Aside from the release of the NX-01 Refit Diagram - Doug Drexler has also revealed a view of Andrew Probert's original Romulan Warbird with the vertically orientated wing structure/ Life is good. http://drexfiles.wordpress.com/2010/04/25/let-the-countdown-begin-2011-sotl-sneak-peek-01-andrew-probert/
Original here http://flare.solareclipse.net/cgi2/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=7;t=001714;p=0 The nose is a bit different on that sketch.
The "vertical" warbird is cool and those concept illustrations are fascinating. And although I'm surprised to say so that refit NX-01 looks light years better than the actual design used. With some tweaking it could actually have looked like something genuinely pre TOS, although not mid 22nd century.
Overall, I'm under-impressed. The wings are too plain and the head's...well...ugly. The gold deflector might have been cool, but the gold cheesy and the shape too simple. The wings are too similar to the warbird's for me (why not just have them be horizontal if there's nothing else different about them?) and the warbird's head is vastly superior. There's just nothing here to make it stand out as anything other than an early version of the better warbird. It's a "what-if" we turn the wings vertically and blunt the beak. Real (disappointing) lost opportunity here. I hope you're not reading this, Mr. P
I posted in the other SOTL thread that the vertical arrangement was the original arrangment and that the powers that be thought it was too alient or something like that (I still don't understand that decision). I would prefer the vertical makeup simply because it is different and not something we see every day. After all, why do the Carassians, Klingons, Romulans, et al., have to have the same horizontal arrangement? YMMV
Yeah, I'm aware. The original head (though itself not quite all that it can be) was prettier. Looking again at the wings, given that the warbird (D'deridex) has been around all this time, I was hoping he'd try something different with them here. Especially given how friggin HUGE this thing is...that big flat wall and the wings' overall simple design are would be an eyesore from a nearby shuttle. The ship's still very interesting and I whole heartily agree with the overabundance of horizontal T-ships. The Ferengi, Klingons, Cardassians, Dominion - all got'em. Even the Romulans, but they had'm earlier, and come-on the D'deridex is one of the most beautiful and interesting ships in Star Trek history.
The only issue I have with the vertical design is the warp nacelles don't look "vertical", they give the apperance of being adapted from the previous version - unless that was the artist's intent.
Yep, I would tend to agree with you some, here. First, consider the size of this thing, MASSIVE. What would you expect to see there? Yes, I plan on revising that 'head' some day but for now, it is in some ways underimpressive. The deflector shape is pretty much the same as the standard Warbird's,... the 'gold' simply means that it's powered up. Look at today's aircraft. Small jet fighter wings are very similar to those of giant StarLifter cargo aircraft because they fill the same function. The Capitol Warbird's "wings" do pretty much the same as the standard Warbird's,... but with a LOT more room inside. Near the center-line you may notice four huge hanger decks for several wings (no pun intended) of fighters, shuttles, and transports. Why are these wings vertical? Asside from this Designer's cinematic reasons (documented before), it creates an intimidation factor,... size does sometimes matter. I really appreciate the honest feedback here. How else am I going to give people what they want unless I know what that is ??? Andrew-
The warp engines are rotated 90º to match the wings and maintain the same relation with each other. Warp engine systems in Gene Roddenberry's universe are co-dependent. As far as their looking like the standard Warbird engines,... a small private airplane has a propeller that looks very much like the propeller on a V-22 Osprey because they preform the same function (basically). Andrew-
Similar to looking at the hull of an aircraft carrier today from the deck of a small service boat up close. Thank you, Andrew-
I dunno - I always liked the idea of the vertical warbird. Anything that deviates from standard "tropes" (that's the trendy new word to describe such things now-a-days, yes?) is always welcome to me. As silly as I thought the Hugh episodes were, I loved the asymmetrical Borg ship, and of course the Breen battlecruiser for the same reason - totally different and very alien. Although I think understand why you rotated the wings in the beginning as, IIRC, it was because of the horizontal nature of television aspect ratio and it would have filmed better that way. Is that correct? In any case, I think it rocks and, if it were ever actually seen on screen, it would have no doubt given even Picard great pause before pissing off her commander, considering the Enterprise-D looks like it would not have been much bigger than that monster's head/primary hull! Question - did this ship ever have an official/unofficial class name? We all know the standard Warbird to be D'deridex, but I was curious about this one.
Small suggestion for Mr. Probert: if the warbird was perfectly symmetrical, "vertical" and "Horizontal" would be meaningless. Think of this: you could take this in a completely different direction and simply fold the gravitational fields "inwards", following the contours of the wings and the command module; this way, "down" is always at the centerline of the ship along the axis of flight. You could even describe this as a feature of the forced quantum singularity the warbird uses as a power source (what else, after all, would you use a gravity drive for, if not artificial gravity for the crew?) That would maximize the amount of deck space on the design -- allowing the decks to "wrap" with the curved shapes of the wings and the hull -- while at the same time removing any "true" axis to the ship altogether. Like a real-world spacecraft, it has no true "top" or "bottom" and can come at you in just about any orientation it wants. It might even maneuver a bit like the Jellyfish from STXI; even in level flight, it can tumble and roll and bank randomly like it doesn't care which way is up. In contrast with the obsessively vertically-oriented Starfleet, that would be about as alien as anything we've ever seen in Star Trek, IMO.
Clearly, the romanization is based on standard Romulan while the pronunciation reflects the regional dialect of the ship's designers.