+2 Helm of Fighterpiloting

Since I ordered one of the flight suits, I was wondering how much of an interest there was for a Wing Commander Confed-style helmet for people?

Examples of the style I'm talking about can be seen here:

I've contacted a local vendor here in Atlanta who is willing to create the necessary mold (currently, we're pricing this around $500 for the inital mold, which would be good for the production of around 50 helmets), and then create individual custom fiberglass helmets. They would be wearable (using the base interior materials from a generic motorcycle helmet), though certainly would not be certified for use as anything other than strictly a novelty item.

My thought was to leave the basic helmet painted the white primer, and then either someone could stick a decal logo on it, or have it custom painted themselves. We could go ahead and have the two basic red stripes painted on them, though. There's also the idea of having Diamondback, Black Widow, and Wolfpack emblems printed as decals, but that's still up in the air until we can gauge some sort of demand for these.

With the base materials, labor, shipping, and whatever else will go into producing one of these, the current estimate price for one would be between $125-175 per helmet (subject to change, based on material costs), and would likely be finished in time for Dragon*Con 2006. Let me hear your feedback about this.

This Really Puts Us On The Map!

Frosty, Halman and I were bored on a sleepy Tuesday afternoon, so we decided to plot Wing Commander characters' home towns on a Google "Frappr!" map. You can find our little map here. All the cool kids are, no doubt, using this tool to plot their MySpace box socials... but like all technology, it is most pure when adapted for uses Wing Commander in nature. It seems to be half tool and half Wikipedia... so if you come across any other characters from Earth, be sure and add them.

The map currently consists mostly of Wing Commander I and Wing Commander Prophecy wingmen... since they're the ones who have bios that list their home cities. It actually has two birthplaces for Knight, as the editors responsible for the SNES port decided that Angola was a more appropriate home than South Africa. It's kind of fun to see characters laid out like this... for instance, Captain Johnny's Prophecy counterpart, Majestic, is from the heart of Africa. Who knew?