posted
Wouldn't the Enterprise have to be the same color in TWOK, since that movie reused all of the shots of the ship in drydock?
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quote:Originally posted by MinutiaeMan: Wouldn't the Enterprise have to be the same color in TWOK, since that movie reused all of the shots of the ship in drydock?
Well, only near the beginning of the film. The rest were all new. But good point.
I seriously wish they would have done a new sequence for that scene for the Director's Edition DVD, since it really wouldn't be that cost-prohibitive nowadays. I'm generally against re-doing stuff, but this one has always really bugged me, what with the travel pod docking at the engineering section instead of the torpedo room, etc. Plus, I always wished it would have been the new Spacedock from STIII, since it seems waaaay more likely that that installation was built in the thirteen years between TMP and TWOK than in the few-odd weeks between TWOK and TSFS...
Oh, well... -MMoM
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posted
Why assume the dock would be built between the movies? It could just as well be something from Archer's era. That would also help explain the anachronistic look of the thing, "space doors" and all...
AFAIK, we have never seen ships repaired or built within the mushroom-style spacedock or starbases. Despite the name "spacedock", I always took the mushroom to be more like "harbor" than a "dock". Ships in operational condition would dock there for crew rotation and stuff like that, and the most extensive services the mushroom could offer would be fresh air, water and in-flight snacks.
The gridwork drydocks would be real "docks", capable of actually performing maintenance and repair work on the ships. Which would explain ST:TMP and "Generations", where the recently built/repaired hero ship departed a drydock and not the spacedock. But yeah, it would have been nice and logical if the Enterprise had been in spacedock in ST3... No repairs or refits in that movie that we know of.
As for docking with the engineering section and not the torp deck... Probert seems to have pre-empted that problem. He specifically designed the two docking locations to be identical, down to the markings and porthole placements. There's nothing in ST2 to really suggest Kirk docked with the engineering section - they even cut short the final "aligning" scene so that one can't tell exactly where the pod is headed.
posted
We do hear about a few ships being repaired/refited at starbase, uh, whatever, in "11001101" though, don't we?
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posted
the TWOK docking scene still shows the pod leveling off at the engineering level though,and then when it backs in, there is enough hull above and below the port visible to preclude it being the torpedo bay.
and right before they meet the Reliant, the ships surface doeschange reflectivity.. i think ive always written this off as not being near a star. there just wasnt enough light to make it look like a huge difference.. now ST:III presents the problem cuz the ship didnt go re-pearlescent in the Solar system.
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posted
It could of course be that the pearlescent surface finish is what the paint looks like when it's not properly dried. And the fact that the ship was in a drydock at the beginning of ST2 would then be easily explained - she was getting a new coat of paint...
...Which, incindentally, also explains the colorful TMP warp effect: that's what happens if you go to warp before the drying-off period recommended by the paint manufacturer.
quote: Originally posted by Timo: As for docking with the engineering section and not the torp deck... Probert seems to have pre-empted that problem. He specifically designed the two docking locations to be identical, down to the markings and porthole placements.
Unfortunately, the set designers didn't pay much attention to his intentions. If you look at the scene where Kirk and Scotty leave the pod, the outer hull bulkheads on either side of the walkway don't have those portholes (nor do they have any place to stand to look through them if they did exist, even though someone is looking out of one of the ports when the pod docks). It's like that corridor forward facing corridor out of main engineering that Starfleet must've borrowed from the Tardis; no room for it on Probert's plans, either.
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posted
The Engineering corridor can be fixed by simply moving Engineering aft a bit. There's no evidence that the "vertical intermix shaft" would have to be located so that it runs straight up to the big blue crystal thing or anything - no MSD-style display exists to show us the intermix shaft or the Engineering location, unlike is the case with most TNG ships. And in the spirit of TNG designs, the shaft of the 1701-nil could well simply lead to a big deuterium tank on the deck above, not all the way up.
The fixed points of reference on the engineering set are few anyway. The horizontal shaft branches up supposedly at the locations of the pylon stems - but with the built-in forced perspective, they can be said to be at just the required distance, no matter what that distance is.
Making the torp deck set work is much more difficult, and entire threads have been dedicated to it here. Ultimately, it probably can't be done without going TARDIS - but it could be that the doors we took for pod aft doors are in fact merely the inner doors of an airlock, and the pod is farther out. Then there would be room for a narrow corridor with portholes there. And a logical place for some of those extras to wander into, when they leave the set at the end of the scene...
quote:Originally posted by Timo: It could of course be that the pearlescent surface finish is what the paint looks like when it's not properly dried. And the fact that the ship was in a drydock at the beginning of ST2 would then be easily explained - she was getting a new coat of paint.
At least it's still the same physical miniature they used stock footage of. For example, it's much harder to reconcile how the Ent-D changed shape, texture, and colour when they alternated between the 4 and 6 foot model between TNG scenes.
posted
I think the color is white indeed, only with some shades of green and blue in it. I would replace the Excelsior side views with something else (and more shading), but they are the most detailed to exist.
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posted
I always liked the pearlescent white hull color. Like ivory or glazed tile, reminds me of that sonar ball the "visitor" exposed, in ST:IV.
It's a pity the later ships had to be matte grey, I don't like that. But it is realistic, the Defiant had first generation ablative armor and so had to look rugged and battle-steelish, like the WWII-dreadnoughts.
The 1701-E did change color many times in FC, though. What is considered the "real" Sovereign-color?
[ August 09, 2002, 19:11: Message edited by: Nim Pim Pim ]
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quote:Originally posted by Nim Pim Pim: What is considered the "real" Sovereign-color?
In most photos of the physical miniature it looks white. The hull also looked quite white in FC when Picard and the others were walking on the bottom of the saucer. It also looked white-ish in the orbiting the Earth shots. So yeah, I'll say it again, "I think the Enterprise-E is white".
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