Star Wars Starfighter Kites Bring The Force to the Skies

by John P. Barker
When I was a kid, kites were just plain lame. They were generally made of two pieces of balsa wood with crappy tissue paper stapled to these to form the generic diamond-like shape. I'd put a tail on it, attach a line, run-dragging it down the street-until it became airborne. Then I'd have roughly 2 minutes of fun until the stupid thing would careen to the ground and splinter into a wad of wood and tissue.Wheeeeeee! Fun! Yeah... right. Shoot me. I would have more fun with a fresh bullet wound.At least I didn't have to walk, barefoot through glass, to school in torrential rain. And no, I'm not quite old enough to sit in a rocker on my porch and yell at kids to get off of my lawn...Anyways, back to kites.Now you can get kites in many shapes and sizes and they are generally constructed of more durable materials than tissue and balsa wood. Take this kite, for example:Those of you who read the blog on a regular basis know that I'm a Star Wars junkie. The moment I saw that I could purchase a Millennium Falcon kite I started drooling. This thing looks sooooo sweet!

If you're not into kites that emulate YT-1300 freighters, you may find Darth Vader's TIE-fighter or Luke's X-Wing fighter more to your liking.

I'm no engineer, so I'm clearly baffled as to how these kites, shaped as abstractly as they are, can actually fly. Or how they can get in the air at all, for that matter.

I dug around a bit and couldn't find any dimensions on these things, but I would think they would be quite large... though maybe not large enough to do this:


Moe's Toys Shop