Douglas Rain died Sunday, November 12. I won’t be one of those that copies a eulogy so go here for that.
Rains performance was pitch perfect for that film. I am still amazed when viewing 2001 how chilling HAL is as a sympathetic villian. Whenever I see an ad for Alexa, or remind myself not to enable Siri, I hear his voice.
More work on the VERY extended range explorer project. I tweaked the warp nacelle design, a bit, and updated the starship that accompanies the explorer. I also decided that the complement of ships housed would include two different class of ships. Each would have a specific mission type but have a fair number of shared capabilities. They also would have similar base components to make maintenance easier.
Here is the revised ‘Class 1’ ship
Here is the ‘Class 2’ ship
Well, it’s not a space station either. ☺
Welcome to another addition to my version of Star Trek. This “little” guy is a post-Dominion war deep space explorer. Built around Earth CE 2400 (Stardate 77001.36), this is one of 4 such ships commissioned. It uses a Federation designed transwarp drive that emulates Borg technology. These ships were sent to the farthest reaches of the galaxy to ‘seek out new…yadda, yadda, yadda’.
The Federation transwarp device works great for extreme distances but not so much for your basic 1-500 light year hop. To meet its primary objective each ship carries a complement of 8 Federation cruisers and a large contingent of smaller warp shuttles. The primary ship does its best to arrive close to a star that one would expect no life to have evolved around – not to scare the natives or start a freak’n war.
I heavily borrowed from existing Masao pre-Federation and Trek space station design on this.
Here is the cruiser (yet to be named) that tags along for the ride.
Now, what are the odds I’ll ever finish this?
Moved another of my (mostly) finished ‘lesser known’ Star Trek ships over to my (ahem) render station. I’m thinking I will create just a section for these when (if) I get enough done to warrant it. Means writeups on each – ah man!
Here is my take on a Federation defense drone. I know that this piece of ubiquitous technology came long after Star Trek (you name the series) but may have been hinted at in the Borg episode ‘Best of Both Worlds – Part II’ with the Mars perimeter ships that were destroyed. I know one of you out there will know way more about this than me.
This is a post-Dominion War design. With all the carnage of that conflict and the losses incurred, the Federation needed to fortify against future threats. This little ship utilizes all kinds of crap they talk about in Star Trek and then forget they ever came up with it.
1) No Warp drive as it is not required, it is built at the system it defends. I suppose you could ferry them out in some undefined transport.
2) Twin impulse engines housed on either side of the main body
3) Reactors power phaser arrays that encompass the forward half of each impulse nacelle
4) Utilizes regenerative shielding
5) Has 8 dorsal photon launchers
6) Deploys interphase cloak (the hell with treaties)
7) Advanced AI used to employ offensive and defensive strategies against targets identified by local central command (does require three levels of authentication to activate and must come from a hardcoded list of in system transmitters – no ‘Ultimate Computer’ issues).
8) No crew
This little beast is essentially a non-warp Defiant class ship at about 75M in length. I am assuming most major systems would have 40 to 50 of these things laying around in wait. They could easily take on a Borg cube or two at the same time and win. Maybe a First Federation ship could bat them off but, hey, they like us (if they still even exist 🙂 )
Yes, that’s correct, there is now a very cool book version of the Star Trek Museum available. The book is written by Masao Okazaki and edited by Dan Carlson. It is available at Lulu.com. There is no price markup on the book, this is being sold at no profit, the retail covers the printers cost.
Shameless plug – it does contain some renderings done by me that I have contributed previously to the museum as well as some specific to the book.
On another note – 9 months since my last post! Whaaaaaat?
Have to work on that.
Almost four months! You would think I have been working hard on getting this project done!
I know you weren’t – and I have not. Life reared it’s ugly head and, well, who cares 🙂 .
I had a free Friday evening and a few quite hours today and played with the station. I know I have built this before but this is going in a big scene (as I keep saying) and everything about the original was way too big. Too many polys and massive textures made it too hard to use. Also, the previous version I had built is not the one you can see at the museum site but a version Masao provided many years ago that is a bigger station.
This version is very low poly, uses masks for a number of things to reduce weight (saves memory) and is the version seen at the SFM site. This makes it so much easier to use because I can stuff ships in the finished scene and it will look busy enough. The doors all open and the interiors are there. I solved for the big (10 story tall) windows. The top/bottom domes are portholes for rooms. The main hanger dome perimeter rooms all have big picture windows. The attachment cylinders with the shuttle bays have large 4 meter(ish) size galleries.
I will have to render the interiors in separate passes for correct lighting. I will have ships in and outside if all goes well.
Anyway – still here folks!
I am attempting to create a very extensive scene using the Fleet Museum. I had (have) revised the mesh to try and simplify the task as it will have a number of ships parked at and within it. Unfortunately the mesh, even modified, became a bit unwieldy for my old rendering system and Wings 3D has some kind of weird export issue if a mesh gets too big. Piecing it out did not help either (maybe another try later).
I took an older version that had most changes and imported it so I can revise and fix textures. Again, my system cannot handle too big a file set so…
Posting mostly as a motivator 🙂
