Perry Rhodan 28mm !?

[Byblos]

Hi all !

Do you know if there are 28mm figures from the world of Perry Rhodan (an excellent series of German SF) !?

[NurgleHH]

I am afraid not. But you can use a lot of stuff for it. For Example the Crooced Dice Astronauts.

[Byblos]

Crooked dice ... Ok !

[Westfalia Chris]

There was an (officially licensed, IIRC) range made by Hobby Products in the 1980s, but those are very hard to find.

I did a Perry Rhodan-inspired project back in the late 2000s and used mainly Hydra Miniatures Galacteers and Robots plus whatever figures seemed suitable, with various scratchbuilds.

Photobucket killed the old thread on that, but I've attached some of the old pics below.

[Byblos]

Ooooooooooooooooooo The figures are superb! 

Do you know if there are any illustrated books to get an idea of Perry Rhodan's vehicles, spacecraft and other machines?

Thank you anyway !

[Westfalia Chris]

Ooooooooooooooooooo The figures are superb! 

Do you know if there are any illustrated books to get an idea of Perry Rhodan's vehicles, spacecraft and other machines?

Thank you anyway !

There is a very nice and comprehensive fanpage (German only, I'm afraid, so I'll link directly to the Gallery section):

https://www.pr-materiequelle.de/

They have a huge lot of cover illustrations (spread over the sub-pages) and the cutaway images ("Risszeichnungen") which became a staple of the original release novelettes.

There's also the "Weltraumatlas" which I've seen quite regularly in car boot sales around here, so it may be available on E-Bay as well. Looks interesting, but my interest in Perry Rhodan (despite having read all the novelettes up to ca. No. 650) is more of a curious variety and its certain retro, at times trashy charme, so I never bought one (only browsed through it once or twice); the various fan Wikis pretty much cover the whole universe and timeline in much more detail and a far more accessible fashion (again, pretty much only in German, though you could use Google Translate to get the gist).

I'd love to see what you come up with. There are a lot more figures available these days which would work very well for the subject - the Crooked Dice Time Lift Security sets, using helmeted heads, would work very well for Terran space troops, and since most of the other races of the setting are humanoid, you could use pretty much anything that suits your taste (I did).

[Hobby Services]

Lovely job on those models, especially the robots.  Really stunning.

...my interest in Perry Rhodan (despite having read all the novelettes up to ca. No. 650) is more of a curious variety and its certain retro, at times trashy charme...

My feelings exactly, although I've only read the English translations (so 120-ish of them IIRC).  I could swap in "Remo Williams" for "Perry Rhodan" and feel the same...maybe with a little more emphasis on "trashy" though - ye gods, those 70s era Destroyer novels were lurid in a sad sort of way.

It is weird that such a gigantic franchise as Perry Rhodan has so little material translated, isn't it?

[Westfalia Chris]

Lovely job on those models, especially the robots.  Really stunning.

My feelings exactly, although I've only read the English translations (so 120-ish of them IIRC).  I could swap in "Remo Williams" for "Perry Rhodan" and feel the same...maybe with a little more emphasis on "trashy" though - ye gods, those 70s era Destroyer novels were lurid in a sad sort of way.

It is weird that such a gigantic franchise as Perry Rhodan has so little material translated, isn't it?

It is extremely "German" in its entire poise and hard to stomach at times. The first few cycles are very much locked in a 1960s, politically right-ish Cold War language and style, and even after that, there are very reactionary tendencies and viewpoints which were rightly criticized at the time (and are subject to proper literary academic research to this day; back then it was more or less the press looking for scandal and 1968-inspired, left-wing critics). The whole concept is very pulp (in the base sense of the word) and it has been likened to other German lurid pulps, especially the "Landser" WW2 apologetics, and with good reason.

From the early 1970s on , though, it got progressively esoteric and I pretty much lost interest in it (go figure ). The writing tended to improve notably, the tone was more humane, but it was getting increasingly long-winded  and boring. The "Silberband" collections are making a good job of collating the original novels, smoothing out the worst parts and curbing the idle segments, though.

I suspect it didn't sell overseas simply because it wasn't actually good on its literary merits and there was so much more going around that was better-written, especially in the UK and US. For that matter, I'd choose Classic Who or Star Trek over it with regard to an engaging universe, quality and humane proportions.

The earlier cycles have a lot of gaming potential, though. Lots of commando ops and stuff, atomic hand-grenades and the like.

[Belgian]

I have a bunch of these minis in blisters, never heard from them before I found them with a seller.

[tnjrp]

I still have all the 16 first issues that got translated to Finnish back in the 1970's. Was quite keen on them as a young 'un but truth be told they are rather dismally poor in regards to their merits literature or science fiction -wise*. In those first issues there's plenty of miniature gaming potential in multiple genres tho, just nothing really very clever or original necessarily.

---

*) The best Perry Rhodan thingy I have is the Chris Franke album Pax Terra which is actually quite good for its own particular genre

[Byblos]

Hi all

I still have to tell you how I came to know Perry Rhodan, because it's an original journey!

I met one of my best friends at the faculty: what brought us closer is the role play.

He created a completely original world, medieval-fantastic, with a lot of originality. He called it "World" simply!

But he has here and there appear bubbles of science fiction, like Stargate, it is both strange and very rewarding!

(It was 30 years ago and we still play!)

I knew he was a big fan of PerryRhodan, he had hundreds (in France we exceed 350 volumes translated) and from time to time I offered him ...

And lately, on "World" appeared a new diffuse threat, the "Island masters"!

From Perry Rhodan of course!

And as for a long time I tell myself that to change from time to time I would do buildings for futuristic era , I thought why not Perry Rhodan (with also Kamikaze 89 in the background, Ah Rainer Werner Fassbinder!)

And suddenly I tell myself that I too will start reading the series Perry Rhodan: here in France we find used books for a mouthful of bread, and it reads quickly, very quickly for a big reader like me!

It is a reading "relaxation" but not simplistic: there is a coherence, and a real humanism that emerges from the series!

And in France there is an active and very specialized association on Perry Rhodan: Bioposis!

And thanks Chis for the links and explanations !

Hydra Miniatures are "fantastics" !

[Daeothar]

Funny; for me Perry Rhodan, translated in Dutch, was quite a formative series, as far as science fiction goes. I received a stack of pockets (about a dozen or so) from an aunt, together with some other scifi books, and the scale portayed in the series just blew my 10 year old mind!

I mean; there was this guy who basically became a god, and became lost between galaxies. Not stars, but billions of galaxies! He finally found his way home all the way back to Sol, only to find it changed big time. Or the near immortal alien who crash-landed on prehistoric earth and guided primitive humanity towards becoming a technologically advanced race (and in the process becoming the archetype for basically every known main god), so they could eventually provided the tech he required to return home.

It was awesome to young me. Any political direction went way over my head though; the books just read like fantastic fare, and were easy reads at that. I cherished those books, I remember they were very early issues (there were some gaps in the numbering): between 1 and 20 or so.

Sadly, my naive young self ended up lending them to a cousin. And when inquiring about them after almost a year (I did not see him often), he casually told me he had sold them!   And as he was going through a rough patch at the time (parents divorsing, moving, falling in with a bad crowd, etc), my parents told me I could not pursue the issue.

But I have never forgotten the wonderful world those dozen small books had built for me, and looking back, they probably also formed a basis for my lifelong passion for scifi.

Dang it; now I want to start sourcing those books again...

Also, as I just remembered, I have used a Revell Perry Rhodan ship model as a basis for a space station in one of my projects! It's not exactly 28mm, but since it was pretty scale neutral when going smaller, it worked well with Silent Death and Battleship Yamato models

[Hobby Services]

Interesting.  The English translations must have toned down the more questionable bits from the German originals, I don't recall anything really awful - or at least no worse that you're find in "men's adventure" series in the period, like Casca, Mack Bolan or Remo Williams.   Admittedly that's a very low bar.  My tolerance for trashy pulp stuff is pretty high and it was a long time ago, so maybe my memory is deceiving me.

Perry Rhodan fascinates me both for its longevity and absurd word count, and for the sheer scope of the story.  The only setting I can think of that ramps up the power curve faster than Perry would be the Lensmen books from Smith - and perhaps his Skylark books.  Maybe it's for the best that I can't read German, having the mystery of what I haven't read (ie most of the series) dispelled might lower my opinion of it.

Also, as I just remembered, I have used a Revell Perry Rhodan ship model as a basis for a space station in one of my projects! It's not exactly 28mm, but since it was pretty scale neutral when going smaller, it worked well with Silent Death and Battleship Yamato models

I broke the Starship Sol kit into half a table's worth of scifi terrain for 40K and Stargrunt.  Great big generators and machines that go "ping!" galore in that pile of parts.

[Ultravanillasmurf]

Crooked dice ... Ok !

One Crooked Dice Astronaut.

[NurgleHH]

Funny. In the moment I listen to Perry $Rhodan Audiobooks while Painting. I also think - when I saw Chris Figures - that Hydra will be the best choice