posted
Speaking of unnamed GCS, remember that Vulcan in DS9 "Field of Fire"? They said he served on a vessel for nth number of years, and that vessel had a crew of 1000+. It might have been a GCS.
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Registered: Apr 2001
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posted
Actually, they gave a name for his ship. The...Grissom? Gorkon? A known Excelsior, at any rate. It has postulated by some, unwilling in an aesthetic sense to have Starfleet so quickly reusing names, that an Excelsior could indeed carry a thousand people were it serving as a troop transport.
Registered: Mar 1999
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quote:Originally posted by Ace: [QB]We saw the USS Galaxy herself manage to survive a hull breech from an orbital weapons platform. Amazingly, the hull breech was in the engineering section, but she kept on going.
Prehaps they FINIALY moved the antimatter pods away from the BOTTOM of the hull and added some "protection" around the warp core....
Hell, a modern reactor has 3-6 feet of cement containment dome around it, along with the cement buildup around the reactor itself...
Hmmm...
YARD WORKER: You want us to do what?! CAPTAIN: Pour cement around the warp core. WORKER: But-- That's made of... dirt! CAPTAIN: Yes, so? WORKER: (sigh)Ok... It's your ship!
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posted
Ha! I did some old-thread-browsing and I found the answer myself! The NCC-71564 is an invention of the good Reverend. He had wanted to include the ship from the Calendar (which he had thought to be called the U.S.S. Santa Maria) in his list, but since the registry was NCC-70564, lower than that of the U.S.S. Galaxy herself, our buddy the Rev decided to (to use his words) "bump it up" so that it would fit a sequential registry scheme.
This NCC-71564 does not exist. And it may be that the NCC-70564 doesn't either. I don't think we were ever able to match that calendar pic to a shot from an episode.
I still wish Mojo would tell us what the name of that ship was supposed to be, though. Santa Maria never seemed right to me from looking at the pic. But it definitely was a two-word name. The last word looked a bit like 'Hope' as I recall.
Give me a little while and I'll dig the scans out of my files and post them.
posted
hmmm lots of questions! I hope I can remember everything...
- The image of the Galaxy Class from the 'calendar' you speak of I believe is a Gary Hutzel image - it's not from a 'Ships of the Line' calendar so I really don't know what the reg is!
- ILM's CG Galaxy Class model, if they do in fact have one, has never left ILM. Digital Muse did the CG FX work for most of DS9, so they built the initial CGI model used for the show (probably for Sacrafice of Angels).
- SOA was a joint venture between Muse and Foundation. The producers knew that the battle they wanted to do would be cost prohibitive with traditional FX, so there was a major gear up of new CGI models for this episode. Muse handled the Fed ships (Galaxy, Miranda, Defiant, etc) while Foundation did the bad guy ships (Cardassian, Jem Hadaar, etc). Muse did the shots for the first half of the show, and Foundation did everything in the second half (beginning with the close-up shot of the top of the Defiant after the act break).
- When it came time for "Timeless," Rob Bonchune went in and did some major fix-up work on the Galaxy Class model, which is the one that has been used up to present day. A brand new CGI Galaxy Class model will make it's debut in "Unseen Frontier." This will be the most accurate yet and may surpass the studio miniature in detail.
- In regards to Constitution Class ships at Wolf 359, the evidence on screen points to one, and since A) There is no proof that one WASN'T there and B) I have the model - I'm saying it was there. Besides, it fits in with my modus operandi that, with approx 24 hours to put a massive defensive fleet together, if it could fly and fire, it was there.
- Despite the fact the many of you would like to believe a Galaxy Class ship wasn't there, there simply WILL be one. Just not wanting to see another one destroyed is not a good enough reason to keep it out of the fray - in fact, because it IS the best and mightiest ship in the fleet, all the more reason the battle was such a tragedy - NOTHING could stop the Borg.
However, my inclusion of this ship is not without good reason and forethought:
- As pointed out, Shelby didn't sit there and name every ship in the graveyard. They were there long enough to see what happened, stood shocked for a minute and moved on. There are MANY unaccounted for ships.
- I firmly believe that Utopia Planitia would have been emptied out of ALL ships that were completed enough to, as I like to say, "fly and fire." To say that ships still at UP were not capable of joining the battle is nonsense. Some of them certainly were in no shape to fly, but it stands to reason that at any moment there are many ships in various stages of completion. Some of them probably just needed a few last panels installed and a paint job! So, rather than play with canon and either make up a new ship name or mess with the life on an existing one, I think it's fine to say it was a ship yet to be finished.
TIME FOR THE PRACTICAL REASONS MOTIVATING ALL THIS:
Welcome to the behind the scene section, folks! This is where I hope you will bear with me and understand how decisions get made - not just for my book, but for most movies and TV shows as well!
- I have a finite amount of resources to get this book done. There is absolutely no way I have the ability to get even TEN brand new classes of ship made to the standards I insist on for this book (they all have to BETTER than TV quality). As much as I'd like to build every alternate class we saw at Wolf 359, it's just not possible. I'll have a few made, but most of the ones being worked on will also be of use in other places (such as the Excelsior, Ambassador and Oberth). For these reasons, I have to make the most of the ships I already have in the library. I wish to respect canon AND the fans (which is why I am here in the first place), but please try and understand - if it's even remotely possible that one of the already-built ships was at Wolf 359, I've got to go with it.
- Finally, the cover of the book is an extremely important consideration. Pocket Books would like a Wolf 359 image on the cover, and I agree it would be quite an attention-getter. However, the cover of a Star Trek book is much, much better off with an ENTERPRISE on it (or at least the same class so that the average Trek fan will recognize something). I originally planned to have the connie on there, but Paramount prefers the D, since it is the ship most fans these days relate to.
So, the cover has to have a Wolf 359 shot in which the Borg Cube and a Galaxy Class ship are very recognizable so even your average, run of the mill, doesn't have any blueprints memorized Star Trek fan will see the book and go "hey, cool, the Enterprise fighting the Borg! Everyone loves that! Lemme take a closer look!"
If it makes you feel better, call me whore.
:-)
Mojo
[ January 20, 2002: Message edited by: Mojo ]
Registered: Mar 2001
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posted
Note: Post was made before Mojo added the rest of his post.
AH! Where's the rest of his post?!
A GCS at Wolf 359...I stil don't like it, but oh well...maybe you could have the unfinished USS Sovereign engage the Borg at Wolf 359, instead...and be destroyed! ::evil laugh::
If you must use a Galaxy class, you could only use the stardrive section? That way the ship wasn't a total loss...I still don't get it.
11,000 lives. 39 ships. If all the ships were equal size, that gives us crews of about 283. No need for a monster sizes ship to take a 400-500 size chunk out of the list.
On a totally unrelated topic: Is the new Galaxy CGI model going to have the nacelle phaser arrays like the Venture?
posted
Your right Monkey, I did. Oh well, silly me. I'm sure I did retract my theory that it was labled Santa Maria, that last word definatly looks like "Hope" any maritime buffs out there know of any famous ship names ending with hope?
I probably shouldn't have included it in my list really.
posted
Fine, I understand the marketing reasons. When you write the history of the "blank" Galaxy class starship, could you say it lasted longer than the USS Melbourne, at least?
Do you still plan on having a New Orleans in the book?
Registered: Jul 2000
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Please make the GCS go out in a blaze of glory. Something like "It was due to the effort of the USS [name of GCS] that anyone escaped the battle at all. The [name of only ship that escaped] was able to recover a majority of the escape pods at Wolf 359 and escape, while the [name of GCS] faught a desperate rearguard action. Her crew's last, valiant stand against the Borg saved over a [large number] lives and bought time for the Enterprise to arrive."
A large memorial build near the remains of the ship would also be nice, like the Arizona memorial at Pearl Harbor.
-------------------- "God's in his heaven. All's right with the world."
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted
Incidentally, I was going to mention this earlier, but It slipped my mind while talking about the Galaxies.
We *do* know what happened to a good deal of the wreckage from Wolf 359: It was hauled off to the surplus yard at Qualor II, as per "Unification" (TNG).
It might be cool to see some tugs clearing the graveyard debris after the battle...
-MMoM
-------------------- The flaws we find most objectionable in others are often those we recognize in ourselves.
Registered: Jun 2001
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Mojo: I think canonite feathers would be less likely to be ruffled if the book actually goes into a bit of depth showing the emptying of UP and this partially-finished Galaxy (along with others) and flying off to their doom, with the text drawing attention to the fact. Some people will be impossible to please, of course, as I'm sure Brannon Braga could attest. But 95% is certainly good enough and I'm pretty sure you can get that. I'll add that <ricky ricardo>you've got some s'plaining to do </ricky ricardo> when it comes to the Connie, too. Off the top of my head, let's assume that the Republic was still around as a refit-Connie trainer ship but it stayed out of the fight, owing to whatever reasons (It was off at Vulcan with a crew of cadets for cultural exchange or something.) But there could have been a second refit-Connie training ship which was recalled from taking comet samples in the Kuiper belt and became one of the true tragedies of the battle when its crew of 300 cadets were slaughtered, (not to mention destroying a 100-plus-year-old piece of history.) I'm just theorizing, of course.
And I still say you should get in contact with Rob Legato and ask about that lost footage. You've got the power, dammit! In many ways that's the original Wolf 359 "unseen frontier" that's been unseen for nine years now.
One last thing: about the VFX in "Angels." Who/what exactly is/was Vision Art, then? They appeared in the SofA credits, and Foundation didn't.
[ January 20, 2002: Message edited by: The_Tom ]
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Vision Art did all the CGI for DS9 until "Sacrifice of Angels". It wasn't much, because DS9 of the first five seasons used models 90% of the time. Vision Art's animators made the first CG Defiant model and animated its warp jump in "Defiant". We also see this model in the revised opening credits and the atmospheric footage of "Starship Down". The company's CGI Jem'Hadar fighter appears in "Starship Down" as well. In addition, they modelled a runabout, did a bunch of Odo morphs, etc.
When Foundation and Muse took over, the CG models had to be rebuilt because Vision Art didn't use LightWave, and the models didn't survive the conversion process. That's why we got the strange new Defiant in "Sacrifice of Angels", among other things, which they ended up fixing in "The Changing Face of Evil."
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