Donny's Refit Enterprise Interiors (Version 2.0)

[David cgc]

Gotta love those ILM designs... they sure do look pretty but have some really weird stuff that's hard to reconcile with the practicalities of how a ship might actually function.

Yeah, the interlocking door seemed silly, but a big off-center thruster behind a door that doesn't go anywhere, that's the height of verisimilitude.

ETA: Whoops, that was Richard Taylor on TMP who didn't care for the docking port, and persistently said it was twelve feet in diameter. I apologize for besmirching the good name of ILM, who I can only assume altered the model so it'd match the tug.

 

[TOMFAN]

Nope. I tend to ignore the fact that they did that to an otherwise beautiful model.

Do we see the back of it in TVH, I only remember the shot from the front?

 

[Jesse1066]

Do we see the back of it in TVH, I only remember the shot from the front?

Same, but now I want to see what they apparently did to it.

 

[Christopher]

Yeah, I don't remember any travel pod modification for TVH either.

 

[Donny]

You can't really tell by the screencap, thank god...


But they extended the back section and added a thruster on the lower portion, making it quite ugly

 

[Donny]

Got most of the basic structure modeled out. Now to detail all the panels and such:

 

[jfttf276]

Could it be something the Travel pod docks into with the door latch that it can release to dock with a ship similar to the TMP Shuttle with warp sled? I never noticed the modification to the TVH pod before.

I really like your work Donny. Lots of your renders look like you just took HD pics on the real sets.

 

[Tallguy]

But they extended the back section and added a thruster on the lower portion, making it quite ugly

What the actual f?

 

[Donny]

Could it be something the Travel pod docks into with the door latch that it can release to dock with a ship similar to the TMP Shuttle with warp sled? I never noticed the modification to the TVH pod before.

I really like your work Donny. Lots of your renders look like you just took HD pics on the real sets.

That's a good idea, however the extension looks rather too integrated for that, as there's no visible separation line. So I doubt that's what was intended, however an artist could depict it with a more visible separation line. But that artist won't be me

I wonder what the thinking was for adding that in the first place? Because they could?

 

[jfttf276]

I can't find the edit option or I'd change the other post. I always thought the pod was being pulled by the tug in front of them.

 

[Norsehound]

I wonder what the thinking was for adding that in the first place? Because they could?

Probably because with no obvious rocket exhaust port they felt like they needed to add one?

I think this is one way you can sum up the transition from TMP to the WoK era. The "elegant" (and probably inefficient) way to do the thing gets retrofitted over by a "dumb solution" that destroys the elegance but elevates function.

The movie-era wedge shuttlecraft also shares this fate. The Sleek SW-7 shuttles with their reaction-less drives were replaced by the Type 5s pretty quickly in the mind of popular culture. In fact Christopher suggests they were available at the same time as a ground assault shuttle as far as within a few months of TMP (as suggested by Ex Machina).

 

[ashleytinger]

I'm going with it being an attachment, but by gods that's hideous

 

[137th Gebirg]

You can't really tell by the screencap, thank god...


But they extended the back section and added a thruster on the lower portion, making it quite ugly

Seriously??? How the hell did they get into the thing then?

 

[Norsehound]

^^ This is probably why they didn't show us the backside in the actual movie.

 

[cardinal biggles]

Seriously??? How the hell did they get into the thing then?

The door is still there in the travel pod interior:

 

[Donny]

The door is still there in the travel pod interior:


View attachment 15477

Let’s all just ignore those modifications to the exterior model. Perhaps then, it will fade from existence in those photographs like Mary McFly’s siblings.

 

[137th Gebirg]

Weird (but good) how they kept the same interior. What were the Image-G guys thinking back then?

 

[cardinal biggles]

Image-G? I thought ILM did the VFX for Voyage Home.

 

[Nightowl1701]

It'd been seven years since it'd last been filmed; maybe they lost whatever mounting rig was originally used for the pod (or it belonged to Magicam/Trumbull and ILM couldn't get it), and the only thing they could think of was "Fine - we'll stick a big rod in the back to hold it in midair, and only shoot it from the front! It's only for a couple of seconds anyway! Then we'll redo the back to look like an entirely different craft, only shoot that from the back at a distance and voila - two shuttles for the price of one!"

 

[Mytran]

You can't really tell by the screencap, thank god...

But they extended the back section and added a thruster on the lower portion, making it quite ugly

Yikes, I'm so glad that rear end never appeared on screen! It also suggests that someone misunderstood the function of the travel pod - it's not something that was ever supposed to operate anywhere but short distances over a micro gravity environment, where small thrusters would be more than sufficient.

I think this is one way you can sum up the transition from TMP to the WoK era. The "elegant" (and probably inefficient) way to do the thing gets retrofitted over by a "dumb solution" that destroys the elegance but elevates function.

Probably true (I can imagine someone asking "why hasn't this rocket ship got a rocket on the back?") but it also continues a trend begun in TMP of explicitly showing more "realistic" (i.e. 20th century) rocket technology on Starfleet vessels, such as the RCS thrusters.