“What are you up to?” Blue asked curiously. It was mid morning on Cloudbase and he’d just come back from a courier mission delivering sensitive documents to the World President. When he stopped off at the Officers’ Lounge afterwards for a coffee he’d found Ochre camped out at the central table with the contents of four scale model kits strewn in front of him and one of their aircraft training manuals open to the diagrams of the Angel Interceptor.
“Building one of these.” Ochre tapped the drawing. “Spectrum hasn’t licensed anyone to make them so I’m kitbashing one together.”
“Kitbashing?” Blue frowned and took a seat at the only chair not occupied with drawings, tools or packaging. “What’s that?”
“Taking some off-the-shelf kits, pulling them apart and making something completely different out of them,” Ochre explained as he measured a part with a ruler, made a note and picked up a different part. “I don’t do it very often, I’m a ‘make the thing on the box’ kind of guy, but the diorama people do this sort of thing all the time. Special effects people do it too, especially for sci-fi movies. It’s not like you can buy a unique alien ship off the shelf.”
“That’s a good point actually,” Blue commented. “Never really thought about that.” He picked up the remains of one box. “So what have you got here?”
“I’m using a Eurofighter Typhoon for the body, taking the nose off a North American XB-70 and the F-16XL has almost the right shaped cockpit, I can make that fit,” Rick explained, pointing to the relevant parts on the boxes. “The tail gave me some problems, but I got lucky and found a Gulfstream G700 at the right scale; I can adapt the tail off that. The rest will be bits from the leftovers and putty.” He frowned at a piece of airframe he was partway through clipping the sprues off. “I’m going to be doing a lot of dremel work to get some of the shapes I need but the real problem is going to be getting the cockpit to open the way I want.”
“Magnolia can probably give you some ideas,” Adam suggested as he reached for the coffee pot and poured himself a mug. “She’s always tinkering with something.”
“Ah, she, uh, doesn’t know about it,” Rick told him, but Ochre’s faint blush gave Adam pause. Especially when one of the receipts that Rick had left off to the side caught his eye.
“So you suddenly building an Angel Interceptor with a cockpit that can open wouldn’t have anything to do with that receipt from ‘Dawsons Jewellers’, would it?” Adam asked as he reached for the slip of paper.
Rick slammed his hand down on the receipt, scooped it up and stuffed it in his pocket. “Not a word, not a single word to anyone,” he warned. “All I’m doing is building another plane and that’s all she knows.”
“S.I.G., and good luck.” Adam grinned and thought of the white and gold box he had tucked in the very back of his sock drawer and the ongoing conversation he was having with Paul who had ambushed him last week with a stack of catalogues and a plea for help because ‘You grew up in high society and I have no idea what the bloody hell half of this means.’
It seemed there were several proposals in the near future.
Author's notes:
Going by the series there was certainly a link between Adam and Karen, the fans took an official photo of Dianne wearing Paul’s ‘Cap and ran with it and I’ve seen more than one fan author linking Richard and Magnolia. This scene popped in recently in response to that.
Also, Gerry Anderson’s team were apparently some of the pioneers of kitbashing for TV.