I never watched Blake 7, but why not?
If you want a really really really ambitious project have you ever watched Red Dwarf? It is a British space comedy
By the way, all the ships you build look amazing
I started watching Red Dwarf back when I was in college (so 1987)... Few of us used to chat about the show between classes ;-)
Blake's 7 is a BBC Sci-fi that ran from 1978-1981. It ran for 4 seasons, 52 episodes. The BBC famously cancelled the show with an over-the-air announcement that surprised not only the public, but the people making the show, who were actually prepping a fifth season. 1981 became known as the year the BBC ruined Christmas. The final episode "Blake" was broadcast originally weeks just before Xmas and left the mother of all cliffhangers.
The show was the brainchild of Terry Nation - yes, the same Terry Nation who created Survivors and famously the Daleks for Doctor Who. Blake's 7 was dark and gritty sci-fi, it pulled no punches. It showed a future where a totalitarian government was in charge, using drugs and psychology to control its population. Dissention was not tolerated in any fashion, and rebellion was quickly and brutally put down. The Federation was mother, the Federation was father. Blake was a rebel who wanted a new government and wanted to free the populace from control. As heroes go, he wasn't the nicest of people. He rebelled once too often and was shipped off Earth to a prison colony on trumped-up charges. Along the way he and a some fellow prisoners (all guilty of their charges by the way) escaped and stole an alien spacecraft and started a fight, which ironically one character (Avon) said they couldn't win. Thanks to the BBC they didn't win, and the cliffhanger ending became one of the grimmest endings to a TV show ever. The reason the show was cancelled, was not due to ratings - but due to pressure from the then UK government who didn't like a show that glamorised rebelling against authority.
JMS, O'Bannon and other writers have cited Blake's 7 as an inspiration for shows they created, Babylon 5 took it one step further and recreated various ships seen in the show and used them. The dysfunctional nature of the crew and gritty writing were light years ahead at the time. The FX and sets... yeah, leave a lot to be desired. The show's budget per episode was less than what TOS had per episode. And yet it's the storytelling that stands out.
The BBC have actually decided to release the series on Blu-Ray with remastered FX (akin to what was done with TOS, although unlike TOS it won't be CGI but practical FX), and rumours have bounced around for decades that a remake is being worked on. Sadly about half of the original cast have passed away, and Terry Nation is no longer with us.
If you do decide to watch it, don't expect great things from the FX, but expect good storytelling.
I really liked the non-Trek ships. Are the conical blue glowing objects with the grilles some sort of space time displacement drive?
The Protectorate universe ships have "hyper-mass" propulsion systems for FTL, with sublight thrusters and gravity drives in normal space. Aside from the
Astris which has big honking sublight drives. The Cyrathian ships use hypermass engines, but the technology is deployed in a different way.
