Everyone has their favorite franchise--and mine isn't Star Trek--but you can't deny that the USS Enterprise is the most iconic spaceship, at least in the western world. I grew up on old Star Trek reruns. I liked the concept of an international crew. However, putting them on a "United States Ship" doesn't seem very international.

So! I built an International Creativerse Ship, or ICVS. I gave it a Russian name. Loved it very much. But now I'm making a station, not a ship. So instead of an ICVS, this is ICV Spaceport Caldo. The name isn't Russian this time, but I'm sure you'll figure it out.

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I started the build before galactic blocks hit the market. Instead of the popular limestone, I wanted my primary block to be bedrock. Thinking back on the Star Wars scene where they hid out an imperial search of the Millennium Falcon by hiding under a floor panel, my station needed panels. Bedrock has those panels. I'm also a bars & iron kinda sheep. I love the reinforced glass. I built an entire section of this station with said glass, and another with clear glass. I stood behind each, looked up at the night sky, and asked myself which made me feel like I was in space. Grudgingly, I had to go with the clear glass dome, but it was the only glass which gave the right feel.

When galactic blocks hit the market, I rebuilt an entire quarter of the inner station with galactic blocks. I hated it. I love the galactic blocks, but it's very easy to overdo them. So bedrock remained my primary block, though space block accents are very, very heavy throughout.

The entire build is littered with references which probably date me pretty well. When I was 8, my dad gave me my first computer (his hand-me-down). It was the original Osborne, which apparently was portable. The keyboard folded up & latched over the screen & disk drives, giving it a suitcase-ish shape, and it had a handle on the back. But it weighed more than I did soaking wet. I guess you can put a handle on anything & call it portable, so long as someone is strong enough to lift it. It had a dark green screen, bright green text, and you could force a mid-shade of green text if you used a VERY long command string. As an 8-year-old, many years before there was an internet and dial-up modems were cutting-edge (you picked up the handset of a rotary telephone & "hung it up" on your modem to interface) I didn't know much about computers. But what I THOUGHT I knew: We had no Windows or MS-DOS. It was just DOS. No batch files to speak of. BASIC was the big programming language for young wannabes like myself, but Pascal was gaining recognition. The Osborne had no hard drive, but 2 floppy drives, and each 5 1/4" floppy could be formatted to fit 48k of data. True hackers of the day knew that you could double this by punching out half a hole in the edge of the sleeve with a hole punch, effectively making every floppy disk double-sided.

And I discovered Zork! *.* No one who doesn't already know will ever understand why it's the greatest game of all time, because the only reason it's still the greatest is the nostalgia factor. It's available free online, but again, if you weren't there for its time of greatness, it just won't be the same.

After that, Tandy's, Atari consoles, FOUR WHOLE COLORS! The Ancient Art of War even allowed you to build custom maps. Defender of the Crown confused everyone because there was no internet to explain how to play it. Then we bumped things up to 16-color EGA for Sierra's onslaught of "quest" games and re-released Japanese games. Even Broderbund got in on the fun. Sentinel Worlds, Thexder, Wibarm, SILPHEED! *.* And 256-color VGA for games like Battle Chess, F-15 Strike Eagle, Willy Beamish! My 2-tone green screen has never been forgotten, and will always hold a special place in my heart. But we've come such a long way since then!

So I threw what I could into this station to spice things up.

The RemyDroid points out some trivia about the phonetic alphabet used in the station. While Spanish is an interesting language, their phonetic alphabet is incredibly dull. In English, we have the "telemarketer" phonetic alphabet: A as in Adam, P as in Paul, D as in David... It is so dull, it could put me to sleep. Then we have our military phonetic alphabet, which is pretty cool, and loaded with history. ALPHA, CHARLIE, WHISKEY, heck yeah! Our original military phonetic alphabet was even cooler, ABLE, FOX, EASY, DOG! Woowoo! Unfortunately, Spaniards never got beyond names & places. Carmen really is the most interesting letter in their phonetic alphabet. So the bays use Spanish versions of the English phonetic alphabet. And not the modern English one, because the old one is cooler. Able/Apto, Dog/Perro, Easy/Facil, and Fox/Zorro. It's a phonetic alphabet which doesn't actually exist, but should. (It CAN'T exist, if you understand the rules of phonetic alphabets. But it still should.)

A friend, Pepinot, saw the old piano in my basement and made an AMAZING version, with the lid open, real sheet music, arc sign keys... It was amazing. I'll simply HAVE to put something more comprehensive up about that. I took pictures. You better believe I took pictures. It rocked.