Star Ship Polaris

[Admiral Buzzkill]

I like the new windows a lot, both the placement and the indentation. The shape, too.

[Captain Robert April]

Just for giggles and grins, howzabout another side-by-side with the Enterprise?

[Maurice]

junxon wrote:

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would the word 'polaris' near the front/top area make more sense if it was rotated 90 degrees clockwise?

Because it would otherwise be upside-down if the thing ever landed on it's tail, as proposed?

[Vektor]

Good point.

[sojourner]

I don't follow? If you take the current text you're reading and turn it clock-wise 90degrees, then when you turn your monitor 90degrees counter clock-wise (to simulate the ship landing on it's tail), the text will be horizontal again. Now, the nose art on Vektor's latest posting is at an angle, but not enough to result in it being upside down???

[junxon]

clockwise.

so it'd be roughly the same way as the decks. subtle emphasis and all that.

seemed to make more sense to me.

could be wrong.

[Admiral Buzzkill]

I like the current orientation and layout of the ship's name.

[Herkimer Jitty]

Yeah, the current orientation probably works best for the majority of the VFX shots. It'd really only be sideways on the ground, where it doesn't serve much of a practical purpose anyways. If you can't find your ship because of a sideways name, you don't deserve to be in space.

[Vektor]

I think the point junxon was getting at, rightly so, is that the name will appear partially upside down when the ship is landed. Right now the text runs at an angle of around 30 degrees off the fuselage centerline, so the solution would be to rotate it clockwise by double that. Basically mirror the angle so it slopes downward from left to right and appears at least partially right-side-up whether it's cruising through space or standing on its tail. Of course, the name on the opposite side would need to slope upward from left to right for the same reasons.

I'll make the change on the next iteration so everyone can see what it looks like.

[junxon]

yeah! thats probably what i meant.

'rotate it a bit' is my usual advice for any given situation.

[USS Jack Riley]

I know Vektor is going to kill me on this one, but why wouldn't a ship that changes its direction as Polaris does have markings that do the same? Maybe it isn't really "paint" in the way we think of it. Just some food for thought. YMMV.

[Captain Robert April]

Howzabout another "Polaris" along the bottom edge?

[Vektor]

Realistically, the whole concept of "right-side-up" is meaningless in outer space. A long-established sci-fi convention is to relate it to the orientation of a vessel's internal gravity, if it has gravity, in order to satisfy the expectations of an audience who's terrestrially evolved brains want to put things in a proper and consistent orientation, even when there is no objectively defined up or down.

But what do you do with a ship like Polaris whose internal gravity is parallel to the direction of travel rather than perpendicular? For the crew of Polaris, up and down are effectively the same thing as front and back. That means what would normally be considered top and bottom as well as left and right are purely arbitrary notions from the perspective of the people on board. It's been decided that "right-side-up" for Polaris is the way I've been showing it in all these renderings and sketches, but that really isn't meaningful in any way other than how an external observer, i.e. the camera, chooses to view it.

Personally, I wouldn't mind if the entire concept of right-side-up in space was left at least somewhat ambiguous in this production. I like it when the camera is not locked-off in the horizontal plane or otherwise forced to pretend that up-and-down is a universal constant. I'm not talking about flipping and rolling the camera all over the place, I'm talking about something as simple as a slow roll in an otherwise fairly static shot, just enough to suggest the camera is really out there in three-dimensional space and the action is not all confined to two-dimensions.

As far as the markings on the ship are concerned, I think my main concern would be that they shouldn't appear obviously upside-down in any of the shots where the camera lingers long enough to get a clear look at them. That brings us back to the default orientation shown in all these renderings and illustrations. For everything we're likely to do in this production, the name and registry as shown would probably work fine, though I do think it would be helpful to put the opposite slope on the name just because I know that, from the perspective of a person standing on a planet's surface looking up at the ship while landed, the name as currently shown would appear to be rotated past vertical and partially upside-down. That sort of thing just kind of bugs me.

Another alternative I still haven't ruled out--though Dennis might have--is to eliminate the sloped text altogether and go back to having it aligned with the fuselage, probably using block letters instead of script and probably just above the orange stripe instead of superimposed on it.

However it's done, all of that will probably be textured, not modeled, so it's not something that really has to be locked-down at this stage.

[Admiral Buzzkill]

I like the very WW II "nose-art" look of the name as it is now. That it's oriented on the fuselage pretty much as it would be on a propeller-driven bomber of the era enhances that resemblance.

Hi all,
very Interesting!
just keep posting and sharing guys...