Ancient Web: John Douglass Built a 1997 Spaceship from a Watch Box

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

A friend gave John Douglass the plastic box from a new watch. Rather than throw it away, Douglass decided it looked like a spaceship waiting for someone to finish building it.

Read his 1997 Starship Modeler build article.

The resulting model has the spectacular name Sowerthe f'Quarwe Long Range Escort Fighter. Douglass credits part of the inspiration to the 'Nebulon Ranger' from Star Wars comics, whose angled single-wing arrangement appealed to him. He had already been using 3D viewers to examine LightWave and 3DO models, converting digital spacecraft into VRML worlds so that their shapes could be studied.

His actual model began with the thick triangular packaging, trimmed to reduce its cross-section. A nearly diamond-shaped wing was cut from 0.060-inch styrene sheet. From there he built the imagined spacecraft's engine pods, cockpit, cannons, panels, and asymmetrical visual balance.

The kitbash has to look like it can fly

The article is unusually candid about design. Douglass wants viewers to know which end is the front and which way is up, even when the ship does not have matching wings. The cockpit shape and weapon placement solve that visual problem.

He also wanted colored panels that looked like repairs or replacement parts. The fighter was painted in blue tones with greens, purples, tan patches, and orange markings. A Hebrew font printed using the Windows 95 graphics editor supplied symbols used as stencils. When he looked at the lettering, it suggested the strange name he gave the ship.

Best of all, there is a Texas Longhorn charm-bracelet charm tucked beneath the cockpit. The author explains that a friend challenged him to incorporate it. Other bits came from armored-vehicle track links and patterned Evergreen plastic sheet.

The page links to large top, front, and underside photos; those were substantial downloads when it appeared. It credits its text and images to 1997 and carries a last-update date of February 3, 1999. The footer says Douglass was making roughly a dozen scratchbuilt spaceships a year and showing them at World Science Fiction Convention art shows.

This is what a useful early fan article does: it preserves the artistic reasoning, source materials, mistakes, and personal jokes behind an object that might otherwise survive only as a photograph.

Inspect the original build notes and model photographs.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.