Trevanian,
Wouldn't play to the specular qualities of the new paint job with LED type lighting. The 'splash' of light IS the look.
I don't know if I'd want to go with self illuminating skin... It would explain the lack of a self-illumination system in TOS, but I actually did like the basic self-illumination idea in TMP...
Hurt-imer Jittery,
I think those are the sensor arrays. They glowed white because... surprise, the sensor arrays glowed white in TOS. The spotlights happened to be in similar locations (this is how I understand it, though perhaps summoning The God Thing or Probert would be of benefit for clarification.
No, that's not what I'm talking about.
In TMP, before they arrived at the final NAV-Dome set-up, they did not have those spot-lights
(the box-shaped structures, one which pointed forward, two sideways, and one aft), and did not have a white dome -- it was silver.
Just above the dome is a small rim. It also was silver. I was just thinking if you put light on the sides
(not unlike the lights on the conning tower dome, same width and height roughly) aft and front and you'd achieve the same lighting effect on the underside of the saucer.
It would also look more high tech than the TMP enterprise, yet retain the self-lit look.
The God Thing,
I honestly don't understand what CuttingEdge100 is complaining about, but then he/she/it has been starting these nonsensical TMP-trashing threads for years now.
I actually have not been on this forum in years. Second of all, most of my critique was mostly towards TOS at the time.
Oh,
that thing. I propose it's an enclosure for the ventral sensor platform's computational/cooling/whatever support machinery. But it is worth noting that the
original version of the NCC-1701 Refit didn't have that structure. It was only added after Douglas Trumbull - who was legendary for his pathological need to glue crap to miniatures as far back as
2001: A Space Odyssey to generate scale - took over
ST:TMP's visual effects duties from Robert Abel & Associates.
That's what I was talking about. It looked cleaner cut on the early refit design, there was a small area to fit the lights, and it actually looked more high tech than the final TMP design
While I admire Doug Trumbull's double-matte high-contrast passes for filming pearlescent miniatures, I think that gluing all sorts of crap to a scifi-model to produce the illusion of scale was not a particularly good idea.
One of the finer features of Star Trek designs is that they were clean-cut despite advanced looking -- this takes away somewhat from that look.
Timo,
The floodlights spoken about here may be very compact devices, really - after all, similar lighting was provided on the pennants at the aft ends of the nacelles, or on the sides of the secondary hull, without requiring massive boxes or anything.
Exactly, that's kind of what I'm talking about.
Data Holmes
I always thought it would be a cool place for the saucer torpedo tubes on the refit...
Well, if a photon torpedo tube was mounted there, that wouldn't be all that bad an idea, especially if the torpedo could be loaded in just above the dome and spun around into any of the four torpedo tubes so it could be fired easily forward, and to either side, and even rearwards when the saucer is seperated
(though the rear tube obviously couldn't be used while the saucer is attached for obvious reasons, blowing your own ship up is generally bad for business).
I could be wrong here, but you'd still need another self-illumination source
(unless, maybe if you wrapped the light around the torpedo tube) as the photon-torpedo tubes in TMP didn't glow unless they were activated and ready to fire.
Technically though side torpedo-tube set-ups aren't really necessary, technically fore/aft isn't really necessary as the degree of sensor integration in star-trek
(and probably even modern day radar-technology) could simply allow you to either program the torpedo to make a 180 degree turn after launch to go for a target behind them
(or the sensors/radars could guide the torpedo into making such a turn for a target on it's side or behind them and such), though having an aft tube could really provide less reaction time for an enemy ship as the torpedo wouldn't have to go forward make a turn and come back, it would just go right at them.
CuttingEdge100
