Oh good, my memory didn't fail me. Sheet 3: Defense: Primary force field, Deflector shields, Cloaking device. She's also called a Starship II. (I've actually become rather anti-Constitution class in my dotage.) Has anyone ever heard the story of how / why that got changed? Amazing work, Donny. I must have been at the right age where I was familiar enough with the old stuff but still flexible enough to think "Well, this is how it was SUPPOSED to look!" Young minds, fresh ideas.
As opposed to FTL capabilities, humanoid aliens, and hyper intelligent machine beings that don't consider wiping away a smudge to reveal the whole name on a plaque? Sorry, just "joshin'" with you.
Harlan Ellison had a field day with that when he "reviewed" (read: "shredded") the movie in StarLog some 40 years ago.
Pretty sure the 41x reduction in the cloud diameter was Daren Dochterman's suggestion. But, as I've said before, don't think an 82 AU cloud is any more implausible than a 2 AU one for the following reasons: In deleted dialog (but in the SLV) Spock says V'ger has a magnetic field greater than Earth's Sun... ...and our Sun's heliopause is ~246 AU's in diameter, basically 3x V'ger's "cloud" The cloud's "12th power energy field" is a trillion whatever they are using to measure In his novelization GR says the "cloud" glows because the powerfield is annihilating hydrogen atoms as it plows through space at warp 7...likely this idea came from Jesco von Puttkamer The "ridiculous" thing is that no one in the film related just what an AU is, so you can bet that most of the audience went "82 somethings" and weren't impressed. Either way, saying some thing is "2 unknownunits" is automatically less impressive than "82 unknownunits".
I bet there's a memo or three from Puttkamer that addressed that very issue, and they never got around to fixing it in the script or adding a line in ADR.
No one bothered to explain what "meters" were, either. Or light-years or parsecs in the original series. Sometimes, giving your audience credit is a good thing.
Is a parsec more commonly known than an AU? I know an AU is the distance from Earth to the sun. All I know about a Parsec is it's a unit of distance or something like distance, in space. Star Wars used Parsec like it was a unit of time, and a lot of people didn't notice.
...Donny! How's the klingon bridge coming? Are you working from home pretty successfully in the middle of all of this?
Thanks for asking! I live and work in the Bay Area, and we've been on Shelter-In-Place since Monday, so I have been taking some time to readjust. We at Cryptic Studios are now all working from home, still chugging along on STO and the rest of our games. Getting off from "work" so I can then have fun with my personal projects (like the K't'inga bridge) means moving from one desk...to the same desk. I'm finding it hard to sit in the same damn chair at the same damn desk all damn day long. So I take about a 3 hour break after "work" to exercise and then go for a walk outside, cook a meal, watch TV, relax, etc, so I don't really get around to working on my projects till about 9. That only leaves me a couple hours before I have to get ready for bed to do it all again. However, tonight I did get some work on the K't'inga bridge done, blocking out the geometry for the front end of the bridge. It's still difficult, and a lot of trial and error, because what schematics I DO have are pretty low res, without legible measurement call-outs. And, as always, there's some differences between what's on the schematics and what appears on screen. So, rest assured, I am working on it when I have the motivation to, but it will be a few more days before I have something new to show. The weekend is coming up, and due to forced isolation, I expect to get a good bit of work done on the bridge. I'm staying very positive about the isolation that Coronavirus is requiring, despite my concern and fears of the virus itself. I realize having to adapt and sacrifice is for the good of humanity. I also am aware that I am healthy and have no dependents, so I am very fortunate to be in a spot for this transition to be relatively painless, although the social isolation is and will take its toll. But I'm drawing from my strength in the face of this thing, rather than letting myself get pulled down into a pit of dispair. For now, anyway. We will get through this. How's everyone else doing with everything?
Explaining things to the audience will bog the story down if the detail isn't important to the plot. Knowing the definition of an AU wasn't important ... Gautreaux's Commander Branch sufficiently expressed that 82 AUs was big. After that, finding out that an astronomical unit is a real thing becomes something of an Easter egg for those who don't know it, and deftly lends verisimilitude to the world of Star Trek for those who do.
I'm actually somewhere up to your northeast in the trivalley The lock down is up in Alameda county too, though part of the reason I'm being super cautious about everything is that with my wife due in a couple of months, I don't want to catch this and be denied from seeing my first kid being born. Hospitals, so we read, only allow one support person to be in the room now. It was the case already that I was the only one allowed in, but it's even more imperative now that I avoid getting sick. Anyone with any sort of symptoms will be denied entry into the room. I hear you on being at the same desk, since I myself work from home. I wish I could offer tips on maintaining that endurance, but honestly I'm missing the chance to go somewhere else for a while, I think. Besides, my workflow is different from yours because I like hopping between pleasure and work while I'm at my desk- even if it makes timekeeping interesting. Donny part of the reason I enjoy your work so much is even in the areas where you need to rely on conjecture, I appreciate your attention to detail and consistency. Whatever the canonicity of what you come up with, it will be spectacular, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it comes out! Forgive me for being blunt, shouldn't this argument be better discussed in the appropriate forum? I know we're all guilty of off-topic non-sequitur threads, but frankly this is not interesting here. This is a thread for looking at and discussing amazing Klingon interior design and other Klingon topics.
Considering that V'Ger was the "villain" of TMP and the thing that set the story in motion, I'd say that establishing its size was pretty important. And in the finished film, we only get a vague idea of its size, best. We can figure out the scale of the Enterprise pretty well, as we see Kirk and Scotty enter the shuttle, and then we see the shuttle's size relative to the Enterprise. And we know that the Enterprise is dwarfed by V'Ger, but once the ship gets inside V'Ger, we don't really have anything familiar to give us any scale. We know that it's big enough for the Enterprise to fit inside it, and that's about it, and that covers a LOT of territory. And if you can establish what an AU is for audience members unfamiliar with the term in a single line of dialogue ("That can't be! That's as big as the distance between the Earth and the Sun!"), then why not do it? Conversely, if V'Ger's size is not important to the story, then why not cut the line about it being 82/2/Whatever AUs in size? As it stands, it's a line that's utterly meaningless to anyone but a few people who have a greater-than-average knowledge of astronomy, and it passes by so quickly that not even they might have noticed it. If you look at some of Donny's other threads, we traditionally go off on all sorts of tangents in between the times he posts new updates. And, to the best of my memory, he's always been cool with it. I'm sorry that you personally don't find this one interesting, but others here do. I'll knock it off if a mod or Donny says that they'd prefer we don't discuss it in this thread, though.