NICE job, Warped9!! I'm especially happy to see that I'm not the only TOS Purist around here! STAR TREK - 1964 to 1979!!
Sorry to double-post, but I noticed that in your first thread, you mentioned "your" chronology. Might I ask what you're referring to? Right now I'm working on modifying Okuda's "Star Trek Chronology" by cutting out any and all information from the movies and other Trek shows. Some of the events had to be moved around a bit in order to be closer to how TOS was and free it from TNG retconning. Is that kind of what you're doing?
I've created my own Star Trek chronology with TOS, TAS and TMP as the primary sources with some written materiel as secondary sources. Anything post TMP (which doesn't add up to much) is considered only wherein it could be consistent with that previously established or could be fit in without contradicting what had already been established. I can dig up a copy for you if you like. As fas as I'm considered (for myself) the refit Enterprise and crew is essentially still out there exploring after the events of TMP.
Wow, I don't know how I missed this thread before. I love your take on these ships -- all of them. My favorite is probably the Valiant referenced in WNMHGB, but I also like the later pre-Connie version as well. That design is very much in line with the general design cues of a pre-TOS ship for a fanfic I've been kicking around. And the Farragut is great, too. I even like your Bonaventure. As mentioned above, I really like the subtle references back to elements from the DY class (and, sacrilege though it may be, I was never a fan of the TAS version.) *ducks from flying tomatoes* And finally ... Yeah, while I am well aware it's not "canon", I've always had my own ideas of what the TOS and movie era timeline should have been. To me, there should have been two 5-year missions with the original crew before TMP (TOS + TAS and Phase II), though I can live with one. And there definitely should have been at least one or two more between TMP and TOS. And whenever I watch TSFS, when the scene between Kirk and Admiral Morrow comes up, where he talks about decommissioning the Enterprise, I always try to squint my eyes just a little and cock my head in just the right way so that I can almost convince myself that Morrow says the Enterprise is fiftyyears old, instead of twenty. But, that's just me. In any event, this is great work. I'm in absolute awe of your photo manip skills. Really amazing!!!
I have a problem. Several actually. I've got too many projects on the go at the same time in addition to my non-project pursuits like reading and movies (and even those can be project related). - my schematics for the TOS shuttlecraft: http://trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=50073 - my Never seen TOS scenes photomanip images - designing my own non-Trek fast relativistic starship - creating a universe and original SF novel for aforementioned relativistic starship
Well, all your projects are awesome - I'd really like to see your original ideas. But of course, it's the TOS material that really interests me, ESPECIALLY the "never seen TOS scenes" project! That sounds pretty darn cool! I was able to find your most updated copy of your chronology in an older thread, and I enjoyed it a lot. Personally, I kind of half-heartedly consider "Forbidden Planet" as part of TOS chronology, as sort of a pre-Cage era story. Don't laugh! If you think about it, it really does work quite well as a "prequel" of sorts, especially compared to drivel like "Enterprise." The uniforms, the crew themselves, everything...and the hat that Pike had on top of his TV was kind of like the ones from "Forbidden Planet."
Hey Warped9... I just want to ask you a question about this thread: Did you start this thread solely to exhibit your artwork, or do you want to engage everyone in a wider discussion about these historical pre-TOS ships and designs? The reason I asked is that I've done some speculating on this subject in the past, and I wanted to know if your thread would be the appropriate place to share these ideas, kinda like what Cary L. Brown was doing several posts back in this thread..
Love the attention your work here is getting. Also, the bump led me to look at my previous post and realized i made a mistake. I meant to say ....
Well, here goes... Quite a while back, we were talking on this board about re-imagining the NX-01 "Akiraprise" (a thread I instigated, BTW) and there was another thread or two about pre-TOS ships, including endless discussions/derivatives meditating on the Daedalus. I had been tweaking some other images seen in this forum, including some of Vance's cool Tookit parts, and came up with this... Keep in mind, this is a very vague take on what an early Federation starship cruiser-class (maybe the Bonaventure?) could look like. This thread, combined with MadMan1701A's 3D artwork on a JJ-Kelvin-ized Constellation, and yet another "twelve like in the fleet" discussion that popped up in the "K'T'inga size" Trek Tech thread, got me to thinking. Warped9, I really like what you've done with your photoshopped U.S.S. Valiant and U.S.S. Farragut, but I would've done it differently. I like how your took the Constitution-class shape and made it simpler and rougher for your Valiant and Farragut. You made a very compelling looking possibility for what pre-TOS Federation starships could look like, and I really could imagine your images appearing as historic ships in TOS. But I'm not keen on the warp nacelle pylons extending out of the interconnecting dorsal "neck" aesthetically or as far as design evolution. That's why the above image is closer to what I would want to see. I do love what you've done with the de-evolved saucer, nacelles and secondary hull. I also enjoy what MadMan1701A did with his Constellation by using the JJ-Kelvin as a basis for design. It would be fascinating to combine all these ideas into one, using one of Matt Jefferies' early design sketches of the Enterprise as a base for such a project. Using a simplified, bulky cylinder as the secondary hull in your Valiant/Farragut is really appealing. It suggests to me that the Federation Starfleet, in its early days, used simpler hull shapes because they may have been easier to design and build for mass-production, kinda like a "building blocks" approach. It also reminded me of Jefferies' crude draft sketch of the Enterprise. What would really be neat is if there were a way to blend the evolution of the secondary hull and dorsal-fit/neck shape with the legacy of the DYellow submarine shape, as with your 22nd/21st century starship images. What I envisioned was the secondary hull being a tubular shape that looked more like the DY ship types (a hull, of any kind, is, after all, just a housing) with the missile-like nose and the "conning tower" evolving into a connecting neck to the saucer. The saucer would be a blend of the "NX-100" ship illustrated above and MadMan1701A's JJ/Kelvinized Constellation. I think it would be neat to give MadMan1701A's saucer an overblown uber-"Cage" style to it, with the saucer vertices topside and below becoming fat ant-hills, almost like an embedded sphere. To top it off, maybe the impulse engines weren't part of the saucer originally. As a nod to ENT, maybe the impulse engine room and engines were a seperate pod, embedded to the saucer hull where the "neck" joins, to form an "impulse deck". (Also a nod to "Where No Man Has Gone Before") You will note in the "twelve like it in the fleet" digression in the K'T'inga Trek Tech thread that I suggested how starship cruiser classes could have evolved from the Bonaventure to the Constitution; I suggested some class names as a play on the "Constitution" name: Constitution ("Connie") being the most recent, preceded by Magna Carta ("Maggie"), Charter of Liberties ("Libby"), and Declaration ("Deckie"). This would seem to fit in with the evolutionary concept you are using with your Valiant/Farragut. I could post more on this today, but I don't want to bore you with a novel.
I always though Kirk's Farragut was Constitution-class; according to the Star Trek Chronology he was posted there in 2254 - nine years after the original launch of Enterprise. Perhaps the SS Conestoga was based on the design of the SS Valiant, launched 4-5 years before and a proven spaceframe - a logical idea given that at the time (2069) building starships was a relatively untried and expensive business with limited expertise. Food for thought: perhaps the USS Valiant was the same class of vessel as our new friend the USS Kelvin?
That was definitely my thinking. The nacelles on THIS ship are really rockets -- so in a weird reversal, in my thinking the nacelles on the earliest warp driven ships are the impulse drive. I never warmed to the FC Phoenix design because I had a very hard time fitting it into an evolution that began with DY-100 and Nomad, and somewhere before the mid 23rd century included XCV-330. I see the ring evolving into the warp coil, so that the evolution of warp drive is about developing the means to power more and more rings/coils that get smaller and smaller until they get stacked into nacelles. The challenge then is to balance twin sources of space warping (nacelles) into one stable bubble. Whether they are rings or nacelles, I see them as negative energy induction circuits that act as an antigravity "blanket" around the ship, protecting it from being crushed out of existence by hypergravity singularities fore and aft that create and extinguish what in effect is I guess, something like a stable wormhole. In the case of the 1701 nacelles, these singularities are contained in the domes forward and aft. Obviously this changes dramatically with the TMP nacelles. We can discuss that subject some other time, if you like.
No. I like your thinking on the nacelle evolution; in TOS, the nacelles were always kind of big "rockets" that pushed the ship so fast that it was able to break the "time barrier" and travel faster than light. Apparently impulse engines could also push you to at least lightspeed (if you watch episodes like "The Doomsday Machine"), but since they weren't run off of the matter/antimatter reactors it took more fuel and wasn't as economical as the m/a reactors. By the time of TMP and "warp cores" (which replaced the various warp reactors on starships), apparently the nacelles were more like giant emitters rather than giant rockets - in this case, emitting a field that "warped" space rather than just going really really fast to break the "time barrier." That's why they don't really have a front or a back, and just glow blue (emitting the warping field) on the sides when travelling faster than light. That's just going by TOS tech, though - the later shows developed their own explanation(s) for warp travel. As for the Phoenix...well, B&B really didn't put a whole lot of thought into that, apparently, so I just exclude the whole fiasco.