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Well, seems I answered part of my own question. I took that last image and turned up the gamma, and it turns out that thing in the back is an aft-facing dish, the same size and configuration as the one up front.
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The Conestoga certainly is impressive. Perhaps too impressive for her own good, in at least two ways...
Would Earth really be able to field something as "purpose-built" in the late 21st century? I'd expect something that looks more cobbled together than that, on the vein of the Valiant "hobby model".
And would a colony ship really be this big? How does the monster land? She does land, doesn't she, so that the colony can be built out of her components?
The intriguing prow of the ship could have some functionality on the surface. Perhaps a crane system for offloading the cargo and for dismantling the vessel? The four "headlights" atop the bow could be the deflectors. Or then the three blue ones farther down are. But I'd have hoped for even more functionality in the looks. Say, an indication of how the ship falls apart at the seams after landing.
Don't take me wrong, though - she's a beauty. And far from an anachronism or a shoddy job. Which is weird, considering how little we saw of her in the end.
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Well, MinutiaeMan apparently does, considering he said, "And now more than ever, the Conestoga reminds me of the old conjectural SS Valiant design.".
Registered: Mar 1999
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I'm amazed at how much work went into this ship, especially considering it was only seen as a tiny screen graphic and further considering they've said the Intrepid and the "Iceland" were just "shapes they put together".
I'm not complaining. IT just makes you wonder sometimes.
Registered: Oct 1999
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Perhaps a flashback sequence was originally scripted, showing the Conestoga leaving Earth and/or arriving at Terra Nova? If it was cut late in the process then they might have already built the detailed mesh when the scene was cut.
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Or, like the Pasteur model from TNG: All Good Things... someone at the studio could've just created it for their own amusement and submitted it to Paramount when the need arose for a ship graphic.
Conversely, we COULD be looking at an early Enterprise concept based on the SS Valiant design created for the ST Encyclopedia.
-------------------- I slit the sheet, the sheet I slit, and on the slitted sheet I sit.
Registered: Nov 2003
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The design looks fantastic. I only wonder why it doesn't have a UESPA logo. Perhaps because it's a ship and not a probe? The name of the UESPA must have made sense when the organization was founded.
The good design doesn't change anything about the commissioning date problem though. On the contrary, if the ship is bigger than Enterprise, how the hell could they build it, even if they had the space frame already available (from a sublight ship) and in orbit?
Registered: Mar 1999
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My default explanation for all these 'very-soon-after-first-contact' warp ships is that they're left over stuff from WWIII that was left standing when most of the government collapsed. Some could have been in orbit of Earth, Luna or Mars. Other may have been on the ground somewhere. The only real problem that I see is just how a supposedly crippled planet managed to get together enough manpower and equipment to make those extensive engine modifications.
One possibility is that Cochrane and his team weren't the only people trying to develop an dual nacelle CPD. That leaves the possibility that some of the other major world powers had similar projects on the go before and/or during the war. The only difference being that Cochrane was the only one who could make it work properly. So this simplifies things a little if there is a post war stash of failed warp prototype hanging around, since all Zeph had to do was get the ones closest to good working order and make the necessary upgrades.
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Perhaps they needed a quick image of a old-style ship, and some prescient member of the FX team took a chance that maybe they might need to see one in more detail one day (after all, this was only about the fourth or fifth ep, no way to know what way the show might go) and took the time to put in a little extra work on a good-looking design. Now, two years later, they're off doing 9/11-Revenge-in-Space and the chances are they'll never need this Conestoga model/mesh again, so why not let people see it who'll appreciate it?
Judging by the looks of her, there isn't really that much ship involved, per se. Sure, there's the four or five deck tall spine structure, but a ship of this era making a nine year journey is mostly going to be composed of fuel and cargo for arrival. I'd like to think also that she was a sleeper ship for at least most of the colonists, but I don't think that was made clear.
In any case, I'd imagine that the spine was the main habitable volume, with the Defiant nacelles on the side being cargo or deuterium.
As for construction, I'd imagine they could've boosted the spine to orbit in completed form, and the nacelles as well. On the other hand, given Rain Robinson's DY-100 model, they could very well have boosted almost the entire ship, funky non-aerodynamic sections and all.
A fairly good median of these two ideas would be that they boosted the main section mostly complete, presumably with some sort of temporary covering to help out the aerodynamics of the Defiant pods. They fueled her in orbit, attached the warp engines (also built on the ground), and loaded the folks, cargo, and minutiae.
Alternately, she was a hydrogen-collection vessel anyway, and they simply built some warp engines and made some modifications after 2063.
Anything would be a job for Earth's crippled infrastructure, but like the 1930's WPA it might've been just a boost we needed.
-------------------- . . . ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
quote:Anything would be a job for Earth's crippled infrastructure, but like the 1930's WPA it might've been just a boost we needed.
Good point. I imagine that during the war itself there would have been a world wide scramble to churn out as many spacecraft as possible and that after the war's end a fairly reasonable percentage of those fabrication facilities would have been left standing. Some might even have become home to communities just like the Phoenix's missile base, I imagine they would have been fairly well protected against nuclear attack, not to mention looters and nuclear winters.
Just to clarify, the 'Warp Leftovers' I referred to earlier were just the vital engine parts that might have been very difficult to mass produce on short notice, (Warp coils, antimatter containment pods, dilithium crystals, M/AM reaction chambers etc.) not the ships themselves. While I'd like to think that the Conestoga was a retrofitted water tanker, the fact that it was said to be specifically designed to be disassembled into a colony (however unlikely that may be) leads me to think that it was a pre-existing piece of hardware, possibly meant for the Martian colonisation programs. In which case all Earth needed to do would be to install the warp drive (newly built or assembled, either way...) and associated systems.
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