Unseen TOS....
- Thread starter Warped9
- Start date
Things need not always be linear. And the sail or conning tower on a submarine is not necessarily the bridge or command control centre if I understand correctly.
Design can also be influenced by societal trends and fashions. Automobiles evolved from wagons and retained some semblance of wagons early on until they became their own thing in the late ‘30s to early ‘40s. Cars adopted tailfins as a styling cue tying in to the blossoming jet age of the late ‘40s to early ‘50s, but quickly vanished in the early ‘60s, although vestigial tailfins would hang on (with Cadillac) into the ‘70s and ‘80s. But in their heyday tailfins were pure fad and certainly served no functional purpose.
Oddly today’s popularity with SUVs and crossovers does harken back to the boxy shapes of automobiles that evolved from wagons.
The taller bridge dome on the Enterprise is likely a remnant of when the ship was originally scaled to be smaller, about 540ft. vs. the now familiar 947ft. Later when the show went to series they took the opportunity to “modernize” the design to make it look sleeker and and more detailed: smaller bridge dome, smaller navigational deflector, removing the nacelle dome spikes and adding more detail to the hangar bay doors as well as nacelle inboards and aft ends.
Nonetheless we assume the earlier version of the ship, as it appears in “The Cage,” clues us in to how older ships should look like. But it doesn’t automatically follow that what the Enterprise looks like must dictate what all ships of Earth origin should look like.
My viewpoint is that overall design and it’s overall integrity, rather than specific details alone, tell a more convincing story. And if you have followed through this thread, or project of mine, you can clearly see my reasoning in how these ships are evolving in TOS’ universe. And they are not evolving in terms of considering the entire Trek franchise—they are evolving in terms of the dictates of each TOS episode as they’re produced. What might they have shown us if given the chance?
And certainly with each newly revealed design the TOS creators would have incrementally more historical context to influence forthcoming designs in yet to be produced episodes. Of course, this also means that some of the designs TOS did use in later episodes might never have happened. A specific example would be the reuse of the Botany Bay to depict the automated freighter Woden in “The Ultimate Computer.” If a miniature like I’ve conjectured here for the Antares or Astral Queen had already existed it would have served much better as the Woden.
Design can also be influenced by societal trends and fashions. Automobiles evolved from wagons and retained some semblance of wagons early on until they became their own thing in the late ‘30s to early ‘40s. Cars adopted tailfins as a styling cue tying in to the blossoming jet age of the late ‘40s to early ‘50s, but quickly vanished in the early ‘60s, although vestigial tailfins would hang on (with Cadillac) into the ‘70s and ‘80s. But in their heyday tailfins were pure fad and certainly served no functional purpose.
Oddly today’s popularity with SUVs and crossovers does harken back to the boxy shapes of automobiles that evolved from wagons.
The taller bridge dome on the Enterprise is likely a remnant of when the ship was originally scaled to be smaller, about 540ft. vs. the now familiar 947ft. Later when the show went to series they took the opportunity to “modernize” the design to make it look sleeker and and more detailed: smaller bridge dome, smaller navigational deflector, removing the nacelle dome spikes and adding more detail to the hangar bay doors as well as nacelle inboards and aft ends.
Nonetheless we assume the earlier version of the ship, as it appears in “The Cage,” clues us in to how older ships should look like. But it doesn’t automatically follow that what the Enterprise looks like must dictate what all ships of Earth origin should look like.
My viewpoint is that overall design and it’s overall integrity, rather than specific details alone, tell a more convincing story. And if you have followed through this thread, or project of mine, you can clearly see my reasoning in how these ships are evolving in TOS’ universe. And they are not evolving in terms of considering the entire Trek franchise—they are evolving in terms of the dictates of each TOS episode as they’re produced. What might they have shown us if given the chance?
And certainly with each newly revealed design the TOS creators would have incrementally more historical context to influence forthcoming designs in yet to be produced episodes. Of course, this also means that some of the designs TOS did use in later episodes might never have happened. A specific example would be the reuse of the Botany Bay to depict the automated freighter Woden in “The Ultimate Computer.” If a miniature like I’ve conjectured here for the Antares or Astral Queen had already existed it would have served much better as the Woden.
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While I am adding detail to my Challenger design to flesh it out I’ve been thinking about other unseen elements of TOS that I haven’t really talked about for this project.
I’m referring to depictions of the Enterprise and other familiar ships: shuttlecraft, Romulan BoP and the Klingon D7 battle cruiser. They had the miniatures, but were limited by time and related cost of utilizing those models in more ways than what we saw.
So this project could explore that.
In a sense this is similar to my Never seen TOS scenes project I had many years ago. It was a way of exploring things that were happening in universe, but offscreen. Or exploring things TOS couldn’t afford to show us. It was a form of Star Trek enhanced years before CBS undertook remaking TOS’ fx with cgi. The distinction is that I sought to retain TOS’ originally aesthetic while TOS-R added a modern veneer to TOS fx.
At any rate I would like to explore that idea again, but in a more focused way, exploring what sort of things TOS might have been able to do with its miniatures given a bit more time. We catch a glimpse of this in the Roddenberry Vault DVDs where you can see unused footage of the Enterprise and shuttlecraft.
For this I already have a detailed 3D model of the shuttlecraft Galileo, but I don’t yet have models of the Enterprise or Romulan and Klingon ships, so those would have to be built. But then I can use those to depict scenes that might or could have been filmed given the time with the resources at hand.
One example regarding the shuttlecraft would be to look at what was done with the Jupiter 2 on Lost In Space and the Flying Sub on Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea, both examples of using what was known as the Lydecker practice of depicting miniatures in motion.
Another example but with the Enterprise is essentially the reverse of what was seen at the end of “All Our Yesterdays.” In that episode we saw the ship escaping the Sarpeidon nova. We could have seen something similar in “Tomorrow Is Yesterday” only we would see the ship flying toward the Sun and then away from it.
*Sigh*—building more Star Trek models, such a chore…
I’m referring to depictions of the Enterprise and other familiar ships: shuttlecraft, Romulan BoP and the Klingon D7 battle cruiser. They had the miniatures, but were limited by time and related cost of utilizing those models in more ways than what we saw.
So this project could explore that.
In a sense this is similar to my Never seen TOS scenes project I had many years ago. It was a way of exploring things that were happening in universe, but offscreen. Or exploring things TOS couldn’t afford to show us. It was a form of Star Trek enhanced years before CBS undertook remaking TOS’ fx with cgi. The distinction is that I sought to retain TOS’ originally aesthetic while TOS-R added a modern veneer to TOS fx.
At any rate I would like to explore that idea again, but in a more focused way, exploring what sort of things TOS might have been able to do with its miniatures given a bit more time. We catch a glimpse of this in the Roddenberry Vault DVDs where you can see unused footage of the Enterprise and shuttlecraft.
For this I already have a detailed 3D model of the shuttlecraft Galileo, but I don’t yet have models of the Enterprise or Romulan and Klingon ships, so those would have to be built. But then I can use those to depict scenes that might or could have been filmed given the time with the resources at hand.
One example regarding the shuttlecraft would be to look at what was done with the Jupiter 2 on Lost In Space and the Flying Sub on Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea, both examples of using what was known as the Lydecker practice of depicting miniatures in motion.
Another example but with the Enterprise is essentially the reverse of what was seen at the end of “All Our Yesterdays.” In that episode we saw the ship escaping the Sarpeidon nova. We could have seen something similar in “Tomorrow Is Yesterday” only we would see the ship flying toward the Sun and then away from it.
*Sigh*—building more Star Trek models, such a chore…
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But a worthy one!
I can’t do animation with my 3D models. But what could be cool is partnering up with some who does have excellent modelling skills to recreate the miniatures as they appeared in TOS and then animate the new fx scenes so that they would look like found original footage.
And I have one or two candidates in mind, if they would be interested…
Still in progress.
The ship that won the Romulan War?
While my initial concept is still there I had to rethink proportions and shapes to get a less awkward form. I think this works and I'll finalize it with approriate detail. It's challenging to make something look more "primitive" without adding all kinds of greebles.
Submarines don’t have viewscreens…I can see this war being fought with radar blobs and a lucky glimpse from a window, camera, etc.
The depiction of space combat in Star Trek always impressed me as something different than how it’s usually done now since Star Wars in 1977. In TOS the impression was ships fought each other at extended ranges and were visible only by instrumentation and imaging sensors. Fast moving objects at extreme distances were visible only as (computer enhanced) blips of light. TOS did this to keep fx costs down, but it worked in seeming more realistic. In TOS ships usually didn’t appear to dogfight. Rarely did you see two or multiple ships in the same frame and when you did they weren’t engaged in combat. “The Doomsday Machine” is an exception and it wasn’t really a dogfight.
Star Wars changed all that. Spacecraft were shown to fight like planet bound aircraft within an atmosphere. It was wholly unrealistic yet the public ate it up and it’s been largely that way ever since even in Trek. They first did it in TWOK and haven’t looked back. But they took the wrong lesson from TWOK where two heavily damaged ships were wallowing about like drunken brawling sailors. Nonetheless the space fights in Trek are now pretty much just like in Star Wars.
But when it comes to TOS I defer back to how I first envisioned it long before Star Wars came along, when ships in Trek fought at extended ranges and even at warp speeds and rarely were visible as more than a distant blip of light on instruments or on screens.
Star Wars changed all that. Spacecraft were shown to fight like planet bound aircraft within an atmosphere. It was wholly unrealistic yet the public ate it up and it’s been largely that way ever since even in Trek. They first did it in TWOK and haven’t looked back. But they took the wrong lesson from TWOK where two heavily damaged ships were wallowing about like drunken brawling sailors. Nonetheless the space fights in Trek are now pretty much just like in Star Wars.
But when it comes to TOS I defer back to how I first envisioned it long before Star Wars came along, when ships in Trek fought at extended ranges and even at warp speeds and rarely were visible as more than a distant blip of light on instruments or on screens.
Truth
As an aside, I really like this as a transitional ship from Daedalus to Connie, and fan stormed something similar.
That is pretty damned good! I got caught up reading all of Part 1 anf jumped right to Part 2. And it was written near twenty-five years ago.
That really caught the feel of what the Earth/Romulan war could have been like.
I admit every time I saw Nelson’s name in my mind I saw and heard Richard Basehart saying the words. Rather cool actually.
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Tell me there is more.
No longer true in the age of the photonics mast.
Thank you for those links. I liked the first one and look forward to reading the second tomorrow.
I’m enjoying these Romulan War stories. Reminds me of a couple of Pocket Books’ Trek novels from back in the 80s or early ‘90s like John M. Ford’s The Final Reflection or Diane Carey’s Final Frontier.
I kept hoping we’d learn what happened to Nelson and the Grant, but leaving it a mystery also works.
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While I could quibble with details (I lean more toward the Federation and Starfleet being established quite sometime after the Romulan War) the overall feel and sensibility are much as I envision that era. I also love that it's not loaded with obvious callouts to other Trek productions. I also love that there isn't one whiff of the Klingons suggesting that they're a problem yet to be faced until decades later.
If you didn't know it was Trek related you could read it as straight space opera SF.
My head canon has always placed the Romulan war after the Federation. It has been that way since TOS. It's a minor issue and I don't quibble that everyone has to see it my way. The film canon does not. "Balance of Terror" is not real informative.
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