people having to get a copy on the secondary market.
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Late to the Moderoid / Good Smile Dai-X, and then the Imperial Master stopped by - it's been a surreal day!
Late to the Moderoid / Good Smile Dai-X, and then the Imperial Master stopped by - it's been a surreal day!
Late to the Moderoid / Good Smile Dai-X, and then the Imperial Master stopped by - it's been a surreal day!
Late to the Moderoid / Good Smile Dai-X, and then the Imperial Master stopped by - it's been a surreal day!
Late to the Moderoid / Good Smile Dai-X, and then the Imperial Master stopped by - it's been a surreal day!
Merry Festivities and Fixes!
Merry Festivities and Fixes!
An actual Star Fleet video from me, it's been a minute!
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