Nice guess our Chief Graphic Artist/Grandeur Project Manager/XO liked the band YES and since that number was on one of their albums we went with that. The number has been there since the beginning. When all of this started we were part of a large ST fan organization the IFT. In real time it stood for International Federation of Trekkers. The fictional side if you will stood for Intergalatic Federation Taskforce. In that scenerio IFT ships were in a off sense sactioned by Starfleet but not necessarily commissioned by Starfleet sort of a separate branch of Starfleet thus the NFC, Non-Fleet Commissioned. We have come along way since then, but many things stuck with us.
It was Yes' most commercial [and thus biggest-selling] album... I have it on vinyl and CD and saw the tour lol. The title '90125' is the record company's catalog number for it as they apparently couldn't think of one.
No that one was, appropriately enough, called Drama ... Rabin produced 90125 but had left the band after the one album.
I am, indeed, still working on this. The 3D model has not progressed much since the last set of WIP images but I've done quite a bit on some related side projects that I'm hoping I can reveal some time fairly soon. Stay tuned.
Okay, this probably isn't the update you were all expecting but I have a feeling it will generate some interest regardless. A while back, Darren Sexton, a.k.a. the citizen, asked me to do up some illustrations of some Avalon class sister ships for various Grandeur related literary projects he has going. These were to be variants of the Grandeur design with standard Starfleet commissions and various individual backstories. The first of these was the U.S.S. Merlin, an Avalon class upgrade that was stolen out of drydock three days before its refit was completed and presumed lost. Years later it was discovered that Section 31 absconded with the Merlin and rechristened it the U.S.S. LaFay, NCC-90666. They heavily modified it with advanced technology, some of unknown alien origin, such as signal dampening fields, Borg-like cutting beams, a cloaking device, and a crew consisting almost entirely of holograms. This is the first of three Avalon variants that I'll be posting over the next few days, and I should be back to some Grandeur updates around the first of the month.
There's a lot of shape and color language here intended to convey an "evil" overtone, much like the red-tinged running lights on Reliant in Wrath of Khan. One of the things you'll see more of in the next couple images I post is a much bolder than usual color scheme that serves a similar function to the different uniform colors worn by the crew as a visual representation of which division or mission profile each ship belongs to. It came about somewhat by accident as Darren and I were working through the design variants and Darren ran with it in some pretty cool ways.