About the Author

My name's Phil. Born in 2376, I've spent the better part of the last twenty-five years working in systems architecture — specifically, building and maintaining the network infrastructure that keeps station-side services talking to each other. Comms routing, data management, interface layers between systems that were never designed to be compatible. That sort of thing.

It's not glamorous work, but it's the kind of work that, when done properly, nobody notices — and when done badly, everyone does. Which, now I think about it, probably explains my affinity for GOW.

I'm based on Grimsby Station. Not in the yards — I'm not an engineer in the structural sense, though I've been called one on enough contractor invoices. I work in the civilian quarter, systems side. The station is home. Has been for twelve years now.

The Model Building

I built model kits as a kid. The usual things — ships, mostly, because you couldn't grow up on a station without developing an opinion about ships, and mine was that they looked better at 1:350 scale where you could see the whole shape without having to crane your neck out of a viewport. I stopped in my mid-teens, the way you stop most things in your mid-teens: gradually and without deciding to.

About a year ago I started watching build channels on the feeds — scratch builders, mostly, people fabricating entire ships from raw stock and kit parts. Something about it pulled me back. The patience of it. The precision. The way a hull comes together from nothing, one panel at a time.

So I cleared a corner of my quarters, bought some tools and materials, and started. I'm a beginner. I'm not pretending otherwise. The first few attempts were educational in the way that a small fire is educational — you learn a lot, very quickly, about what not to do next time.

The GOW Obsession

I don't remember when GOW went from "that company whose name is on half the infrastructure I maintain" to an actual fascination. It crept up on me. You live on Grimsby Station long enough, you absorb the company the way you absorb humidity — slowly, invisibly, and then one day you realise you're saturated.

I started reading the archives. GOW's archives are famously inconsistent, which is either infuriating or wonderful depending on your relationship with certainty. I found it wonderful.

This site is where I put all of it. The company history, as best as I can reconstruct it. The stories of individual ships, as told by the people who built them, flew them, and fixed them. And, increasingly, my own modest attempts to recreate those ships in miniature, because apparently one obsession wasn't enough.

Contact

If you have GOW stories, records, corrections, or opinions about which ship class was the best (it's the Longshoreman and I will not be taking questions), you can reach me through the site.

Keep flyin'.