The Official Fan Art Lounge (Off-Topic Discussion Goes Here)

[Michael]

Welcome to the official Fan Art Lounge!

The place for off-topic side discussion, random tangents and other interesting conversations. Make yourself at home, maybe grab a good book from our extensive library, enjoy a game of 3d chess or just stare out the windows and gaze at the stars. Whatever you do — if you are looking for cultured exchange on the finer points of Trek artistry, you've come to the right place.

You've spotted an interesting thought in another fan art thread and want to spin it off into its own conversation without cluttering up the artist's thread? Or you have something else you want to share that maybe doesn't warrant its own thread? It all goes here.

Enjoy.

And since @Donny's amazing thread inspired all this, I'll try to set the mood and leave you with this …

This is *not* the place to spam, though. So please behave yourselves.

 

[K1productions]

I've been through every page now of your TOS and Refit threads. I really love watching the work develop, and the results are amazing, even for sets and craft I never really cared for. The TOS and TMP aesthetics carry the day for me. As much as I enjoyed TWOK and others moving forward, I feel in many ways that some of the scenic designs just pasted unnecessary layers onto what remain excellent core designs. Looking forward to seeing more!

I agree there. While in some instances, some extra detail is nice,... all the extra stuff they put in the corridors was just unnecessarily busy, especially in the intersections. It actually made the ship look LESS advanced.

 

[cardinal biggles]

^I think that was kind of the point. Nick Meyer wanted to make Horatio Hornblower In Space. The added greebles, the new uniforms, the manual-load torpedo room complete with grates that have to be pulled up out of the floor, and the way that the ships fire phasers at each other like two old men-o'-war trading volleys from their cannons... it all pushes the film's aesthetic away from the sterile, 2001 feel of TMP and toward something that lines up better with the director's intent. (Even moreso in Undiscovered Country where they take Herman Zimmerman's beige bridge from TFF and go full Red October on it.)

 

[K1productions]

^I think that was kind of the point. Nick Meyer wanted to make Horatio Hornblower In Space. The added greebles, the new uniforms, the manual-load torpedo room complete with grates that have to be pulled up out of the floor, and the way that the ships fire phasers at each other like two old men-o'-war trading volleys from their cannons... it all pushes the film's aesthetic away from the sterile, 2001 feel of TMP and toward something that lines up better with the director's intent. (Even moreso in Undiscovered Country where they take Herman Zimmerman's beige bridge from TFF and go full Red October on it.)

I actually prefer the Final Frontier bridge. I loved all the wonderful displays Michael Okuda had designed, only to see much of them replaced with not only physical buttons,... but a straight rip-off of a sound mixer. Considering it was a console that was shown multiple times in close-up, it felt rather lazy to me to have no design effort put into it.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

I loved all the wonderful displays Michael Okuda had designed, only to see much of them replaced with not only physical buttons,... but a straight rip-off of a sound mixer. Considering it was a console that was shown multiple times in close-up, it felt rather lazy to me to have no design effort put into it.

I wouldn't say that there was no design effort put into it. Just a different aesthetic. You design for what the director likes.

 

[K1productions]

I wouldn't say that there was no design effort put into it. Just a different aesthetic. You design for what the director likes.

Well the close up shots of Valaris punching the buttons before sliding up the sliders when initiating Impuse, that is literally nothing but the sound mixer with a different cover. At least in Wrath of Khan, the new controls were just switches added where they were needed, so a custom layout. Hell, even Rick Berman's infamous NX moment offered more originality than this. You know, when he slapped an image of an Akira-class down on (I forgot if it was Rick Sternbach or Doug Drexler)'s desk and said "I want Enterprise to look just like that"

Oh shoot, we're starting to dive into off-topic mode again.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Well the close up shots of Valaris punching the buttons before sliding up the sliders when initiating Impuse, that is literally nothing but the sound mixer with a different cover.

Yeah, and so what? It worked perfectly well for the quick cutaway shots the piece was used for.

 

[cardinal biggles]

At least in Wrath of Khan, the new controls were just switches added where they were needed, so a custom layout.

Which new controls are you specifically referencing?

 

[K1productions]

Which new controls are you specifically referencing?

The Wrath of Khan ones I am mentioning were on the Weapons station. The row of switches, and the torpedo safety handle

They at least went to the effort of creating a new contraption for the torpedoes (as unnecessary as it was), and while the switches were just individual switches made in a row, that is all they were supposed to be.

Undiscovered Country however,... look at what they did. They tossed away the legitimately awesome-looking Okudagrams from Final Frontier

and instead just took the soundmixer and either took the cover off and slapped a new one over it, or just painted over it. The layout is EXACTLY the same, even the color of the buttons. If we didn't already have the previous console, this wouldn't have bothered me as much

 

[JoeRalat]

ST 6 buttons and displays are the best. Perfect mix

 

[cardinal biggles]

I guess we're just going to have to agree to disagree on the changes they made for Undiscovered Country.

The Wrath of Khan ones I am mentioning were on the Weapons station. The row of switches, and the torpedo safety handle

They at least went to the effort of creating a new contraption for the torpedoes (as unnecessary as it was), and while the switches were just individual switches made in a row, that is all they were supposed to be.

The switches also look incredibly out of place — they don't match any of the other physical controls on any of the TMP-era sets — and there's a huge glaring flaw in them: the switches can only be flipped once; this means (at least with this interface) it's impossible for Starfleet to use any prefix code that has more than one of the same digit. Oops.

 

[K1productions]

I just would rather have seen them take buttons and build their own layout out of them. Arrange them in their own pattern to make something unique, to compare with the artistry of Michael Okuda's wonderful work in the previous film. But with what they did, they might has well have put a standard qwerty keyboard on the console

 

[jfttf276]

For a while I considered the TUC switches to be in place to operate some functions in case the power went out. It is a shocking step back compared to the TFF bridge. TWOK prefix code switches would have been better as something similar to a telephone pad or 10 key pad so that the code could be entered faster, be longer, and have some numbers repeated. It would have made sense for the prefix code to be alpha-numeric.

 

[K1productions]

For a while I considered the TUC switches to be in place to operate some functions in case the power went out. It is a shocking step back compared to the TFF bridge. TWOK prefix code switches would have been better as something similar to a telephone pad or 10 key pad so that the code could be entered faster, be longer, and have some numbers repeated. It would have made sense for the prefix code to be alpha-numeric.

I would have felt those switches were dumb had they only been used for the prefix code. However, we see Joachin flipping one of them to activate the shields on the Reliant. It is clear they can have different functions assigned to them, much like the rocker switches on the TOS bridge

 

[Mytran]

The limited prefix code only really makes sense if you have ONE CHANCE to enter it and get it right, otherwise alarms are set off on the target ship and the option is locked out

 

[jfttf276]

I forgot one was used for Reliants shields. I remember hearing once that Michael Dorn had said that the button to fire torpedoes changed every time.

 

[K1productions]

I forgot one was used for Reliants shields. I remember hearing once that Michael Dorn had said that the button to fire torpedoes changed every time.

That happens a lot. In fact, when they fire phasers, they are doing it wrong. They were pressing the indicator, not the button.

The blue button at the bottom is to actually fire, the tall rectangles above just light up when it is firing. Same thing for Torpedoes, the red hexagons were supposed to be used to fire, not the handle thing. I would assume CTY is actually supposed to be QTY to indicate quantity of torpedoes being fired.

 

[Christopher]

The blue button at the bottom is to actually fire, the tall rectangles above just light up when it is firing. Same thing for Torpedoes, the red hexagons were supposed to be used to fire, not the handle thing. I would assume CTY is actually supposed to be QTY to indicate quantity of torpedoes being fired.

The Flight Manual notes say the torpedoes are loaded using the sliders on the panel two to the right of that one, and the panel above that has eight lights that blink when they're loaded. So those would set and indicate the number of torpedoes loaded. So "CTY" has to be something else.

 

[K1productions]

The Flight Manual notes say the torpedoes are loaded using the sliders on the panel two to the right of that one, and the panel above that has eight lights that blink when they're loaded. So those would set and indicate the number of torpedoes loaded. So "CTY" has to be something else.

That is the torpedo load panel, not the fire control panel.

The sliders would control the yield of the torpedo, and the indicator apparently displaying said yield in magnitudes of quarters (i.e. 25%, 50%, 75% and 100%) blinking when said torpedo is loaded into injector 1 and 2. Control of actually firing them is then operated by the Fire Control panel, where the operator can select the quantity and to initiate fire.

Also keep in mind at this time Photon Torpedoes were still energy weapons, not a physical warhead (speaking with regards to the production, not canon, which had later changed). Wrath of Khan changed that because Nick Meyer wanted his manual labor Navy scene.

 

[Tomalak]

and instead just took the soundmixer and either took the cover off and slapped a new one over it, or just painted over it. The layout is EXACTLY the same, even the color of the buttons. If we didn't already have the previous console, this wouldn't have bothered me as much

I do understand and sympathise with this, but as with all these found objects, it only sticks out if you know what the original item is. I've never worked with sound mixers, so don't know what one looks like. Most cinemagoers will be the same, so it's fine for a few brief shots.

Once the director has indicated the direction he wants to take in the design process, the designers just have to go with it. Why go to the trouble and expense of designing something bespoke when you have a very small budget to start with? Just get something off the shelf and install it. It looks fine and does the job nicely.