No handrails? Those science ships do see alot of action! Just thinking.. How would a mirror ready room look like? Trophy? Personal agony booth? Both look great!
@valkyrie013: I've been wondering how to add handrails in a unique way here, but then again it's not what the client wanted, so maybe I'll carry those experiments over to a personal project of mine. As for the ready room, yeah lol as @batboy853 says I'd look at Living Witness for the moodiness, though I'd also add some more Terran stuff, maybe a banner or something. Plus a lot more military style decor. Okey, here's the Hermes finished! Not much changed from the last updates of course, just the finished MSD area at the back, and a change of dedication plaque style, per my client's request.
Very cool Rekkert! I like that TNG style helm console a lot. The ISS Intrepid bridge is just.... *chefs kiss*
@Rekkert your bridges are absolutely amazing! Love the Hermes, really is just what I'd picture a 24th century Oberth-Class bridge to be like.
Did anyone ever try to do a proper version of the Tsiolkovsky bridge? That one always boggled my mind — why would you have an emergency hatch right at the back of the bridge (and just the hatch — not even an airlock!) so one crazy drunken night they can hit the wrong button and kill everybody?
That bridge design also really bothered me. It was cool to see the refit bridge in use again, but that was really a poor use of it. Seems like Starfleet was following the Hogwarts philosophy on unsafe work environments there for a while. Space is a dangerous place to live and work. We don't need our own ships built to assist in our demise.
Maybe there was a lifeboat there that they ejected first before ejecting everyone on the bridge? Otherwise if I was the captain I would always be looking over my shoulder to make sure the airlock was still closed.
We see so little of it, other than the obvious reuse of the TMP bridge chairs, you can't really make out much from it. The back wall looks like new, TNG-style construction similar to stuff they'd throw onto a "room of the week" set.
@Nays: Thanks mate! @Donny: Always a pleasure, man! @Bry_Sinclair: Thanks very much! As for the Tsiolkovsky, yeah that's a difficult one to do in a way that makes sense with other bridges we saw. There is this fan-made schematic for it, but honestly I don't like what it did, it's just a standard bridge with a huge airlock at the back. Which I guess it's accurate, but a bit uninspired, it needs some sort of background or explanation. My working theory is that this particular ship had such a specific mission profile that a special hatch on the bridge made sense in context. Maybe it usually investigates ion storms and other spatial phenomena like that, and thus it was outfitted with a special module at the back of the bridge that functions as a regular science station most of the time, but that can be detached and used as an ion pod directly by the science officer. Maybe in their drunken state, said science officer took the pod out for a ride, which would've triggered the airlock to close off. Then the drunken bridge crew caused it to open back up.
Come to think of it, I always kinda assumed this hatch was normally hidden behind one of those big systems displays they often have in the back of the bridge. In case of an emergency that display would disappear to the sides or drop to the floor and reveal the hatch.
That at least makes a little more sense than what we saw. There's another problem I hadn't thought of previously: what we (don't) see outside that emergency hatch. The Oberth-class has its bridge inside a smooth dome-like structure with no visible hatches, so unless a big section of the dome blows off to expose the emergency hatch... Then again, this wasn't the last time the exterior would fail to match up with the shape of the filming model.
@Michael: Yeah, that's another alternative I considered, might be standard on smaller ship classes like the Oberth. @cardinal biggles: The lack of continuity between interior and exterior is what lead me to think of the external pod idea, as the whole back end of the bridge module would essentially detach, explaining the open space behind the bridge. I had a specific bridge concept for an Oberth-Class bridge in my head for a while, and given the recent Hermes commission I was motivated to finally start it. Well, sort of... See, my idea was simple, take the Enterprise-A bridge aesthetic from the end of The Voyage Home, apply it to an oval shaped bridge; and it would be perfect for the USS Copernicus, which also appeared in The Voyage Home. It could be a realistic reuse if for whatever reason the interior of that ship needed to be seen during the movie. Thing is, I don't have any of the specific models from that era already modeled, and I certainly wasn't gonna tackle such a big project now, given that I have several commissions to get back to, so I'll leave the USS Copernicus idea for another time. For now though, I really wanted to do an Oberth bridge with that clean look, particularly because I've been meaning to have another personal project ship like the USS Potemkin, so that I can then do sickbay, engineering, shuttlebay, etc, and thus experiment more in this era of Trek. Just like with the Potemkin, I wanted to take a name from canon and build upon that, instead of just inventing my own ship (that both helps with making my work more discoverable, and with my OCD tendencies of wanting to add to what's already canon). Problem is, other than the Grissom, Oberth and Copernicus, there aren't any other canon Oberth-Class ships from the era. I toyed with using the USS Banting from Starfleet Academy, as I have a lot of fond memories of that game, but as mentioned before I wasn't entirely comfortable with that because it wasn't from canon. In the end, I went down a rabbit hole for an alternative. On TUC there's the USS Helin NCC-1692, named after US astronomer Eleanor F. Helin. The ship was just listed in some okudagrams, it wasn't seen or mentioned, but according to Memory Alpha, "In an issue of Bjo Trimble's Space-Time Continuum, it was mentioned that Eleanor F. Helin was given a model of an Oberth-class ship which bore this name." So it was promising, but I wanted to find proof of this. After some research around NASA sites, I ended up finding a photo of a dedication plaque for the USS Helin from the Helin Family Estate, indicating that it was given to her "by the Star Trek franchise" in honor of the naming of this ship. Bingo! It might not be exactly canon, but the USS Helin being an Oberth-Class was intended by the powers that be. Thus I decided to make that ship my Oberth project (and yes, I updated Memory Alpha with this seemingly new information). So, here's what I've got so far. The bridge is oval shaped just like the Grissom's, while using a latter visual style (a mix of TVH and TFF), plus the Enterprise-B Captain's chair, just because I LOVE that thing. I decided to add some steps and rails, to make it more visually interesting than the Grissom. The station chairs colors are taken from the prototype from the Thunder Bay Museum (now that I think about it, it was listed as 'Star Trek chair', so maybe it has those colors on purpose to match the Enterprise-A from the end of TVH?). Other than that I'll be designing this one as I go, and it might not be finished right away, but still, I wanted to share what I had.
Wasn’t the captain chair and nav/helm console on the same level as the outer ring stations on the Grissom bridge? I can’t remember exactly - my memory of that bridge is forever monopolized by the horrific pink chairs.
That was not an alteration - the black cover is original and covers the wheels. See the patent: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/20/eb/26/c86c97cb37181f/US4738487-drawings-page-6.png
Never thought I'd see three generations of Oberth-class bridges reconstructed by amazing fan artists within what, a year of one another? Donny did the 2270/80 version, and now Rekkert's doing a 2290 refit and already provided a 2380?s ship-of-the-week bridge. And of all ships, the Oberth.