Constitution Class Ships Seem To Be Everywhere

So, if we go by the remastered visual effects TOS S3 " The Way To Eden", that means a class J Starship looks like an old sixties era VW Bus with Warp Nacelles...got it.

 

Eff that; given a choice, I'll go with the Tholian dart with wings everyday over that CGI thing.

 

Backwards flying Tholian dart with wings!

 

The Captain Obvious level of irony is that TOS-R ended up reusing Harry Mudd's ship.

 

I thought the original "Mudd's Women" fx worked fine. They're at extreme transporter range, which I think was 1600 miles in The Making of Star Trek, and Mudd's ship is just marked as an electronic blip on the screen. Makes sense: it's little and far away. And the original explosion was pretty cool.

The lack of a miniature for the Antares in "Charlie X" worked for me, too. It (unintentionally) created a weirdness in the situation, something Alfred Hitchcock or The Twilight Zone might do to make you sense that something is off kilter. Something is spooky about that ship, that we are not given to lay eyes on it.

OTOH, Bele's invisible ship in "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" just announced "Let that be your imagination, because we are not spending any money on this one."

 

And the producers of Star Trek only needed typewriters and a couple of models, because they can have any kind of starship they want meet any other kind of starship they want, to tell whatever story they want, because starships don't fucking exist.

And what boggles my mind is that I've seen plenty of space opera sci-fi where multiple vessels of the same class occupy the same area of space at the same time, yet this thread is the only place I've found in any fandom where that idea has been treated as an anomaly that has to be explained and somehow compensated for. Like I said before, this is stupid.

None of this matters, not the volume of traversed space, not the various FTL speeds involved, not the mythical other starship classes that shoulda/coulda/woulda been involved, the creators had stories to tell and a couple of models to work with, so on screen Connies met Connies in space, period, and all the theorizing and agonizing and calculating we might do for the next decade isn't going to change that fact. Nor should we want it to, because there's absolutely nothing wrong with Connies meeting Connies in space.

 

Do you really want to take that chance, though?

 

Risk is our business and all that...

 

No no, I'm sorry. I plum forgot I'm supposed to always be supportive and positive on this board. Please, don't let me interrupt this riveting discussion again, and I look forward to the next thought provoking thread on exactly why 2+2 should equal 4 when there are so many other numbers.

 

There’s a difference between not being supportive and positive, and being a belligerent jerk.

 

Could be even further. In "Obsession" the Enterprise beamed up Kirk and Garrovick from the planet surface at a distance of 30,000 Km. In "Mudd's Women" we do see Mudd's ship (it's not a blip).

 

You're right. In this sharp frame, it looks like an animated ship, and not entirely featureless:
https://tos.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/1x06/muddswomen001.jpg

But on old-style 20th century TV sets, there was no detail in it at all. I always took it for an electronic placeholder, a blip mapped onto the screen by the Enterprise sensors.

 

Mudd’s ship was more than just a light effect (like the Thasian ship or the Orion ship from ‘ Journey to Babel.’) It looked like there was some kind of object on the screen.

Yep. And what made it worse was the crew being in awe about the ship being invisible, as if they’d never heard of the concept before. Unless the writers were implying that the ship itself was made from material that was naturally invisible, which is ridiculous in the extreme.

 

I remember watching this episode on an old fuzzy TV set and I could make out the shape and despite the lack of detail you could model something close to that shape unlike the blips from "Balance of Terror" or "Lights of Zetar"...

 

Mudd’s ship from “-Into Darkness” has a similar lozenge shape..

 

Yeah, I was going to point that out too. They seem to have designed the ship to resemble the original VFX. Good for them.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/K'normian_trading_ship

 

And I'm done here; thanks for having me. When threats fly, so do I.

 

That's the range adopted in Star Fleet Battles, too (5 hexes or ~25,000 miles!)

 

Oh wait - did SFB change their rules? I seem to remember that each hex was 10,000 Km across so just 3 hexes?