Tag Archives: featured

Come Fly With Us!

Posted on by tjkopena

Rocketship Games has expanded to a legit launch vendor! Well, as “legit” as you can be operating out of the back of a small hatchback in the middle of a cornfield…

Fancy tent’s big debut! Photo by Andrea H.

The past ~18 months we’ve been low-key manufacturing & selling kits of our own designs. Very niche micro-rockets, but there’s hundreds of them out there in the wild now, across all points of the continental US + Hawaii.

Earlier this year we wanted to start carrying Estes motors in addition to Quest’s MicroMaxx motors, to complement some new larger kits we’re (slowly) working toward. Then we figured it’d be really useful to have full lines of motors available for sale to everyone at our section launches. Beyond the convenience, shipping some of the higher thrust motors incurs hazardous materials fees that clobber the efficiency of small personal orders but a vendor can amortize over a larger purchase. And at that point we may as well go all-in, right? Obviously. So we also started stocking a solid mix of other kits along with basic construction tools and supplies. Of course then we needed a fancy tent to put it all under, and here we are!

But, seriously, one of my big goals in this effort was to create just a little bit of a hobby shop experience for the kids that attend our section launches. Realistically my daughter will not have the extremely formative experience I was fortunate to have growing up of walking to the neighborhood hole-in-the-wall hobby shop on weekends and just drinking in all of the kits, tools, supplies, and built models on display. I don’t know that there are any such shops left in our city, let alone in walking distance. She’ll have different and in many ways better experiences—between Internet forums, online shopping, and rapid shipping, let alone technical advances, this is a golden age for hobbies of all kinds. But there is something special about having it all tangibly there in front of you. So this project’s already paid off in watching the 8, 10, 12 year olds and so on at our launches agonizing about what to spend their allowance on, or doing the little kid dance of checking everything out, going away for a bit, coming back to stare some more hoping someone starts just handing you gifts, maybe doing that cycle once or twice more, and then deciding on a course of action and bringing over mom or dad to show them all the cool stuff & begin internal negotiations…

Alice deliberating on our table arrangement. Photo by Ken D.

That’s our big news this month. Recently we also concluded dramatically increasing the workshop & storage space in our basement factory warehouse and are looking forward to getting back to new kits & other projects. Come on over and say hello if you see us at a launch. We are at PARA 520 in southeastern Pennsylvania essentially every month, and are hoping to make it to MDRA and other clubs in the mid-Atlantic and northeast regions more frequently in 2023, now as a vendor in addition to flyers.

We’ll see you out there!

Open for business! Photo by Ken D.

Hats off to Al & his Allied Hobbies in the Roosevelt Mall, which I’ll never forget…​

Minis Workshop (Oct 2022)

Posted on by tjkopena

Last week Matt L, Julien B, and I led the first of a planned monthly Miniatures Workshop at Redcap’s. We had very solid attendance with at least 15 people there for the whole night, and handfuls of people floating in & out over time from other areas of the shop.

Joe talking at length about different kinds of miniatures and basic preparation.

First segment I did a long impromptu talk about how different types of miniatures are made, various materials and their properties, how to prep them, basic adhesives & assembly, and getting ready to paint.

Second stretch, Matt took about half the people and went around the group just getting introductions and quick discussion on what people wanted to work on/play. Julien and I each took a group of people who’d more or less never assembled miniatures and we put some together. A few people brought their own, for the others I had a stack of old Genestealer and Space Marine sprues to give out.

Third part I took a totally novice group to talk about priming, different kinds of paints (acrylic, GW Contrast, etc), and then we all spray primed models. A bunch of people had never used a spray can before. A group who’d already begun their painting journey split off with Matt to talk fundamentals—kinds of brushes, caring for brushes, brush control, loading brushes, etc.. Suffice to say, Matt like to talk about brushes… Julien floated around talking to people about their specific projects.

Matt talking about brush and paint basics.

Julien coaching people on assembly and repair.

My brother and I assembling genestealers.

By the end a lot of people had made new acquaintances and were deep into hobby talk. At least one person was super stoked about the Genestealer they’d assembled and primed. Next month we’ll push more into actual painting on-site.

Rocket Kids (Oct 2022)

Posted on by tjkopena

Alice invited a couple friends to come launch rockets with us yesterday. And then she insisted they all get to build their own rockets. And then it turned out the friends had invited friends. And then some siblings came along too. So in the end we had 8 kids from 2yo to ~8yo playing with rockets, plus some spectators drawn from the adjacent playground. Within almost exactly two hours rolling in to rolling out: 6 micro-rocket kits got built, markered & stickered; we did at least 19 launches of those and some other MMX models; and then blasted off a few larger odd-rocs to cap off the day. Quite the hive of activity! I’ve always understood it, but I have a newfound love for the launch control safety key, which ensured I came home with both my eyes… Fortunately my brother was watching like a hawk to grab it any time I forgot before going to load another rocket onto the pad.

Little engineers getting down to work on their rockets.

Applying some highly technical finishing touches with permanent markers.

Success!!!