People got excited about those models?
Usually my friends and I were looking at the aliens and whatever new design was on the name up.
Starfleet Academy Starship Thread
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Usually my friends and I were looking at the aliens and whatever new design was on the name up.
I don't think the Enterprise-C model was ever meant to be used again after "Yesterday's Enterprise," what with the battle damage and all. That's why Jein built another one using the mold.
I agree that I would have liked to have seen new models for the Raman and the Pegasus, but I will say that I'm glad they didn't use Sternbach's idea for an Ambassador kitbash for the latter. A prototype ship built only five years before the Enterprise-D should have looked a lot newer than an Ambassador class (although the use of the Grissom model makes this even worse.) But the budget issues plagued the entire show, not just in the last season. We absolutely should have gotten new models for ships like the Lantree, the Tsiolkovsky, and the Brattain instead of reuses of movie models (see next.)
What always annoyed me was that in TNG season 1 alone, we got seven new studio models of various alien ships, but the only new Federation ship we got besides the Enterprise-D was the Stargazer, and that was only because Jein built the model on time and under budget to replace the TMP Enterprise movie model they were originally going to use. And it wasn't even a contemporary ship to the Ent-D, it was a ship that was 70 years old!
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Yes.People got excited about those models?
Actually it's not, it first appears in the "What We Left Behind" documentary on the cancelled DS9 Season 8 as one of the three concepts for the USS Emmett Till. It was recycled several times, including as STO concepts, but namely it became the Sampson-class concept which became the Wallenberg-class and Walker-class (and from there all the other DIS ships), while the DS9 concept (called Neptune-class) became the Inquiry.
I don't think this is an Eaves problem, I think this is moreso a production problem. Eaves understands the 2370s-2390s perfectly, the problem is when people take a 2370s design and turn it into a 2150s or 2250s design (and sometimes this is Eaves' fault for suggesting an unused concept from Nemesis, sure). I think some of his concepts for ENT-era ships are fantastic, but they weren't chosen as designs (one of the Andorian concepts would make a WAY better Romulan Warbird of the period than the T'Varo does, which is obviously Nemesis-era).
Ah, that explains it. There are changes though - the "plasma exhaust vents/rear photon torpedo tubes" on the Excelsior model are longer on the CGI one. But I think Excelsior had to be rebuilt from the ground up no? The model was worn out already when they restored and modified it for Generations/DS9, and then after that point it was pretty much worn out.
Agreed. Would have at least made sense to reuse a Wolf 359 design like the Springfield or New Orleans maybe.
I don't think that's correct. The design Eaves recycled for the Inquiry cut-and-paste fleet was the top ship here:
The bottom ship was what eventually morphed into the Wallenberg tug. Both of these designs came from the defunct STO game, years before the DS9 S8 documentary came out.
But he was given the job to design those 22nd and 23rd century ships. He chose to make them look similar to what he designed for the 24th century, whether he made new designs or recycled old ones.
They scanned the Greg Jein Excelsior model, not the original Bill George one.
I would have preferred something new. but those work too.
I'm still amazed that Jein built his Excelsior by "eyeballing" the original from the same production footage that everyone else in the world has seen. What I never understood is, why didn't he at least have access to the production stills that the studio would have been able to give him copies from their archive? Or the original construction blueprints? It could have given him a better idea of the proportions, especially of the secondary hull. I mean, it was damn good for what little he had to work with, but for the love of All That Does Not Suck, why did he have so little to work with?
I never understood why TNG kept reusing TOS movie era Starfleet ships during the series but for the one-off Battle of Wolf 359 created a dozen of awesome, era-appropriate models from scratch that were never used again. The Springer and the Orla would've been perfect background ships in DS9, First Contact, etc.
Always wondered that myself.
Exactly. It’s the people asking him to design ships.
Eaves can design 23rd century ships fine, when he’s asked to make ships that look like that era.
Look at the USS Kelvin’s shuttles. Look at his redesigned Connie for Discovery.
Isn't it because they used hero models for regular appearances but the Wolf 359 ships were able to be basically garbage models, so they could go nuts?
A lot of work was put into those things, though. Those weren't simple kit-bashes like the DS9 Frankenfleet. They were basically new designs with period-correct components. They weren't just re-scaled Galaxy class parts, either. They were custom-made and quite sizeable. It was kind of a shame they had to get put under flamethrowers and partially melted down to serve as wreckages. Some of them were pretty cool designs, IMO.
They were made with love, but weren't they also made with a bunch of highlighters?
And correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't they made much smaller than what is normally used for hero ships?
Three of them - the Cheyenne, Springfield and the New Orleans used highlighter pens to represent alternative warp drive nacelle designs, yes. They were smaller than hero ships, but MUCH bigger and an order of magnitude more detailed than kitbashed AMT/ERTL-sourced miniatures, like the Niagara and Freedom classes:
For that matter, why didn't he have access to the actual Excelsior studio model itself?
The five study models built by Ed Miarecki were not actually built specifically for BoBW. Ed had built them previously at the request of Michael Okuda, who wanted to show the producers that they could come up with new ship designs using the Enterprise-D molds. They were already sitting around when the need for damaged ships came about, so Okuda added new names and registry numbers to them per the BoBW script. The producers opted to only have one of the study models built into a full-size filming model (Nebula class.) The other two larger ships built by Greg Jein just utilized the Ent-D, Ent-C and Stargazer molds he already had available, but they were never meant to be fully-fledged ships, just random wrecks in the background.
And look at his DSC season 1 ships, which were a hodgepodge of designs most of which do not conform to any specific era, and could have been used as FC ships for all the viewing audience knew.
I wouldn't call them 'garbage models' by any stretch of the imagination, having been built by a professional model maker. But I get what you mean. Now, the DS9 kitbashes...those are another story
Luckily Sternbach took pre-damaged photos of them, which allowed Eaglemoss to recreate their models
That makes so much sense.
The other important point is: The "TOS movie" models were extremely high quality movie models - with internal lighting, texture details, that you could film from all angles & close-ups and get good results.
The Wolf 359 skips were small, dark wreckages on screen. Not a lot of surface details visible, and certainly no lights in windows, engines etc, no cabling, probably obvious brackets at the bottom...
Dark, destroyed ships being the perfect opportunity for "low cost" world-building - to imply a lot of TNG era ships, without having to spend too much actual money on them.
Notably when they filmed the same battle for DS9s pilot episodes, and instead of all the cool new ships had to go back to use the same old, detailed "working" models (Miranda, Excelsior, Nebula...)
Because that's what he was asked to make. Bryan Fuller wanted flat ships with square nacelles.
We've been over this. Which is why I didn't quote your previous post in this thread.
The nacelles have nothing to do with what I was referring to.
I kinda want an Athena, but would have nowhere to put it and not sure my housemate would approve of it on the coffee table
Get a large model and make it the coffee table...
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