Complex Numbers

Per Ardua Ad Astra

Whew. I feared today's prompt would be about... well, something else.

Mini-Contest below! You could win a Merit Badge.

PROMPT September 11th

Write about your favorite childhood game or toy.

Teen years count as childhood, right? At least some of them do. I don't remember much about my pre-teen toys or games, though I do know my parents taught me important games like chess, checkers, and poker.

I think I was maybe 12 or 13 when I got my first rocket, a gift from an aunt. It was a cardboard and plastic thing with a Star Trek theme (I told you I've always been a fan), and, most importantly for Kid Me, you could put a solid-fuel engine into the thing and launch the sucker into the trees.

Sure, the tree thing was inadvertent. We had about a ten-acre field, plenty of room for launch and recovery, but somehow, something like 1 out of every 3 launches ended up with me climbing a goddamned tree. This is why I'm not Elon Musk.

The Star Trek-themed rocket was only the first of many. The basic design of most of them was similar: a long cardboard tube, nose cone, fins. Some were even multi-stage. Some had clear plastic payload chambers, and I should raise a memorial to all the beetles, worms, and mice that underwent several Gs of acceleration in the name of science. One even had a camera built into the nose cone -- a 110 mm film camera, as this was long before the days of digital photography. At perigee, the thing would automatically snap a blurry picture of the launch field and use it to determine which tree it would land in.

Most model rockets take some time and various degrees of skill to build. Glue (several types), sandpaper, balsa sealer for the fins, different color paints, decals, that sort of thing. Some were easier to build than others; hell, some of them were extraordinarily complex. Once built and dry, you could shove in an engine, install an electric igniter, hook it up to a battery, and launch it.

I didn't have much else to do in those days, what with living out in the sticks and it being a few years yet before home computers became a thing, so I built well over a hundred rockets.

Some of them are probably still in the trees.

In those several years, though, there was one model that was forever beyond my reach, both in terms of price and, I was sure, complexity of build, and that was the scaled-down Saturn V.

But I have never really lost my love for rocketry, even though, these days, I don't have a place to launch them. It's the building part that intrigues me. Every once in a while, I'll get it in my head to put a rocket together just for the craft of it.

And a few years ago, I finally got my hands on a Saturn V.

Unfortunately, the paint scheme foiled me. The thing's completely built, but for half the paint and the decals. I keep thinking one of these days I'll revisit it, touch up the parts that got fucked up because I'm not so great at masking, and put the decals on. Hell, I wanted to do it for the Apollo 11 50th anniversary, but never seemed to get around to it.

Still sitting there, though. Waiting. One day...

Merit Badge Mini-Contest!

Today is an important day. No, not just because of that, but because it happens to be my 16th anniversary here on Writing.com.

So no prompt for comments today -- just comment below and you might get a badge tomorrow. As usual, deadline is the end of the day today, September 11, WDC time. If you must have a prompt, you could talk about model rockets or how awesome I am, or how awesome my model rockets are even though I don't have any pictures of them up. But really, I just want to encourage comments, so anything goes, today. That's right - it's my birthday, but I'm the one giving a present. (Don't worry if I've given you a Merit Badge in the last couple of weeks; if applicable, I'll remind myself to send it out later for CR credit.)