Kitbashes: ones you love and hate

[Rekkert]

IIRC, the Reliant kit wasn't released until 1994ish.
Yes, they used Gundam kit parts for greeblies. I think Greg Jein made it, but I may be wrong. Just plain silly, IMHO, but I guess even in the 80s they didn't think it would be so closely examined.

The original ready room model was made by Sternbach and Probert.

Personally I like the greebled look for TMP-era designs, makes them more utilitarian-looking and thus the evolution to the more elegant TNG-era designs more apparent.

Plus it had a real-world purpose: to hide access panels for lights and supports. The refit Constitution was a very smooth looking model, and ILM hated working with it once they received it for TWoK, because it had no access panels so it needed an almost full disassembly to fix simple stuff. It was this very fact that made the model impossible to be used for a TV schedule, which they realized for 'The Battle' and required the larger Constellation model to be built after the episode was already filmed.

 

[137th Gebirg]

IIRC, they also greatly disliked the beautiful pearlescent paint job the ship had from TMP. It apparently made it difficult to light with ILM’s configuration at the time. Might be an urban legend, but they repainted the whole thing to give it less of a glossy reflective look with all the odd colors it was throwing off during filming (which was the original intent of the paint job to begin with). I love ILM and the work they’ve done in the past half-century, but that decision kind of irked me.

 

[Rekkert]

Yes, the pearlescent paint was a pain to work with, even during TMP the filming crew hated it as it was hard to make it look good on camera, despite by all accounts looking incredible in person. Lighting that model was extremely difficult, and even 3D reproductions that emulate the effect correctly are hard to lit.

However ILM didn't have a choice in repainting the model, as they used a blue screen to film their models, which was a technique not used on TMP and which transfered the blue onto the pearlescent reflections, so the paint had to go.

 

[publiusr]

One non-canon design that I've always liked is the Churchill class. Steals design elements from at least five ships and shouldn't work but does and looks gorgeous.

Star Trek Blueprints: U.S.S. Churchill NCC-2713 Advanced Tactical Cruiser Technical Specifications

Cygnus-X1.Net: A Tribute to Star Trek

www.cygnus-x1.net

Shangri La’s meaner brother

Nendoroid—what Funko should be.

 

[Dukhat]

I need to dig up photos of the filming miniature (of which Ex Astris is oddly bereft), but yes, there’s a robot there - not sure if it’s an Optimus Prime part, some other Transformer, or a Shogun Warrior model kit part. The two big dome halves on the underside are from the Dark Nebula Empire “3-Legged Tank” kit from Space Battleship Yamato (Be Forever Yamato). There are some good photos from one of the auctions from a few years back.

The robot was from an anime called Xabungle. It was ‘super-deformed,’ ‘chibified,’ or whatever you call it when they make a cute small compact version of a character. I have a pic of it somewhere. When Jein made his filming model he greatly reduced the detail of the robot where it was vague enough that you couldn’t tell its origins as the Xabungle robot.

 

[B.J.]

The Constellation has a nice overall shape, but WAY too many greeblies. In the Trek universe, I'm a fan of smoother ships without a lot of dressing. I think it was just nuts to glue a couple of Enterprise pylons and some robots on the hull, and those bigass lumps on the bottom look like a bad case of lipomae.

I've had the thought that the Stargazer was either a modified Constellation or a later run, similar to how older military aircraft tend to get "greebles" as they try and add more capabilities to an older airframe. It would be interesting to see what a "clean" version of a Constellation would look like.