Fanciful Engineering and Frank Tinsley

The art of Frank Tinsley and Sci-Fact-Fic

Some time ago I participated at a panel on spaceships for artists at Arisia (see old post). One of the odd things I was surprised at was the lack of familiarity in the panel and others with Frank Tinsley, an illustrator who did quite a bit of work for pre-war pulps and Mechanix Illustrated magazine after the war. While many SF illustrators were famous for the SF pulp cover work they did, Mr. Tinsley did no particular work for the many science fiction pulps or paperbacks during his career that I can find. On the other hand, he did quite a bit of work in an area which doesn't really have an adequate description. I suppose it is an area normally referred to as futurism, but in some ways I  think the terms science factional fiction or science fiction engineering is closer, or even Futurama. I don't mean the TV show, but rather the hugely popular GM pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair designed by Norman Bel Geddes.

"To New Horizons" the GM industrial film to introduce their Futurama Exhibit at the New York's World Fair of 1939

The reason I believe in the difference is perhaps because futurism does cover a lot of work that is actually rigorously thought out and modeled with reasonably hard data regarding technological and social trends. The type of work I would consider under sci-fact-fi or S/F/E  covers the type of documentary work  that talks about subjects with an air of hard technical background or specificity that is really at best an excessively overly optimistic view of technological and social trends and at worst pure hyperbole.

In spite of that last sentence, I do believe there is a great deal of value to this type of work. Whilst on the one hand, it is not really useful as any sort of foundation for creating a real functional piece of technology or social engineering, I do suppose it has in the past served as much an inspiration for young future engineers as the appearance of technology in science fiction romances. In fact, such articles were perhaps even more inspiring since they were normally presented as a non-fiction subject sometimes in quite serious publications such as Life or National Geographic.

Life magazine speculative article illustrated by Robert McCall about the future of space travel that accompanied the "First Man in Space" issue April 21, 1961 (find original at Google Books)

Frank Tinsley

Frank Tinsley was born in 1899 in Manhattan. Turn of the century Manhattan was perhaps the living embodiment of a future city in its day. Already having some of the tallest buildings in the world, it was a hub of continent wide transportation arteries. It contained the largest and highest bridges in the world, an elevated and subterranean suburban transport system, and collected a truly polyglot community perhaps unequaled anywhere at the time. Perhaps more importantly he was born in someways along with aviation and it was the aviation pulps where he did a lot of covers.

Variety of covers and art work Frank Tinsley did for the Air Trails/Bill Barns pulp magazine

As dated as these covers may seem to us, they are drawn with an air of passion about flying machines, colorful and dynamic. I dare say much more exiting than even what comes out of the marketing department of Boeing/McD-D and Lockheed-Martin these days. Many of the aircraft shown in these covers and stories represented slight variations on existing aircraft or protototypes.Some of Bill Barnes aircraft were truly inventive designs with some rarely implemented features on real aircraft such as retractable floats and sky hooks for areal dockings.

Some of Tinsley's fanciful futuristic designs that accompanied his articles for Mechanix Illustrated. From top right: A suburban saucer, a nuclear airship, a walking jeep or mechanical mule, and an airborne hover police car.

After the war, Frank Tinsley also began to write articles of speculative engineering projects, S/F/E involving many different forms of transportation: space, terrestrial, and maritime. He also illustrated a memorable series of advertising for American Bosch Arma in the 50s. These ads featured various nuclear and solar powered spaceships and lunar bases with descriptive copy of the futuristic settings, although the company was not in the business of building or designing spacefaring hardware at the time (just their electronics). I still have fond memories of the ads having come across them in old Scientific American issues from the 50s.

Two of the American Bosch Arma Adverts

As prolific as he appears to be in this area of illustration, I can't find any mention of him connected to any actual science fiction magazines or covers at this time. Given the nature of his articles, I can only imagine that he must have been a fan

More on this

While his images are out there, and not always credited, there is very little about Frank Tinsley himself. A brief bio as available at The Field Guide to Wild American Pulp Artists: Frank Tinsley. Also some more information here at the Lambiek Comiclopedia. The Flikr user X-ray Delta One (Call sign for the "Discovery" if you didn't know) has a collection of his images including some of the text of some of his articles. The articles for Mechanix Illustrated are available at the Mechanix Illustrated blog (I've put the link off the search term here to hopefully make it faster to find). A gallery of the ABA ads can be found at Vintage Ads on LiveJournal.

Buck Rogers Space Cruiser

The 25th century's magic bus

As a small child I remember that I followed the adventures of both Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers as the serials were shown as filler in kid shows along with Our Gang comedies and cartoons. Recently I found that the original Buck Rogers Universal serial has been made available as a feature on Hulu and other free video streams out there in the form of a compressed version made in the 50s called "Planet Outlaws". Yes, the acting/writing is pretty awful. The re-editing of the multiple episodes into just over an hour also make it rather confusing at times. It also gets rid of many of the action scenes, which admittedly were there only to pad the story out to several episodes with cliffhangers. On the other hand given their budgets and state of the art, the special effects are not totally awful. Yes, basically models on strings and sparklers out the back.

The 25th century Interplanetary Earth Cruiser

The designs on these old serials do have an appeal to the model maker as an example of "diesel punk" style. I also had something of a challenge. I had again volunteered to do the model in an hour workshop for Arisia '12, and not wanting to do the Probert shuttle again, I decided to try something new. The Buck Rogers cruiser seemed to fit the bill.
     The workshop went off rather well, but a couple of problems with the design came up, so I tweaked the model a bit to help improve assembly.  I also added a stand to make this rather simple ship look a bit fancier (So to the participants, sorry for the delay...this took longer than I thought).

The Model

This version of the model is a simplified version of the Earth Space Cruiser seen in the serial. There are a variety of reasons. For one thing, I could only work off the available video streams and so the quality of the scenes are rather poor. Secondly, this initial version needed to meet the build in an hour requirement and minimize resources. I also needed to keep it to just 2 pages.

• Link to instructions
• Link to model

    Given that there is a villain in the piece as well and both ships are nearly identical, I figured, what the hec. So I added a new page 2 that allows you to build Imperial Cruiser, which is basically the same ship but with serrated fins. I made a few additional changes to help differentiate the two which shouldn't change the instructions significantly except for the fins which assemble differently (see next paragraph).
     The fins assemble differently from the original in that because of the serrations they can't be folded over the top. Instead the vertical fin is folded from the bottom, but the side fins come in upper and lower halves (o/u) and starboard and port sections (s/p). The step for attaching these side fins differs in that you need to glue the lower halves to the tab onto the ship assembly first (note, that the lower fin has a tab that should fit under the plate overhang). Trap the tab by gluing the top half on top. An alternative method is gluing the upper and lower half together only at the outer edges, and then apply with a toothpick glue within the slot and tab and slip over the tab on the ship assembly.

• Killer Kane's Imperial Cruiser (technically, Killer Kane's government is never actually referred to as imperial, but it's apt).

    Another "model" I added to this package was an appropriate stand for either model. Very art deco, it comes in one page and should be printed on cardstock or glued onto cardboard before assembly. You will need to cut the rectangular name plate from the ship pages to put the name on the stand. The stand assembly should be relatively self evident, but a simplified assembly guide was printed on it.

• The stand which might work with other models as well with a little modification (Google docs preview seems to show it blank, but it does download ok)

     The model scales roughly to 1/120. I'm thinking about eventually scaling this up to a 4 page version that would address some of the simplifications of this version, but if you are looking for a simple kit that requires little experience or time, these should be pretty good.

Suggestions & hints

There are several limitations due to the scale and the need for simplicity, but you may consider the following suggestions to get a better finish on the model. While the kit is designed for a fast build,  a well finished model depends on neatness that comes with taking your time; i.e. avoid picking up wet glue on your fingers and then putting it all over the model. Another thing is you can camouflage joins by using a colored pencil along exposed card edges to help it blend with the part colors. The rocket exhausts are tricky to form from cardstock, so feel free to use the card part as a template for cutting out of lighter paper, or even using coffee stirrers instead. Tabbed kits, particularly at this scale will often show slight joining problems when finished, so consider using either small sharp scissors or a sharp hobby knife to trim excess parts (but do so carefully).
   While the serials are black and white, the Buck Rogers comics often show ships in wild colors, so feel free to color the parts in as you wish or spray the ships gold or silver. At this scale, building several of these for a mobile is also practical (particularly combined with some of the other "retro" rocket kits available out there (see Tor's Stubby and Cthulhu's "retro rocket" (also a rocketship XM there).
 

More Info...

You can back track to last year's article for the workshop which includes the ST-TMP shuttle concept (start's here) or download the shorter pdf document. Also visit my Zizzerz 'n Mizzilz page which tries to organize my postings on modeling.
    As for the ship itself, struggle through that serial!