quote:Originally posted by Shik: There IS even drag in space--it's not a comPLETE vacuum, y'know.
Reminds me of a short story I read...The pioneers see a streamlined starship docked at a space station and ask one of the locals if it's sleek and dart-like purely for aesthetics, because a ship would have to move insanely fast and near the speed of light for aerodynamics to be a factor in near-vacuum. The local simply replied, "They're that fast."
The number of stray hyrdogen atoms in the interstellar medium is infinitesimal. On the other hand, at high relativistic speeds the energy released by colliding even with a dust particle is pretty extreme (I've read somewhere that hitting an object with one gram of mass at high sublight speeds would release energy on the scale of a nuclear weapon). If that's so, streamlining wouldn't help, because a hit is a hit. That's what the navigational deflectors are for...to make sure there's nothing to run into.
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quote:Originally posted by Harry: Nothing personal against Eaves, and he's probably a good designer in general. But he sure can't beat Sternbach at designing Trek ships. I mean, just compare the Ent-E article to the Prometheus article! Sternbach starts thinking about engineering and fitting into Starfleets history even before he draws a single thing. All Eaves thinks about is how to make his ships look FAST AND SLEEK!1!!!. Oh well. That's enough ranting for now. Perhaps we were just spoiled by Sternbach
I know I'm in the minority but I personally think Eaves is a far better illustrator/designer than Sternbach. Sternbach is very, very good on the practicality side of things but I feel that his designs are excruciatingly bland. I can't help but think that Sternbach is far better suited to blueprinting than he is to actually designing.
A common complaint of Eaves is that his designs are too much alike. That's all well and good, but the same thing can easily be said of all the illustrators that have ever worked in the franchise. It's not that hard to tell which ships are designed by who.
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And Sternbach ships just make more sense to me. Eaves may be superior illustrator, but... Sternbach design may share some common things, but Eaves designs share more than that - they share whole elements (like those familiar-looking nacelles on Romulan BoP)
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posted
I agree that the similarity of Eaves' alien ships nacelles is a big problem but, as an example, it's not all that different to how the Galor-class looks like a backwards Vor'cha-class.
Da_bang80
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quote: Why the hell do we need 'sleek' in the Starships!?!?! They're not flying in air or fluidic space.
Cause Sleek Starships look way cooler.
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quote:Originally posted by Phoenix: But the Prometheus is the most gorgeous ship in the history of the universe! Anyone who can design that is a god in my opinion.
I don't know, like most of Sternbach's ships it suffered from Stumpy Nacelle Syndrome [SUP]TM[/SUP]. Something that Eaves's ships thankfully lack.
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But Eaves' ships all suffer from Pointlessly Pointy Nacelle Syndrome. At the unvealing of another of his designs children around the world are heard crying "mummy, why does that ship have a pointy thing?"
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