My dad isn’t a particularly well-educated man, but I think he is, in his own way, something of a genius. Over the years, I’ve seen him modify ordinary tools to fit difficult jobs, rather than spending the money on a specialized gadget; improvise repairs to things that everyone else would say are impossible to fix; and, most impressively, build wild flights of fancy for no other reason than he thinks they will be cool and make people smile. There was, for example, the year he transformed my ’63 Galaxie into a reasonably good replica of the RMS Titanic, complete with Ken-and-Barbie versions of Jack and Rose out on the bow, for a Halloween party.

Then there are the ideas he’s had but for one reason or another never brought to fruition. He was always going to cobble together a Headless Horseman outfit and ride Thunder, our old gray nag, through the subdivisions just to see what the trick-or-treaters would do. And when I was a young fanboy, he often thought about making a float with a life-size X-Wing on it for our small-town Fourth-of-July parade. (The idea was that I’d be dressed as Luke Skywalker, riding the float alongside my “ship.”)

I was reminded of Dad’s unfulfilled X-Wing scheme this afternoon when I ran across this:

That’s a 21-foot-long (half-scale?) X-Wing built by a group of model-rocket enthusiasts; they intend to launch it next week, with four solid-fuel rocket motors mounted right where the engine pods would go on a “real” Incom T-65. And here’s the wild thing: the wings are motorized. If all goes well, the ship will “lock its S-foils in attack position” as it ascends. Or maybe the ship will start off with the wings in X-configuration and fold them closed during the flight — the two websites I’ve seen contradict each other on that. Either way, there’s a good chance the whole thing will come apart, but I hope it doesn’t. And I also hope the video of its flight makes it to the web; my three loyal readers know I’ll be posting it if it does!

Read an overview and see lots more pictures here, or go here for an obsessively detailed construction log.