Thunderbird 3 Walkthrough

Описание: Thunderbirds was a British children's science fiction TV series created by the maestro Gerry Anderson for impresario Lew Grade and broadcast on ITV in 1965 and 1966. 32 fifty minute episodes were produced over two seasons, plus two feature films.

Around 2065 retired astronaut and millionaire philanthropist Jeff Tracy has created a secret base hidden inside his own private Pacific island from where he launches the five Thunderbirds, super advanced rescue craft designed and maintained by the reclusive engineering genius known as Brains (AKA Hiram K Hackenbacker during his rare appearances in public) and piloted by Jeff's five heroic sons - Scott, Virgil, Gordon, John and Alan, all named after 1960s American astronauts.

Because it was a spaceship Thunderbird 3 was my favourite, even though it only featured in 4 of the 32 episodes. It starred in "Sunprobe" which introduced the boarding procedure whereby up to three astronauts could be delivered directly to the spaceship by means of a sofa in the villa's lounge which sank through the floor down to an underground railway, eventually to be raised again up through the centre of the ship into its own little red quilted lounge. From there a small lift carried the pilot up to the command deck where he flew the ship from a circular rotating control station. "The Uninvited" showed the spaceship docking with the space station via its docking ring and revealed the autoexit, a mechanised circular tunnel which directly connected the Thunderbird 3 and Thunderbird 5 control rooms by somehow turning at least one corner, possibly five, and inverting gravity. "The Imposters" revealed a radar-fix screen somewere on the bridge (I put it next to the autoexit). Second season episode "Ricochet" showed tightly cropped views of a redecorated control room done up in sexy polished metal finish instead of the bland beige of season one and also showed a big rectangular airlock door somewhere on the outer hull, its gravity clearly perpendicular to the rest of the spaceship.

"Brains" was really Derek Meddings, who designed vehicles and special effects for all of Anderson's Supermarionation TV series and he ended up working on Bond films. Thunderbird 3 was brilliant but as seen on the telly it presented some contradictions infuriating to engineers such as myself. As well as the four episodes my sources were three gorgeous full colour cut-away views of the Thunderbird which I found on the web and remember from my youth appearing in annuals and comics such as TV21. Although only two decks were ever seen or even mentioned on the telly the general consensus is that there were four decks in all.

The lounge deck featured the travelling sofa, two g-couches, some odd chairs, book shelves and a huge telly. In "Sunprobe" a safety beam is used to save a doomed mission to the sun by remotely activating its malfunctioning retro rockets, and the large unwieldy console controlling it is seen stuffed into the lounge. This is only possible because the g-couches disappear somewhere and the sofa has been pushed back from the centre of the circular room, clearly impossible because it must be above the central rectangular shaft. I moved the safety beam console upstairs and added a small washroom and kitchenette to the sides of the lounge not seen in the episode.

The lift shaft seems to have doors with a mesh, not glass, window and an open platform moving up and down it. Risky on a spaceship, but I kept the model authentic to the episode.

According to the plans the next floor is rescue equipment storage bins and bunks, and I included a second washroom.

I made the third deck into the hold with shelving based on that seen in Thunderbird 2 in some episodes, and cargo bay airlock doors big enough to get the safety beam console in through them.

The top floor is modelled exactly as per the show's first season including its original orangey beige colour scheme.

Anderson never worried about precise scale, but I do. Thunderbird 3 is described by Brains as being 200 feet high in one episode and by Jeff Tracy as 287 feet high in another. I modelled the four decks and exterior separately then made the exterior as small as possible to plausibly contain the decks above the docking ring. I made the decks as compact as I could and the ship still turned out to be 386 feet high, 23 feet longer than a saturn V, the biggest rocket ever built. If I had crammed in all the features shown in some of the plans, such as emergency tunnels, Thunderbird 3 would have grown to over 500 feet. The launch bay views in my model look to be in the same proportion to the human figure as the ones on the show, so I reckon my version is sound.

Peter Jackson's 2015 relaunch with CGI Thunderbirds painstakingly made to look like hand crafted physical models is brilliant and features a much better designed Thunderbird 3, but I stuck with the old 1965 version because... 1960s!



"Thunderbirds March" by Barry Gray.