I just visited the TrekMovie web-site, and read their review of the newly remastered "Is There In Truth No Beauty?" episode. I understand there was a new ship featured in a flyby at the end of the show. I did not have a chance to see this episode firsthand. TOS-Remastered has given us a peek at the ill-fated Antares ("Charlie X"), and completely replaced the Woden. ("The Ultimate Computer"). Whether any of us consider this "canon" or not, TOS-R is making subtle contributions to "Trek Art". Does anyone have any feedback on the Mystery Ship at Medusa? Has anyone tried to scale or draw it?
According to Masao based on a reply to an email he sent Mike Okuda and posted at Flare, it's a Medusan ship built with Federation parts modified, one supposes, to accommodate lunchbox-sized energy beings.
Unless my perspective is wrong, this Mystery Ship is in front of the Enterprise; the two ships are facing each other. This would suggest that the Mystery Ship is quite a bit smaller than Enterprise. http://trekmovie.com/2008/03/22/is-there-in-truth-no-beauty-screenshots/#more-1780 If this is a custom-built Medusan ship using Earth/Federation parts, I bet I know what the tubes are for: they are loading/unloading bays for non-corporeal Medusans. Maybe they each get into a Kolos-style box to get sent out through the tubes.
It appears the jury is in: The FX Reel is up on TrekMovie that shows the Enterprise clearly facing the Medusan vessel. Any comments on what this means for the Mystery Ship's size?
As conjectured over in the TOS forum, don't be surprised if this medusan buggy shows up as the "SS Aurora" (perhaps minus that funky ring of tail tubes) in place of that sad tholian kitbash in "The Way To Eden" when that episode gets the re-mastered treatment. A test run as a "new" ship here first would fit the - Antares/Woden and then Mudd's J-class/Denevan shuttle - double use pattern the CBS Digital folks seem to follow with their meshes/models.
The windows are very small and close together. If it is in front of the Enterprise, they would be very small crew members on board.
Hahaha... the planet is the ONLY thing in that entire FX reel that looks even remotely real... with everything else, especially the energy field, it looks a thousand times better in the original TOS footage, lol. The new FX look like stuff from a cheap PC game, which is funny, because if they want the new stuff to stand the scrutiny on new HDTV plasma, LCD, and DLP monitors, they're in for a shock, if they look cheesy as-is, on a 20-inch flatscreen computer monitor. On a non-crit point of view, I like that we finally get to see a ship belonging to a smaller race of beings, and therefore, the ship itself is much smaller... it really helps to give a scale to the various races in the ST universe, that human-sized aliens are not the only ones out there.
I don't think that the effects were as bad as being made out, but they're definitely not to par with a number of other episodes that have been remastered. I have to wonder if reusing the shots from other episodes (as the original version did) might not have worked better...
"Is There In Truth No Beauty" and "Elaan Of Troyius" are scheduled to air this afternoon on a local station here. Does that help in any way?