*Sigh*
It's been a
loong year and a half. I've popped back in here every so often to keep the thread alive so not to have to start another if this one went dormant for more than a year.
But now finally, things are looking up to get back on track. I've been in my new home for just over a year now and I can't believe it's almost a year I've had my new car (and, yeah, once in awhile I still reminisce about my CrownVic). But even moreso it's hard to believe my mother has been gone a year and a half...
More on point to the subject at hand. Last year I bought a new computer, as I mentioned somewhere upthread--an M3 iMac with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD. To that I added a Minisopuru USB-C hub/doc with enclosed Samsung 990 Pro 2TB backup storage. I next installed SketchUp Pro as well as Maxwell 5 to continue my modelling work. Then I ran into a problem, one I've been fussing with off-and-on (mostly off due to distractions): I cannot seem to activate Maxwell's licence.
Now SketchUp Pro 2024 is optimized for Apple silicon, their M series processors, but it seems Maxwell 5 isn't optimized (although I've been told that is coming...whenever). It still shouldn't be a problem because on previous M series Macs you could install Rosetta for emulation to run programs not yet optimized for Apple silicon. And it should be as easy as toggling on a switch in SketchUp to activate Rosetta. Problem is my version of SketchUp Pro 2024 (or '25) doesn't have that option to switch on Rosetta. I even tried installing Rosetta manually and it made no difference.
I've also tried activating Maxwell's licence manually and it's still not working. I'm presently communicating with someone at Maxwell who is trying to help me sort this out, so hopefully we can get this working. However, if I cannot get Maxwell to work then I will be looking at alternatives such as Ambient Occlusion or Blender or whatever.
Nonetheless, there's no reason I can't get back to modelling even if I don't have a dedicated rendering engine yet. That said in the current version of SketchUp Pro there are plugins available allowing you to render your model in real time within SketchUp to see your model's progression--this could be a temporary solution until I sort the other thing out.
To that end I'm dedicating more thought and sketches to what the starship
Valiant referenced in "A Taste Of Armageddon" could have looked like if we had seen an image of it on a bridge overhead display. This isn't a design that TOS would have had to build (although I will be building it), but it could have been depicted on a vewscreen as a schematic or illustration as a set background detail (I did the same thing for the
Valiant referenced in WNMHGB, although I intend to revisit that design at some point).
I know I already created a design for the old
Valiant referenced in "A Taste Of Armageddon" some years back, but I want to revisit it because I'm now thinking of perhaps something different from I did before.
To that end I've put on my Trek archeology hat to try figuring out what direction go in. The easiest answer, of course, would be a somewhat devolved version of the familiar
Constitution design. But bear with me.
By the time we get to "A Taste Of Armageddon" we're deep into the first season, about 4/5 of the way through. By that time some elements of TOS' in-universe backstory have been revealed to us--more specifically "Where No Man Has Gone Before," "Balance Of Terror" and "The Menagerie."
"Where No Man Has Gone Before" informed us humans have had interstellar spaceflight for at least two centuries thus explaining how the Galactic Survey Cruiser
Valiant managed somehow to reach the edge of the galaxy (we won't quibble at this point about which edge it reached). We can safely assume the old
Valiant wasn't a Starfleet vessel (Starfleet having not yet been established onscreen) and that it wasn't anything like the
Enterprise given some of Kirk's references. But I think we can reasonably assume the
Valiant had at least some early form of FTL or space warp propulsion to get deep into interstellar space.
"Balance Of Terror" informed us that Earth had fought an interstellar war a century earlier with an alien race known only as Romulans. We eventually learn the Romulans are likely an offshoot of the Vulcans who are aligned with Earth and (as will be later established) members of the Federation. In more technical respects we learn the ships used by Earth (and those of the Romulans) were "primitive" by standards of the TOS era. This suggests something more advanced than the old
Valiant yet still significantly less advanced than ships of the TOS era. Spock always endeavours to be precise so he likely wouldn't use the adjective "primitive" rather than "less advanced" unless it more accurately conveyed what he was describing.
"The Menagerie," through its incorporation of the bulk of
Star Trek's unaired first pilot episode, gives us a bit more detail of TOS' historical backstory. More specifically the reference by Lt. Jose Tyler that, "The time barrier has been broken. Our new ships can..." This begs the question how much weight do we give this reference? By incorporating "The Cage" into TOS' regular onscreen production a lot of what is seen and heard there is given canonical weight. It now becomes a matter of how it can be interpreted particularly in light of what we have already learned of TOS' backstory.
When "The Cage" was being produced
Star Trek's in-universe backstory was a complete blank slate. I suspect the reference to a time barrier being broken was likely to suggest that the
Enterprise's faster-than-light space warp capability was a relatively new development. For a 1960's television audience it's not a bad assumption for storytelling purposes. But in-universe it doesn't make much sense at all. If the
Enterprise is already on patrol in deep interstellar space then how could a slower-than-light ship also have reached that far out only eighteen years prior? When you line this up with earlier references made in "Where No Man Has Gone Before" and "Balance Of Terror" it seems likely the
Columbia referenced in "The Menagerie" did indeed have some faster-than-light space warp capability. So Tyler's reference
could mean that ships prior to the TOS era were
a lot slower even though they still had warp capability. Tyler's reference to a "time barrier" could mean he is implying a
significant advancement in starlight propulsion over the past twenty some years. And even if we don't know how old or new a ship the
Columbia was.
Now we get to "A Taste Of Armageddon" and the reference to the starship
Valiant that disappeared in the Eminiar star system fifty years prior. Right off we know this isn't the same
Valiant mentioned in "Where No Man Has Gone Before" because not only was that ship 150 years older, but it was also destroyed. We can also assume the newer
Valiant should be more advanced than the "primitive" ships Spock referenced in "Balance Of Terror." However, this
Valiant predates (or is of the same era as) the
Columbia mentioned in "The Menagerie" by maybe forty years so it precedes the "time barrier" advancements Lt. Tyler mentioned. Given this reasoning then how likely is it this
Valiant is a devolved variant of the
Enterprise design?
Realistically the
Valiant could still be something of a variant of the
Enterprise design, but perhaps not as close a variant as the design I explored some years back. Back then I took one of Matt Jefferies' earlier concepts for the
Enterprise and fleshed it out as a pre TOS era starship. It still works for what I intended, but it might not really be appropriate for the design of the
Valiant.
So here I am pondering a new design that might incorporate elements of my previous design.
An abandoned design that might be worth revisiting. This design has elements similar to the Antares I designed for "Charlie X."
My previous design for the
Valiant. Not bad actually if I may say so.
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