Galasphere 347 Revealed!

Описание: Space Patrol was a British children's TV show broadcast in 1963, running to 39 half-hour episodes.

Roberta Leigh and Arthur Provis had both worked for Gerry Anderson on his earlier children's puppet shows but had amicably left his company to produce their own, and whilst Anderson was making Fireball XL5 during 1962 they created Space Patrol, both in black and white. Whereas Fireball was a children's puppet show produced by a man who really wanted to be making big science fiction movies, Space Patrol suffered no such creative dissonance and was just a kid's show with appropriately modest production values and puppetry. None the less, it had its charms.

Roberta Leigh acquired a synthesizer and created her own music, all futuristic tonalities and pulsing techno, probably the first show to go 100% electronica since Forbidden Planet. The hypnotic warbling that was the show's signature tune (& the galasphere's engine noise) & the industrial throbbing sounds of Space Headquarters city are still clear in my mind 50 years later.

Fireball was better produced but Space Patrol had a better sci-fi premise. In the year 2100 Earth is part of a peaceful triplanetary alliance with the native humans of Venus and Mars, Venusians being fair slender elves given to pedantic logic (4 years before Spock) and Martians swarthy, stocky bears. The 3 planets have founded an organisation to patrol the solar system and keep the peace - Space Patrol. They do this in elegant spaceships of a unique design - the galaspheres. Unlike Fireballs which were rocket ships which somehow reached other solar systems, meson powered galaspheres looked like classic 1950s space stations, moved like flying saucers but could not travel anywhere near lightspeed. Trips around the inner solar system might only take a few days but journeys to Jupiter or beyond took weeks or months, during which time the crew rested in suspended animation in the freezing chamber while the ship was tended by the ship's robot. Over the course of the series non-human life was discovered on the outer planets, including sentient plants from Uranus (before it was pronounced YOO-rannus), hostile telepaths from Neptune & giants on a self-heating 10th planet beyond Pluto. All adventures took place within the solar system.

The galasphere design was elegant, a smooth torus supported on 3 tubes radiating from a central axis. The axis seemed to contain mainly engines but with one room of catwalks above some kind of bubbling mist-filled pit. 3 tubes, sometimes described as decontamination corridors, led from this room to the outer torus, the main habitable volume. The ship did not spin but in spaceflight was surrounded by a flickering spherical meson field, generated by an extendible fluted cylinder at the top of the axis, that gave that impression. Approaching a planet's surface it simply hovered, or sometimes glowed, and the landing cone split into a tripod, seemingly far too small for the vast bulk of the galasphere balanced over it.

There were 3 entrances to a galasphere, a classic rounded bulkhead door in the outer side of the torus which docked to the landing platform at Space Headquarters, a large square cargo bay door in the torus from which could be launched hoverjets, & a tube which delivered a cylinderical lift down the axis through the landing tripod to a planet surface. My design also includes a 4th, an extendible docking tunnel, necessary for a galasphere to dock with another craft in space but never seen in the series. I had the space so I added it for fun.

Galasphere 347 was commanded by blonde goateed Terran Captain Larry Dart, piloted by Martian Husky (my favourite) & the 3rd human crew member was Venusian Slim. The bridge had a central raised walkway and the 3 crew inspected the vast (if rather tatty) instrument banks in moving high chairs.

Galasphere's were peace-keepers & so carried no weapons, but in some episodes equipment might be mounted in the hold to fire out of the loading hatch.

Most rooms seemed to be sections of the outer ring but their relationship to one another was vague, & visual clues usually contradictory. This was the challenge - to fit it all in. Given the external shape of the galasphere and the minimum size of the central cryopit room, my design works out at 115 ft tall & 111 ft diameter.



Music by The Oracle, "Grayson", 2003