Space Cruiser Aurora

Hello all,
I always wanted to know if the Aurora from "The Way To Eden" would be considered a luxury yacht? I personally like the original Tholian design over the remastered version. The Hippie's parents seemed to be people of importance and wealth. Starfleet considered the ship to be of great value and wanted it returned. I think the ship was a long range luxury yacht, What is your opinion?

 

It's technically a Raymond Luxury Yacht.

 

It had to be a small, private vessel, because it was stolen rather than hijacked, and the hippies were the only ones aboard. So it was like a yacht that had no crew when the owner wasn't using it.

If it was anything bigger, like a commercial cruise ship, then the hippies would have had to use violence (or threats with weapons) to seize it, and the charges would have been more serious.

 

But pronounced Throat-wobbler Mangrove.

 

Note it's The Tholian ship but upside down or at an angle as I recall! It was well known in the twenty third century that wealthy businessmen and Diplomats had a deal going with the leaders of the Tholian Assembly in spacecraft adaptation! The Tholians sold the hulls of their worn out ships and the rich used them for their own needs that or it was a Tholian ship captured by Starfleet and given as a prize to the Radd family?
Or it was a model that was reused in the show because they thought no one would notice?
JB

 

It's a Tholian ship turned nose to tail with nacelle grafted on.

 

There's a cool old set of fan blueprints depicting this as a 20 m long private/commercial space yacht, with one of the three hull sections being a two-deck habitation area and the other two being for engines and stuff. Sort of Vulcanesque... That is, if one wants to think of the TMP shuttle as a Vulcan design.

I'm immensely partial to the TOS-R remake, though.

Timo Saloniemi

 

I haven't seen any other version than the re purposed Tholian model on my screen. So that's the only one that's canon.

 

The BBC always screened Way To Eden before The Tholian Web so sadly the first scene of the Tholian ship was not as impressive as it could have been for me!
JB

 

The Tholian-Aurora miniature was modified with parts from AMT model kits. They apparently used engine pylons from the Klingon kit and (modified) nacelles from the Romulan.

 

Well maybe that's why Klingons felt so aggressive towards The Tholians then? They'd stolen part of their ship design for their own fleet!
Not that we ever saw or really heard anything about that only from Riker in TNG!
JB

 

The Klingon pylons I can believe, but AMT did not release a Romulan ship (BoT style) until the mid 1970s.. Wouldn't it seem a bit more reasonable that nacelles from the USS Enterprise kit were scavenged?

 

Oh, this myth again. Just look at the Aurora model and it's obvious whose are not klingon ship pylons:

1. they're curved at the bend, not angled like the klingon ship
2. the klingon ship "wing" sweep back, then forwards after the bend, on the Aurora it just sweeps back

PHOTO ON MEMORY ALPHA ​

Looks to me like they just cut and heat-bent pieces of perspex.

 

Thanks, @Maurice. I'm at the office and many sites are blocked (I surprised this one is not), so it can be a bit tricky to access resources. I couldn't readily picture the pylons in my head, so I was unsure about that feature. But I felt confident the engine tubes themselves could NOT have come from a Romulan kit as that assembly kit would not be released for several more years.

 

Hmm, the engines can't "see" each other. A violation of one of Roddenberry's rules.

 

I don't think that "rule" was in Gene's head at that point, and Gene wasn't exactly there day-to-day on season 3.

 

That's right, I remember now. The Romulan kit came out years later than the Enterprise and Klingon ship.

I'd now say Maurice is right about the non-Klingon pylons. The nacelles might have been from an Enterprise kit and cut down in length, or they could be any kind of tubes that came to hand.

 

As terrible as it is to ask, what did the Aurora look like in the CGI version of the episode? I'm pretty sure it was nothing like the original version or a Tholian cruiser!
JB

 

^^^ Here you go. http://img.trekmovie.com/tosrem/waytoeden/new_tosr075_01.jpg

 

I think this is one where the remastered design beats the original.