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Original K'Vort Class Concept - via Mike Okuda on Facebook

NeghVar

NeghVar

Ensign
Red Shirt
Thought that this would be worth a share:



Original K'Vort Class Battlecruiser from Yesterday's Enterprise

Michael & Denise Okuda
June 29 at 5:05 PM
https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=3136396856397847&id=142375465800016

This was my suggestion for the K'Vort-class Klingon battle cruiser in "Yesterday's Enterprise" (TNG). I kit-bashed it over a weekend from a TMP Klingon ship model kit, added three flashlights, and a bunch of plastic bits I got from Kit Kraft in Studio City. I put a brass tube down the centerline of the model to widen and lengthen the neck and to serve as front and back mounts for motion control photography. Rick Sternbach lent a hand, painting on some nice weathering and battle scars. I offered it to our friends in Visual Effects, who were, at the time, working on postproduction for the episode. They seemed to like the design, but unfortunately they felt that the detailing would not hold up in the shots they had planned for the episode, so they ended up using the beautiful bird-of-prey model made by ILM for Star Trek III. Which is how the powerful K'Vort-class battle cruisers ended up looking exactly like the smaller bird-of-prey.
 
With only the one view provided it's hard to get much more than a rudimentary feel for the ship as a whole. I'm not sure I'm a fan of the outsized warp nacelles to be frank.
 
Aw, yeah! Finds like this are pure gold to me. Kudos, Mr. Okuda. This reminds me of when the Kronos One study model was unearthed.

What a shame it wasn’t used in the episode, getting the scaled-up BoP instead. If it had been moving fast enough (like the Centaur in DS9), no one would have noticed it was just a kitbash, especially with low-rez 13-inch televisions of the time. Oh well, another victim of TNG’s time & budget constraints.

Next question: where’s the substitute model for the Romulan warbird-sized Klingon BoPs from “The Defector?” ;)

Lord Other said:
With only the one view provided it's hard to get much more than a rudimentary feel for the ship as a whole. I'm not sure I'm a fan of the outsized warp nacelles to be frank.
Click to expand...

The only real way to get a sense of scale is if the ship still had its original bridge module. Since this one doesn’t, the ship could literally be any size.

*Edit*: the bridge seems to be made from a miniature jukebox :)
 
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This might or might not have not have worked for “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” but they could have used it for the two Klingon ships behind the warbirds in “The Defector.” They could have kept the more detailed Bird-of-Prey for the one closest to the camera, behind the Enterprise, and had this one as a couple of more blurry Klingon ships further away. Maybe. Though they might have needed replacing with a couple of Vor’chas when the series was rereleased in HD.
 
Just imagine them as Klingon warbirds, squinting their exact shapes into something more impressionistic. After all, that’s what the VFX supervisors wanted us to see, not the exact same ships as the Bounty upscaled.
 
The BoP was supposed to be all different sizes right? Might be nice to see one stretched...,flip the wings around and put nacelles in place of the disruptors...something.
 
While I applaud Mr. Okuda for trying to create a new design for a ship that was obviously meant to be a match for the YE Enterprise-D, that kitbash really isn’t all that good. I understand that he was on a time crunch, but it’s very obvious that the model was made from a K’T’inga, some flashlights and a toy jukebox, and would have looked silly on screen, even from a faraway distance.

I think the only really logical solution for both ‘The Defector’ and ‘Yesterday’s Enterprise’ would have been to create a new fully-fledged 24th century Klingon battlecruiser filming model, considering the dramatic aspects of the scenes (these weren’t just far background ships in an establishing shot.) But they didn’t have the budget for that, so they utilized what they had. I’m also not a fan of changing what was originally shown on the screen (a la the Star Wars special editions or TOS-R) even if what was shown on screen didn’t make much sense.

Boris Skrbic said:
Just imagine them as Klingon warbirds, squinting their exact shapes into something more impressionistic. After all, that’s what the VFX supervisors wanted us to see, not the exact same ships as the Bounty upscaled.
Click to expand...

Except that even far background ships like the Yeager (the Voyager/Maquis raider kitbash) which was never meant to be scrutinized up close ended up being shown exactly like what it looked like, with even an Eaglemoss model made of it with zero changes whatsoever to its original parts. So the prevailing attitude is we are supposed to take the design of these ships very much at face value.
 
Dukhat said:
So the prevailing attitude is we are supposed to take the design of these ships very much at face value.
Click to expand...

Eaglemoss is following what starship fans are doing and catering to them specifically in developing those miniature subscriptions. I mean who else wants to see a random background ship of the week? The model-building community seems more interested in classics like the TOS Enterprise. VFX supervisors, on the other hand, were making do with what was available in order to get story points across to a much wider audience.

(I’ve argued before that the DS9TM shouldn’t have shown the “Frankenstein fleet” up close, and that the later photo-based reconstructions, while certainly fun and interesting, are hard to take entirely seriously. On the other hand, it’s not like we have an alternate option until someone chooses to create the “actual” designs, or it would stop being analysis/discussion and become unlicensed fan art.)
 
I don't think anyone's ever done it, but I'd be interested if someone genuinely took a shot at modeling a cruiser-sized K'vort Bird of Prey, with the detailing altered to fit with the larger size, similar to how in DS9 they built a special section of the Neg'var to represent the much larger mirror-universe version.
 
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