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