Warbird/Bird of Prey Thingy

[Forbin]

Locutus of Bored said:

Babaganoosh said:

Forbin said:
The first time we saw a Klingon ship in ENT, even though the art department had been designing a retro battlecruiser, the assholic producers told them to just use the advanced K'Tinga from the movies, 200 years before it was supposed to exist.

The K't'inga was never used on ENT. They had a number of retro style BOPs.

Yes it was. In 'Unexpected.' It wasn't called a K't'inga, but it clearly used that model.



This battle cruiser was a very much-'unexpected' reuse of the K't'inga-class model, used at the behest of the production staff, despite the series being set over 100 years before this Klingon ship class made its first appearance.

John Eaves and the rest of the team, understandably exhausted after the Enterprise pilot, were asked to do yet another design at the last minute. Eaves did, labeling it a D4 class, but the producers said that "its windows weren't prominent enough", a fact Eaves was very unhappy with. Due to time constraints, they ended up reusing the battle cruiser model that was built for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and had previously appeared in another discontinuity in VOY: "Prophecy", as a D7 class battle cruiser.

As Rob Bonchune recalled the situation, "The only other original design that was also chopped (that I remember now) was the John Eaves Klingon D-4 that I included in my calendar image for 2006. It was originally done for free for Star Trek: Enterprise by Koji Kuramura, who stayed up 36 hours to do it for the show. It looked great, but then the "producer(s)" said, "put more windows on it". We said "no" (you have to understand that we did so much extra, that at that point it was the straw that broke the camels back when they were being mindlessly trivial and unappreciative). So, in their infinite wisdom, they choose to use a low-resolution K't'inga model (from a timeline over 100 years later) we had lying around. Because that was much more logical than a ship that needed 10 more windows that no one would ever notice!"

http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Vorok%27s_battle_cruiser

Here's what they originally planned to use and call a D4:

So there!

 

[Locutus of Bored]

People get on Eaves' ass a lot over his design choices, but as that article demonstrates, while he and other designers have some initial control over the direction a design takes, at the end of the day the final decision comes down to the producers.

If they say they want torpedo launchers in all kinds of ridiculous places on the Enterprise-E, he's got to do it. For some reason they decided that having a ship from the totally wrong era on the show was a better idea than simply not adding a bunch of extra windows that no one would care about to a ship that actually fit with the time period.

I think Eaves gets a lot of unfair criticism sometimes over things he didn't make the final decision on.