I would guess that he intercepted the messages Servalan sent to the Liberator claiming to be from Blake. After all, he had an interest in the Liberator and was probably keeping an eye on them.
Blake's 7 on Blu-ray!
- Thread starter Turbo
- Start date
I would guess that he intercepted the messages Servalan sent to the Liberator claiming to be from Blake. After all, he had an interest in the Liberator and was probably keeping an eye on them.
Well he'd probably get Vila that way
That is a good question as well, also how does he know that's Terminal? Then again Zen knew it was Terminal I suppose.
One could hypothesise Dorian had been looking for Liberator for a long time and had detected a method of tracking it's engine?? I mean I'm really hypothesising here!
Well Zen's got a big memory so he'd know. As for Dorian - he'd possibly spent a lot of time in that area of space and it might not have been too far (comparatively) from Xenon as it didn't take them that long to arrive at the base unless he could fake being out cold for many many hours
The other thing is that he might of noticed federation activity in the area and though it might bring the the Liberator and crew.
Dorian must have been following the crew of the Liberator for some time - as far as he knew, there were five people onboard and one was a telepath. Which is why he had Soolin set out six cups - one for Dorian and five for Avon and the others. He wasn't aware that Cally had perished on Terminal.
Last edited:
My (very) rough guess, based on comparing the sizes of the airlocks in model and live action footage, put Liberator at a bit under 900m, and Scorpio at about 60m. But that is very rough, and assumes the model makers and live action people talked to each other (which they probably didn't).
At another guess, the corridors could be pressurised, but routinely weren't.
Last edited:
In researching for my Patreon reviews, I found this site of references for the Scorpio (apologies if someone has linked to this already and I overlooked it):
smallspaceships.blogspot.com
The first image is what I assume is a conjectural cutaway, and it shows the ship's total length as 13-14 times the length of the "Flight Deck Area." There's also a schematic that gives its length as 337 feet (102.7 m), which would make the flight deck about 25 feet long, which sounds pretty close. Still, I would've thought the ship was rather smaller than that.
One of the two best references for the ship's size would be "Stardrive," where we see Tarrant and Avon mending the hole in the drive chamber hull, and then cut to a wide shot of the repair taking hold. That would suggest that the hull segment corresponding to their location is about one story high. That's also consistent with the other best reference, the size of the airlock seen in "Gold." To me, that suggests a scale about 3/4 or so what the schematic shows, which would make the ship about 75-80 meters, maybe. Which is still bigger than I would've guessed, a bit over twice the size of the Millennium Falcon.
Ultimate Scorpio Reference
This is everything I can find for the Scorpio model from Blakes 7. If I find more (or if anyone sends me more) I'll update this post. More r...
smallspaceships.blogspot.com
The first image is what I assume is a conjectural cutaway, and it shows the ship's total length as 13-14 times the length of the "Flight Deck Area." There's also a schematic that gives its length as 337 feet (102.7 m), which would make the flight deck about 25 feet long, which sounds pretty close. Still, I would've thought the ship was rather smaller than that.
One of the two best references for the ship's size would be "Stardrive," where we see Tarrant and Avon mending the hole in the drive chamber hull, and then cut to a wide shot of the repair taking hold. That would suggest that the hull segment corresponding to their location is about one story high. That's also consistent with the other best reference, the size of the airlock seen in "Gold." To me, that suggests a scale about 3/4 or so what the schematic shows, which would make the ship about 75-80 meters, maybe. Which is still bigger than I would've guessed, a bit over twice the size of the Millennium Falcon.
The closest thing to 'canon' on Scorpio is a cutaway made, but not used, at the time. It suggests that the rear are drives, the hump at the top flight deck, and the nose mainly holds but with mining lasers below (the only onscreen hint that Scorpio has weapons is in Games: trying to make it work, the ship had mining lasers which were ineffective against other ships, but useful in that particular situation "A small power close up, beats a big power long away" or something along those lines).In researching for my Patreon reviews, I found this site of references for the Scorpio (apologies if someone has linked to this already and I overlooked it):
Ultimate Scorpio Reference
This is everything I can find for the Scorpio model from Blakes 7. If I find more (or if anyone sends me more) I'll update this post. More r...
The first image is what I assume is a conjectural cutaway, and it shows the ship's total length as 13-14 times the length of the "Flight Deck Area." There's also a schematic that gives its length as 337 feet (102.7 m), which would make the flight deck about 25 feet long, which sounds pretty close. Still, I would've thought the ship was rather smaller than that.
One of the two best references for the ship's size would be "Stardrive," where we see Tarrant and Avon mending the hole in the drive chamber hull, and then cut to a wide shot of the repair taking hold. That would suggest that the hull segment corresponding to their location is about one story high. That's also consistent with the other best reference, the size of the airlock seen in "Gold." To me, that suggests a scale about 3/4 or so what the schematic shows, which would make the ship about 75-80 meters, maybe. Which is still bigger than I would've guessed, a bit over twice the size of the Millennium Falcon.
That at least sounds right. Scorpio can't be that big and still land (I appreciate Voyager is almost 400 metres long and lands but I think Scorpio would be a mite conspicuous if it was that big.
The big question is how big pursuit ships are (clearly not as big as Duel's original effects work makes them out to be I'd imagine!
) Yeah there's no reference that I can recall to Scorpio having weapons either before or after Games, outside of Soolin's comment that Scorpio wasn't built to tangle with pursuit ships. Plus in Assassin there's no suggestion of them just blowing up Cancer's ship once they catch up to it.
It's not illogical that even a small freighter might be armed (for defending against pirates etc) but not remotely well armed enough to actually go toe to toe with another ship unless there's no choice.
They wouldn't have done that, for the same reason Avon took Cancer alive once they boarded the ship -- because Avon wanted to question him for information about his contact with "Sleer," or else wait for Servalan to contact the ship so he could gain information he could use against her.
Also, Nebrox had told Avon that a slave had been taken aboard the ship. And Avon proved he was capable of altruism by saving Nebrox. I don't believe he would've casually murdered an innocent slave (so he thought) for his convenience, not unless he was convinced that there was no alternative.
So it doesn't prove anything about whether Scorpio had weapons.
From the book
One of Jim’s (Francis) first responsibilities for the fourth series was designing the rebels’ new ship, the Scorpio. Unlike the massive Liberator, its replacement was smaller, more austere, and capable of making planet-fall in various episodes. “We went through about a dozen designs, with a huge influence of hard-edged design work coming through from Star Wars. We had to make the ship aerodynamically capable of flying through the atmosphere, but at the same time, it needed a certain amount of shading and detail so we could use hard-edged lighting on it. I commissioned several different-sized models: a big one four to five feet long, a second, two feet, and a really small one. We had some success taking foreground miniatures out on location for Hitch-Hiker’s, so we tried it with the Scorpio and Blake’s 7, taking it out to some of the quarries, where the actors could run up to it. We used the big one for that, the middle-sized one for flying and docking sequences, and the really small one for distance shots.”
The Scorpio models were farmed out to a talented modelmaker named Ron Thornton, who would one day win an Emmy Award in America for his groundbreaking computer-generated spaceships in Babylon 5. “I was impressed with his designs and some of the models he made, so I told him we wanted three sizes built. In fact, it was two to start with, but when I phoned him up and said I also wanted a three-inch model, he threw it in for nothing. When he delivered the models, every one of them was perfectly in scale and proportion. He did everything I asked for, detailing those areas when I wanted detail, and the paintwork was superb.”
“It was a great day when Ron turned up in the workshop, because the base of the ship was being made by one of my guys, with the girder that it sits on and spins around. I spent two weeks looking at that and hoping the ship was going to be all right. I had great trust in Ron, and I’d been to see him at one stage when the model was just in Perspex, and he’d got all the shapes and facets I wanted. When he walked in with this huge model, we all gathered around and it looked fabulous. The original Liberator was this bloody great big lump we have to carry around, and I used to get stabbed with the prongs so many times. You could easily forget they were there, and take an eye out. Where the Liberator was weighty and needed to sit in one position, the Scorpio had been strengthened with built-in steel sections and fixing points, so we could suspend it from four different points without snapping it. Even though the Liberator had been so big, it didn’t have the detail or the sort of body that Scorpio had. I felt it was a lot more functional, which was our aim with all the spaceships, guns, and everything else on series four.”
One of Jim’s (Francis) first responsibilities for the fourth series was designing the rebels’ new ship, the Scorpio. Unlike the massive Liberator, its replacement was smaller, more austere, and capable of making planet-fall in various episodes. “We went through about a dozen designs, with a huge influence of hard-edged design work coming through from Star Wars. We had to make the ship aerodynamically capable of flying through the atmosphere, but at the same time, it needed a certain amount of shading and detail so we could use hard-edged lighting on it. I commissioned several different-sized models: a big one four to five feet long, a second, two feet, and a really small one. We had some success taking foreground miniatures out on location for Hitch-Hiker’s, so we tried it with the Scorpio and Blake’s 7, taking it out to some of the quarries, where the actors could run up to it. We used the big one for that, the middle-sized one for flying and docking sequences, and the really small one for distance shots.”
The Scorpio models were farmed out to a talented modelmaker named Ron Thornton, who would one day win an Emmy Award in America for his groundbreaking computer-generated spaceships in Babylon 5. “I was impressed with his designs and some of the models he made, so I told him we wanted three sizes built. In fact, it was two to start with, but when I phoned him up and said I also wanted a three-inch model, he threw it in for nothing. When he delivered the models, every one of them was perfectly in scale and proportion. He did everything I asked for, detailing those areas when I wanted detail, and the paintwork was superb.”
“It was a great day when Ron turned up in the workshop, because the base of the ship was being made by one of my guys, with the girder that it sits on and spins around. I spent two weeks looking at that and hoping the ship was going to be all right. I had great trust in Ron, and I’d been to see him at one stage when the model was just in Perspex, and he’d got all the shapes and facets I wanted. When he walked in with this huge model, we all gathered around and it looked fabulous. The original Liberator was this bloody great big lump we have to carry around, and I used to get stabbed with the prongs so many times. You could easily forget they were there, and take an eye out. Where the Liberator was weighty and needed to sit in one position, the Scorpio had been strengthened with built-in steel sections and fixing points, so we could suspend it from four different points without snapping it. Even though the Liberator had been so big, it didn’t have the detail or the sort of body that Scorpio had. I felt it was a lot more functional, which was our aim with all the spaceships, guns, and everything else on series four.”
That part is not at all surprising. Scorpio looks like it could've come straight out of a Corellian shipyard.
Yep, Pursuit Ships are probably a bit smaller. The set suggests that the interior and the model are roughly similar. Not quite a jet fighter (too many crew), but similar. Width maybe 4/5 metre? The central bit, not the 'wings'.That at least sounds right. Scorpio can't be that big and still land (I appreciate Voyager is almost 400 metres long and lands but I think Scorpio would be a mite conspicuous if it was that big.
The big question is how big pursuit ships are (clearly not as big as Duel's original effects work makes them out to be I'd imagine!
Yeah there's no reference that I can recall to Scorpio having weapons either before or after Games, outside of Soolin's comment that Scorpio wasn't built to tangle with pursuit ships. Plus in Assassin there's no suggestion of them just blowing up Cancer's ship once they catch up to it.
It's not illogical that even a small freighter might be armed (for defending against pirates etc) but not remotely well armed enough to actually go toe to toe with another ship unless there's no choice.
As a side note, just watched the updated FX on Time Squad. They went with my idea that the orange pods are where the capsule was taken in.
Last edited:
My 'Behind the Scenes' book has a picture of the very first sketch Ian Scoones drew of what would become the Liberator and eventually evolved into the Federation Pursuit Ship. It is very Star Wars influenced, looking more like a Star Destroyer, than the vessel that we're all familiar with.
There is a nice photo from, I think Rescue, when they took the big model on location, of all of them sitting on each other, like fleas having smaller fleas.
My head canon has always assumed Pursuit Ships are mainly engines and weapons with a small living quarters and flight deck for the crew. The flight deck is similar in set up to a cylon raider which I'm guessing is coincidental.
Or both are drawing on an earlier real precedent, like bomber cockpits or something. Heck, it's basically the same layout as the central well of the Enterprise bridge, a command chair behind two adjacent stations. It's a natural enough arrangement.
and the use of mutoids would help keep the space required for the crew down.
I thought of that, but then I remembered that Travis's use of Mutoids was supposed to be atypical, a personal preference of his, since they creeped out a lot of other officers. So presumably pursuit ships would normally have all-human crews. Although we did see another Space Commander use Mutoids (with blond wigs rather than black bell-pepper hats) in "Hostage," and Servalan used them in Series C-D. But then, it stands to reason that the diminished Federation post-invasion might have to rely more on Mutoids, since so many human military personnel would've died in combat.
Depends if blood plasma takes up more room than food
Mutoids don't seem to need to sleep though so fewer bunks!
I'd read that Darrow and Pearce definitely thought she was miscast. She definitely overdid it both ways. Just checked the blog I did last time I did a run through of episodes and I wrote that she's too annoying as Piri and too arch as Cancer. I did argue that her performance is so camp it almost works. Almost is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. She does get the most hilarious death scene in all of Blakes 7 mind you.
Assassin manages to be terrible and hugely enjoyable all at the same time. If I ever do a top five list of B7 episodes that are perfect to watch when you've just come home from the pub then Assassin will definitely be in there.
It has a lot of Star Wars style screen wipe transitions as well.
