Studying all the images available it seems the artist intended the pods to be generally an elongated elipsoid with pods varying in size. Some pods look almost perfectly elipsoid and some look somewhat distorted and more like an egg shape. And some of the pods appear to be a bit flattened on one side. Many of you might think I'm nuts, but I'm reworking this yet again to try to get closer to what we see onscreen even though it's difficult to gauge perspective with this thing and keeping in mind that even things with which we are already well familiar weren't drawn perfectly faithfully with what was seen in TOS. That leaves me some leeway to interpret what I'm seeing. The other thing I'm considering is how might this ship have been constructed as a live-action miniature during TOS. With this in mind I'm wondering how the method of construction could influence the look of the final product. I am cheating a little by thinking in terms of having sufficient time to do the job reasonably with materiels at hand rather than whatever could be cooked up today with CGI. The miniature wouldn't have to be all that big to get the right effect to film decently for television of the day. Perhaps one could use somewhat heavy gage wire to form the vines and connect the pods together. Even heavy coathanger wire could serve if the miniature wasn't too big. The pods might be some kind of foam (perhaps prefabricated in roughly the right shapes) or maybe they could be paper mache. The planet killer from "The Doomsday Machine" is an excellent example of something actually rather simple that manages to look truly alien when lighted and filmed properly. Perhaps this could have ben done with the alien ship from "Beyond The Farthest Star."
My guess is a miniature would not have been built self-supporting due to potential wobble. My guess is that the pods would be fixed to blue painted mounting rods and the "vines" would not actually bear any load. Looking at the still frames of the close angles of the pods some of them look dumpling shaped, which may or may not match with the wide view.
If the miniature were suspended by one end and the pods were lightweight then the wire might not wobble. It might be interesting to try constructing this thing sometime.
The bulging deformities on those pods always looked to me to be weak spot damage from having blown outward.
I must confess I feel somewhat challenged in thinking of a way to show the pods with holes ruptured outward. I can create a hole, but mimicking what we see onscreen presently has me stumped. And it would be time consuming to do every pod with such damage. I am also adding a bit of surface detail on the pods and vines that we did not see onscreen to make the model a bit more interesting. Furthermore the coloured mottling on the pods is actually a slightly recessed feature noticeable in shots where we see the pod surface up close. But at the scale I'm working at I'm inclined to forego such a detail that would be indiscernible at a distance. It's not an impossible detail to add, but it would be quite time consuming as each green coloured marking would have to be recessed individually and repeated on every single pod. And on a physical miniature I could see that as a challenging detail to add as well.
Are you intending then to show this ship as it looked when active? Pre-damage? You have some latitude with the vines then, as - at least to my eye - there seem to be at least two missing pods and the vines seem somewhat tangled from the other pods being moved around a bit. That is assuming there was some bilateral symmetry at the start. This was one of the ships I did some work on for my “50 Ships for 50 Years” project, so I’m familiar with the problems you are encountering.
The image to which publiusr linked has a side view of “Defiant” that was meant to include some of the distortions that popped up in TAS renderings of the TOS Enterprise- specifically, the elongated secondary hull and nacelles. Those were only occasional, and no doubt errors. But combined with that crazy huge hangar they depicted, it offered the opportunity to say the ship might have undergone extensive repairs after Season 3 that left it with a slightly altered profile.
I intend to show the alien ship as the Enterprise found it, or at least how it might have appeared on TOS. To that end some of the pods could be out of alignment with others as it appears to look that way onscreen. So I might come up with some way to show the damage.
Scott describes the manufacture as “this metal, it isn't cast or rolled. It was drawn into filaments and spun. ”Kirk then replies, “Like a spider spins his web.” And Spock summizes, “A lighter and stronger material than anything we have now.” The pods are then described as definitely having been blown open: “KIRK: Look, every pod, they've all been burst open. SCOTT: Aye, from the inside, from the looks of them. MCCOY: Must have been some accident to get almost every pod. SPOCK: Accidents seldom have such system, Doctor McCoy. I believe we must consider the alternative possibility that the crew of this ship destroyed her themselves.”
When I heard these lines in 1973 (and later read in Foster's novelizations) I thought what a wild, "high concept" notion. Nowadays, I think of filament style 3D "printing".
The pods could have been blown up maybe two ways: 1. The crew blew the pods open trying to kill the alien entity or to make the ship useless to it. Since the entity evidently doesn’t need a habitable environment then this destruction would be pointless. Doesn’t make much sense the crew blew the pods open to kill themselves—a crummy way to commit suicide. 2. The alien entity blew the pods open to kill the crew. If so then a rash choice since the entity couldn’t work the ship alone to try to escape the negative star mass. Later the entity used the Enterprise’s phasers to completely destroy the alien ship. Was this a final act of vindictiveness against the long dead alien crew that had frustrated its escape? Or was it to prevent the Enterprise crew from further investigating the alien ship? Maybe they might have learned where the entity originated?
The pods are rendered rather dumpling-like in some of the close angles, and the impression sure is that this thing is waaaaaay bigger than the Enterprise given how thick the vines are compared to the figures standing on them (like so).
Yeah, it looks like the Enterprise could fit into some of those pods. Then again we don’t have a clear idea where the Enterprise is relative to the alien ship—is it directly underneath (as seems to be implied), further in the background or in the foreground? The strongest case can be made that it’s directly underneath the alien vessel. Although I initially plotted out the arrangement of the pods in an ideal symmetrical arrangement I’ve decided to contort the position of some of those pods as the onscreen image seems to suggest to convey the idea of the ship as a whole being damaged.
Is it possible that the dumping shape is the result of a viewing a pod directly towards its end? http://tas.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/blu-ray/101-BR/beyondthefartheststarhd0126.jpg
Seeing things up close can reveal detail, but be distorted in shape due to close up perspective. Thats why I would rely a bit more on a distant shot for a truer sense of overall shape. In the end I still see these pods in varying in shape although overall elipsoid. Update: I have only two pods left to make and then the mess of vines in the aft end. Hopefully I'll have something to show soon.
I think I might have a way to show the pods ruptured. Note that not all the pods facing our pov need to be shown ruptured given realistically some of the damage would be on the opposite side of the ship unseen. But being a 3D model I could rupture all the pods to be more complete. It might not look exactly as what we saw in TAS, but then we're now seeing something in three dimensional form as we might have seen it live-action as opposed to a two dimensional animated drawing. The vines don't lok to be ruptured, but in two or thre places they look as if they are a bit contored but not breached near where a pod has been ruptured.
Update. I've got all the pods done, but the vines at one end are insane as I try to decipher which vines go whrere, what are they passing behind and which pods are they connected to. It's looks nuts.
Considering that when we see it - the ship has been "blown" out, the pods may have drifted from their proper places. Some by the force of being blown open and others as a side-effect...
This looks rather chaotic from a human perspective particularly without any idea how the ship is supposed to be laid out or what purpose each pod serves. Considering the size of the ship and the distance each vine spans the vines must serve some other functions than simple access from one pod to another. There also looks to be very little direct access from one pod to another. In many if not most cases getting from one pod to another requires a rather long and roundabout path. As such one wonders if this could say something about the social structure or hierachy of the beings who built this ship. Perhaps they were highly structured and segregated, limiting easy access from one part of the ship to another.
Primary modelling is done. Next is to try adding damage to the pods and perhaps a bit of added detail to the vines. It's getting there.