So, I made this.

[blssdwlf]

The animation looks wonderful @Professor Moriarty Given the variability of the different phaser firings thru the series I think your versions are fine. I think the nacelle caps need a little more orange (like your reference image) so maybe bring back more saturation?

I do have a question - are you mixing in the photon torpedo sound with the phaser firing sound?

 

[David cgc]

Oh yes, absolutely. The phaser switch firing effect was only added at the beginning of these videos for fun.

I like it, but then I'm also a big fan of the KT movies having the ships make the viewscreen chirp on the outside, too. Makes the ship feel more alive than just a plain engine rumble (though your gradually increasing engine rumble in this video really sells the scale of the ship coming close and looming over you).

 

[Professor Moriarty]

I think the nacelle caps need a little more orange (like your reference image) so maybe bring back more saturation?

I selected that image because it's the one that made me fall in love with the only woman (besides my mamma) I've ever loved, but I could have picked any number of identical copies of this particular VFX shot from other screencaps on trekcore.com where the Enterprise nacelles were brighter, darker, oranger, AAHHHHHHHH! At some point I have to say DONE and move on... I can't work on this fucking model another twenty years!

I do have a question - are you mixing in the photon torpedo sound with the phaser firing sound?

Yep! And if you go back and watch "The Doomsday Machine" you'll see hear the same mixing of the effects when the Enterprise fires on the planet killer under Decker's maniacal command. I think the effects producers were trying to convey what it would sound like if the ship's mighty phasers struck and bounced off a surface made of pure neutronium, but I like the enhanced effect just on its own merits. The kid stays in the picture!

One final update to share:

That's hot.

This is a closeup of the aforementioned phaser turrets. Up until now on my model, the phaser turrets have been featureless mirrored surfaces (you can still see this in the image above on the starboard side phaser bank, which hasn’t been retrofitted yet). The design of the turrets is based on the ground artillery laser cannon used in "The Cage". Each weapon is attached to an articulating armature that allows independent targeting of the beams. (A feature not seen in TOS, but who’s to say it wasn’t a capability? )

When they’re not in use, the weapons retract and are hidden behind sliding doors in the “ring” surrounding the lower sensor platform. (And that’s another reason the turrets are on armatures… it takes a bit of maneuvering to get these things to slide down past that @#$! convex area on the underside of the ring!) The sliding doors will be nearly flush with the hull when closed, which in my “head canon” solves a problem for me: The TOS Enterprise was not a ship of war; she didn’t brandish her weapons emplacements for all to see. So how did the ship fire her phasers (and for that matter, her photon torpedoes and her science probes) if there were no visible holes in the hull? Easy: the weapons ports are hidden behind sliding panels. We just couldn’t quite make them out in the blurry images transmitted backwards in time to our Motorola color TVs.

Thanks for the feedback everyone! I'll be going dark again for a few weeks--upcoming family obligations plus a need to get cracking and go heads-down on this project for a while. (Quick personal update: me and Mr. Professor Moriarty got our first of two Moderna shots on Monday. Kicked our asses on Tuesday, felt fine on Wednesday. And you better believe I'm thankful for the real-world science that made this possible!)

Back with more visual goodies when I got 'em, or April Fools' Day, whichever comes first!

 

[David cgc]

I selected that image because it's the one that made me fall in love with the only woman (besides my mamma) I've ever loved, but I could have picked any number of identical copies of this particular VFX shot from other screencaps on trekcore.com where the Enterprise nacelles were brighter, darker, oranger, AAHHHHHHHH! At some point I have to say DONE and move on... I can't work on this fucking model another twenty years!

Anybody got that mosaic image somebody made when TOS-R came out of every single shot of the original Enterprise where the nacelle cap was visible, and it never looked the same twice?

 

[Professor Moriarty]

Those guys were working under a lot of time pressure so don't be too harsh. (Place the blame on CBS Digital--they didn't have to rush those remastered episodes out at that ridiculous pace.) At least they admitted the first version was an outright mess and fixed it after a few episodes.

For my money, I still think the best version of the TOS warp nacelle effect that I've seen is the gorgeous Defiant from part two of "In a Mirror, Darkly", built by the inestimable Koji Kuramura. A close second is our own @Donny Versiga's Enterprise:

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Amended to add: After I posted this, I started to doubt my recollection, so I fired up Netflix and rewatched the Defiant scenes in IaMD. I now have to take back what I said; Donny’s Enterprise edges out the Koji Defiant as far screen-accurate replication of the warp effect is concerned. It’s just about perfect.

That effect is infamously difficult to nail down. Between the stroboscopic effects caused by the camera shutter, the spinning blades, the lights themselves blinking on and off... yeesh. I elected to replicate what the effect looks like on the model sitting forty miles away in downtown DC, with a little extra texturing of the otherwise featureless domes thrown in.

 

[blssdwlf]

I selected that image because it's the one that made me fall in love with the only woman (besides my mamma) I've ever loved, but I could have picked any number of identical copies of this particular VFX shot from other screencaps on trekcore.com where the Enterprise nacelles were brighter, darker, oranger, AAHHHHHHHH! At some point I have to say DONE and move on... I can't work on this fucking model another twenty years!

That I understand.

Yep! And if you go back and watch "The Doomsday Machine" you'll see hear the same mixing of the effects when the Enterprise fires on the planet killer under Decker's maniacal command. I think the effects producers were trying to convey what it would sound like if the ship's mighty phasers struck and bounced off a surface made of pure neutronium, but I like the enhanced effect just on its own merits. The kid stays in the picture!

I just watched parts of the "The Doomsday Machine" and I hear the torpedo sound effect now All these years I hadn't noticed it, LOL. It's loudest on Enterprise's initial salvo and kinda muted when Constellation fires. On it's own it does kinda sound like a phaser sound report. I can hear why they re-used it as the phaser bounce sound when hitting the Doomsday Machine.

When they’re not in use, the weapons retract and are hidden behind sliding doors in the “ring” surrounding the lower sensor platform. (And that’s another reason the turrets are on armatures… it takes a bit of maneuvering to get these things to slide down past that @#$! convex area on the underside of the ring!) The sliding doors will be nearly flush with the hull when closed, which in my “head canon” solves a problem for me: The TOS Enterprise was not a ship of war; she didn’t brandish her weapons emplacements for all to see. So how did the ship fire her phasers (and for that matter, her photon torpedoes and her science probes) if there were no visible holes in the hull? Easy: the weapons ports are hidden behind sliding panels. We just couldn’t quite make them out in the blurry images transmitted backwards in time to our Motorola color TVs.

It looks awesome and yeah, I was going to ask how you got those turrets past that convex area so I'm glad you figured it out

 

[Professor Moriarty]

It’s a tighter fit than my pants.

 

[blssdwlf]

It’s a tighter fit than my pants.

 

[Professor Moriarty]

Eek. Uh, to clarify, the WAISTLINE of my pants.

 

[Tallguy]

One final update to share:

We just couldn’t quite make them out in the blurry images transmitted backwards in time to our Motorola color TVs.

For years now I've always said I was going to make a super detailed model, then render it like it was "1966 TV". If it looked the same I could say "It always looked like that!"

A close second is our own @Donny Versiga's Enterprise:

Amended to add: After I posted this, I started to doubt my recollection, so I fired up Netflix and rewatched the Defiant scenes in IaMD. I now have to take back what I said; Donny’s Enterprise edges out the Koji Defiant as far screen-accurate replication of the warp effect is concerned. It’s just about perfect.

That effect is infamously difficult to nail down. Between the stroboscopic effects caused by the camera shutter, the spinning blades, the lights themselves blinking on and off... yeesh. I elected to replicate what the effect looks like on the model sitting forty miles away in downtown DC, with a little extra texturing of the otherwise featureless domes thrown in.

Donny's is amazing. And yeah, I think a lot of it comes down to "What did it look like on film?" I think the blur of the spinning vanes is the deal breaker for me. Most of the time you see them recreated they look too sharp.

Your phasers look terrific, BTW.

 

[Santaman]

Great job.

 

[publiusr]

The Arena phasers were the most unusual in TOS...area effect...

 

[Professor Moriarty]

Yeah OK, it hasn't been a month but... thoughts?

 

[blssdwlf]

Looks like a great start . I am seeing both forward phasers and torpedo launchers, correct? It's pretty subtle with the doors closed.

 

[Professor Moriarty]

Yes. The phasers turrets were just too small to be believable when they were confined to the ring surrounding the lower sensor dome. Because of that concave cross-section of the ring, the cannons were limited to a length of only about 36". (I kept thinking Sulu might as well have stuck his arm out a porthole to fire a hand phaser, the things were so puny.) By dropping them vertically out of a hidden panel at approximately the same spot where we saw the phasers being fired in TOS, I was able to not only more than double the size of the cannon to a more respectable 84", I was also able to simplify the deployment (which makes much more sense from a military standpoint; you'd want your primary weapons to be easily deployed in a straight down path from the hatch vs. having to do a bizarre S-shaped path when scooting past the lower sensor dome obstructions). The thing is, now that we can clearly see the cannon, we can also see how goofy the original design seen in "The Cage" was. So, I'll take another stab at how the guns look. Maybe something more reminiscent of the phaser rifle.

The photon torpedo tubes are low-poly placeholders for now, but as you can see there's not really a lot that you can see. In order to place the photon torpedo tubes approximately where we saw them being fired in TOS, the torpedo doors have to be located so far down the curvature of the primary hull saucer that the open doors are more like holes in the floor, necessitating that the tubes themselves be severely recessed (otherwise the doors would scrape against them). Perhaps as part of the arming sequence the doors would slide open and the tubes would then extend forward? Hmm...

(Yes, we definitely did not see things like phaser guns and photon torpedo tubes sticking out of the Enterprise on the show, but I don't think what I'm proposing violates the overall design aesthetic Matt Jefferies envisioned. In fact, I think this keeps the spirit of his genius design intact; the doors are flush with the hull (and nearly invisible) when closed, and the machinery can be maintained and repaired entirely within the safety of the ship's hull.)

 

[Viper]

View attachment 21323

Yeah OK, it hasn't been a month but... thoughts?

That's an awesome idea. Do you mind if I steal it for mine?

 

[aridas sofia]

When I designed a post-Cage, pre-TOS perimeter action ship, I confronted a similar issue over how ship-mounted lasers/phased lasers might look. I combined three ideas-the ground-based laser artillery piece from The Cage, the hand laser, and the phaser schematic from...what was it? “Trouble With Tribbles” or “Space Seed”? On Kiaga they were to be mounted like a turret a’la Franz Joseph, but you could easily adapt the idea (or something similar) to create a drop down cannon like you are doing. In fact, what you have is very much what I had in mind for how a TOS installation of something evolved from this might look.

 

[David cgc]

View attachment 21323

Yeah OK, it hasn't been a month but... thoughts?

What's going on with the windows on the saucer edge near the centerline of the image, with the light-colored rectangles around them? Is something weird happening with reflections on your panel texture, or is there some kind of artifact turning your light-bloom square, or maybe some kind of polygon error in your mesh?

 

[137th Gebirg]

When I designed a post-Cage, pre-TOS perimeter action ship, I confronted a similar issue over how ship-mounted lasers/phased lasers might look. I combined three ideas-the ground-based laser artillery piece from The Cage, the hand laser, and the phaser schematic from...what was it? “Trouble With Tribbles” or “Space Seed”? On Kiaga they were to be mounted like a turret a’la Franz Joseph, but you could easily adapt the idea (or something similar) to create a drop down cannon like you are doing. In fact, what you have is very much what I had in mind for how a TOS installation of something evolved from this might look.

It's TWT.

Here's the enhanced view:


Space Seed had something completely different that I don't recognize. Not sure if anyone ever did a re-creation of it or not:

 

[Mytran]

I like the drop-down phaser idea, covers a lot of sins!
The widely space torpedo launchers look a little unusual at first glance but thinking about it - did the photorps ever get a consistent place where they left the ship?