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

[Dukhat]

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.

The prevailing attitude of the VFX people for TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT (and even TOS to an extent) with spaceship shots was to

1. Use stock footage first;

2. Film new footage of an old model if stock footage couldn't be used (and then use that stock footage whenever possible;

3. Build a new filming model ONLY if there's no possible way the first two options would work.

They weren't too overly concerned with how the fans perceived the shots or had any real intention of having the fans' imaginations come up with something different than what was shown on screen. Other than maybe changing up the colors of the ships in post-production and adding some little bits here and there to suggest a different ship than when it was used for the previous aliens-of-the-week, most of the ship shots were the same, no matter what alien race was using them, what time period it was, or what part of the galaxy it was taking place in.

While I suppose that's not a huge deal for aliens-of-the-week, the Klingons at least should have been given better shrift. The Ferengi had failed as the main villains, the Romulans were being reintroduced, and Worf was becoming a more popular character and the Klingons' relationship with the Romulans were a part of that. Between the Pagh from "A Matter of Honor," the three BoPs from "The Defector" and the K'Vort class from "Yesterday's Enterprise," there definitely should have been a new Klingon filming model built much earlier than the Vor'cha.

(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 agree that those ships should never have been shown in that manual, especially since it made things even more convoluted by pointing out that they weren't actual ship classes, but parts of ships cobbled together as if the IRL kitbashing was actually a thing in-universe, which is absurd based on the different scales for each of the components used.

 

[Timo]

Then again, only one of them is a "mixture of eras" kitbash, with ancient nacelles on a modern hull. All others are true to form and scale, save for things that have no scale. They're little different from the Constellation class, another design first just cobbled together from random parts and then given a veneer of respectability at the late stage where an actual photographic model was built. Indeed, just about any one of them could have been Picard's old command for the purposes of "The Battle".

Modern CGI-bashes in turn close the gap that formerly existed between the likes of the Frankenstein Fleet and the stuff Miarecki carefully sculpted as design studies - the "sculpting" part and the "cobbling" part sort of become blended when one uses the virtual medium and can freely stretch the shapes and re-curve the curves. So there's less there to critique artistically when the seams are straight, and relatively more to critique in in-universe terms of whether the deflector dish is properly sized for a mediumweight support frigate of these fictional specs from this fictional decade.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Boris Skrbic]

They weren't too overly concerned with how the fans perceived the shots or had any real intention of having the fans' imaginations come up with something different than what was shown on screen.

Yes, because they were focusing on the audience that wouldn’t notice any problems. If a supervisor were pressed on the issues of scale or kitbashing, they’d probably say “Sure, I get it, but it’s an illusion created for TV. I needed a large cruiser there and some variety over here; feel free to imagine what it could’ve been.”

I’m just saying these artistic choices shouldn’t always be translated literally if the target medium is as revealing as a model or a technical manual. Omission is acceptable and so is redesign to an extent, especially given DSC’s update to the Enterprise.

 

[Dukhat]

Yes, because they were focusing on the audience that wouldn’t notice any problems. If a supervisor were pressed on the issues of scale or kitbashing, they’d probably say “Sure, I get it, but it’s an illusion created for TV. I needed a large cruiser there and some variety over here; feel free to imagine what it could’ve been.”

But he never would have been pressed in such a manner. If anything, the boss would have wanted the VFX guy to use the exact same stock footage for every ship in the show. Star Trek producers don’t care about how a particular ship should be scaled. They care about the budget.

I’m just saying these artistic choices shouldn’t always be translated literally if the target medium is as revealing as a model or a technical manual. Omission is acceptable and so is redesign to an extent, especially given DSC’s update to the Enterprise.

I’m well aware of CBS’s stance on visual canon (i.e. I should no longer trust what my own eyes show me), but for the Berman Trek years, the attitude was more that people weren’t going to recognize that the stock footage of the ship we previously used as a Talarian warship is now being used as a Frunalian science vessel, because TV screens were small, or the audience were too dumb to notice, or they didn’t have the budget to make a new model, etc. The producers of DSC absolutely had the budget to recreate the TOS Enterprise inside and out, and chose not to do so because they wanted a certain look for their reboot. That’s not the same as Berman Trek.

 

[Boris Skrbic]

If anything, the boss would have wanted the VFX guy to use the exact same stock footage for every ship in the show.

I was actually thinking of starship fans interacting with a VFX supervisor, not the boss, whose primary concern would’ve been the average viewer also.

The producers of DSC absolutely had the budget to recreate the TOS Enterprise inside and out, and chose not to do so because they wanted a certain look for their reboot. That’s not the same as Berman Trek.

It’s not, but Eaglemoss and technical manuals span all eras, so why not extend the latest notion across the board and say that if the Enterprise could’ve been retconned to achieve a certain look both before and after “The Cage”, why not do the same with the K’vort-class battlecruiser? Or the Keldon-class warship, which could be made huge to justify the tiny Defiant? They could even show up on LD or PIC.

 

[Dukhat]

It’s not, but Eaglemoss and technical manuals span all eras, so why not extend the latest notion across the board and say that if the Enterprise could’ve been retconned to achieve a certain look both before and after “The Cage”, why not do the same with the K’vort-class battlecruiser? Or the Keldon-class warship, which could be made huge to justify the tiny Defiant? They could even show up on LD or PIC.

I suppose, but honestly I think that ship has sailed. The producers of PIC don't care about the problematic scaling of the BoP from a TNG episode from 30 years ago. If they had a problem with it, they would have changed the ships when they did TNG-R, but they didn't. The best you'd probably get is a joke about it in Lower Decks.

 

[Boris Skrbic]

The best you'd probably get is a joke about it in Lower Decks.

But why couldn’t Eaglemoss commission the K’vort-class battlecruiser from Rick Sternbach? It would sort of match the bird-of-prey footage from “Yesterday’s Enterprise” and also the little screen icon from “Penumbra”. Add to that a nice tech booklet consistent with the fleshed-out Rotarran from the Haynes manual, and you’ve got a package ready to be referenced in tie-ins and eventually the canon.

 

[publiusr]

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.

I think a fresh D-7 might be apt:
https://modelermagic.com/for-sale-1650-29-inch-re-imagined-klingon-d-7ktinga-from-richard-long/
I might flip the nacelles there....tweak them a bit.

The piece de resistance
https://modelermagic.com/coming-soo...k-renegades-1-350-klingon-battle-cruiser-kit/
THAT is K'vort.

https://modelermagic.com/page/1/?s=REL+klingon

Those ships I wanted to see for TNG remastered.

 

[Boris Skrbic]

Those ships I wanted to see for TNG remastered.

No, let’s do this correctly and recognize the special-edition fad for what it was, a turn-of-the-millennium artifact taken advantage of in order to give TOS-R viewers something new on broadcast TV (as explained by Dave Rossi for the Inglorious Treksperts podcast). The bird-of-prey footage should remain as is but still be reinterpreted as a somewhat different design, a precursor to the Vor’cha which was also designed by Rick Sternbach.

(Essentially, it should be possible to look at the K’vort design and consider it a “refit” = reimagining of the bird-of-prey model as we know it, if only those precise original shapes could make sense at hundreds of meters in length.)

 

[Timo]

It is rather amusing that a corvette and a battleship today (that is, about a hundred years ago) are basically just differently scaled versions of each other: a bigger hull goes with bigger guns in bigger turrets, with bigger smokestacks and masts, and so forth. True scale-establishing factors such as lifeboats or portholes or deck crew would be minimized, hidden or absent altogether on ships like that. The Klingons thus might have every excuse to build their ships as a range of identically shaped designs of varying size.

The deciding factor should be the needs of drama. If a plot calls for a pitifully small Klingon ship (the traditional role of the BoP), it should look distinct from the menacingly superior Klingon ship (the role into which the BoP was cast in "Yesterday's Enterprise" and "Rascals", and it's quite the shame that it does not. Yet fixing things like this was never the forte of the TOS-R effort, even in (and especially in) those cases where the ship VFX was deliberately and completely changed.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Boris Skrbic]

The Klingons thus might have every excuse to build their ships as a range of identically shaped designs of varying size.

But why identically as opposed to similarly shaped to the extent that the Enterprises retain the same basic configuration even as they increase in size? A K’vort would still be identifiable as a bird-of-prey.

 

[publiusr]

Well, the two Glomars looked alike

 

[Dukhat]

(Essentially, it should be possible to look at the K’vort design and consider it a “refit” = reimagining of the bird-of-prey model as we know it, if only those precise original shapes could make sense at hundreds of meters in length.)

https://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/schematics/valdore-screen.jpg

So basically this is what the BoP would look like at the scale shown in "The Defector" and "Yesterday's Enterprise." I believe that John Eaves designed the ship to deliberately evoke the BoP. The Valdore already has inherent problems such as the completely unnecessary super-long wingspan for a spaceship that's presumably not meant for atmospheric flight, the thickness (or lack thereof) of the wings themselves, and even why the wings exist in the first place. The wings take up 2/3 of the complete volume of the ship. Why? Are there living quarters in the wings? I don't see any windows. Are there necessary ship's systems in there? If that's the case, why not utilize the volume in a more logical way and have the wings be thicker and shorter rather than longer and thinner?

So even scaled up, the BoP design makes little sense for a large battleship. It's fine for a scoutship that can land on planetary surfaces, but not for something as large as the Enterprise.

If a plot calls for a pitifully small Klingon ship (the traditional role of the BoP), it should look distinct from the menacingly superior Klingon ship (the role into which the BoP was cast in "Yesterday's Enterprise" and "Rascals", and it's quite the shame that it does not. Yet fixing things like this was never the forte of the TOS-R effort, even in (and especially in) those cases where the ship VFX was deliberately and completely changed.

The problem with YE was that both designs were used in the same episode at different scales, first when the scout ship attacks the Enterprise-D, then later when the K'Vorts show up. I know they decided to use the BoP as the K'Vort instead of utilizing the kitbash that Okuda hastily built, but at the very least they could have used stock footage of the three K'T'Ingas from TMP since while not as large as the Ent-D, they're significantly larger than the BoP.

 

[Unicron]

It would have been cool to see a trio of Vor'Chas in YE instead, IMO. Sadly the Vor'Cha wasn't built until S4.

 

[Dukhat]

There's no way we would have gotten a filming model like the Vor'cha for YE. There just wouldn't have been time or money to build anything that detailed. Their only real choices were to use stock footage or film a model they already had on hand. As I mentioned before, if I was going to film new footage of attacking Klingon ships that were a match for the Enterprise-D, I would have utilized the Promellian battlecruiser colored green in post-production and multiplied by three.

 

[Timo]

The easiest thing to do would have been to swap the species, so that the Romulans (with their existing "scout" and "battlewagon" models) would attack while the Klingons would go unseen. Much of the story could still go the original way, with the E-C heroics saving the UFP-Klingon alliance rather than a UFP-Romulan one; what happened at Narendra III could result in Romulan rather than Klingon aggression easily enough, too.

Thinking ahead would always be a good idea, though. When introducing, say, the Cardassians, the show probably could have afforded to create two ships to meet obvious dramatic needs, "big/menacing" and "small/civilian" - and this is pretty much what they did, even if the latter was a repainted piece of Pakled junk*. But S3 would have been the perfect time to do this to players that already were known to be important assets for the show (and already had one half of the required models built): the Romulans got the treatment, the Klingons sadly did not.

Timo Saloniemi

* For the better, really, since DS9 would then go on to establish this triangular motif as something pertaining to Cardassian/Bajoran ships in general, including one further repaint job and a couple of newbuilds!

 

[publiusr]

There's no way we would have gotten a filming model like the Vor'cha for YE.

A quick and dirty kitbash could have been done--as here:
http://www.starshipmodeler.co/gallery15/kk_121113_kd.html

Now there, II would have flipped the power-pack box/shuttlebay block upside down and had two nacelles in a flat "T" looking a bit like the Jem Hadar heavy cruiser


It would have been nice to see this..had it been fleshed out
https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/my-version-of-kronos-1-study-model.250342/page-3

FASA’s hull wing design would be nice…L-24s maybe…

The shadow makes one of these minis look great
http://www.starshipmodeler.us/gallery14/eb_100909_d7.htm

 

[Dukhat]

A quick and dirty kitbash could have been done--as here:
http://www.starshipmodeler.co/gallery15/kk_121113_kd.html

That’s an absolutely horrible-looking kitbash. Also, the BoP model kit at the 1:350 scale didn’t come out until five years after YE, so they wouldn’t have been able to make that anyway.

 

[Maurice]

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.

Which study model would that be?

 

[Dukhat]

Which study model would that be?

Yeah, that one. And thanks