posted
Very nice! I've always liked this design and the model is excellent.
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quote:Originally posted by The Mighty Monkey of Mim: (The fact that I think the "real" Antares was NCC-501 and looked like the Xhosa notwithstanding... )
Well, you're just crazy anyways.
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posted
They (meaning John Eaves) did. TPTB wanted something "sleeker". I hope to hound Eaves about it when I meet him in June and mabye he'll describe the rejected ship designs to me: I know one of them had a sphere forward section (although not the Deadalus). I really really doubt that we'll get to see the proposed thumbnail drawings Eaves did now that the ST Mag is gone (or really soon to be). Anybody live within driving distance of North Carolina? Eaves is going to be at Wonderfest this year along with Ray Harryhousen.
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posted
Reverend, I think you left out an "N" -- shouldn't that be Akirantares?
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posted
A warning first: you should implicitly assume that I'm completely in awe of the quality and beauty of this work. Because I am.
Now to criticism. Or rather, personal bias.
What's the deal with the ventral pod and the deflector dish? Doesn't seem to do the design much justice. And it can't be discerned in the original drawing anyway. The ship would look much prettier with either no deflector at all, or a small golden dish either mounted on a thin pole Saladin style or flattened a bit for mounting on the forward edge of the secondary hull.
The spinal "cargo pod" is a wonderful idea. But what about making more of the idea that it is a swappable unit? The original drawing has no saucer phasers. It does have a triangular "warning label" atop the spinal module. Perhaps this is the location of the sole dorsal phaser of the vessel? Perhaps you can take out the cargo pod and install an equally sized phaser device, with that single emitter? You could also downscale the whole ship a bit to make this type of limited armament more plausible.
If you want to maintain that this is the ship from "Charlie X", then a swappable module like that would jibe well with the alternating "science probe vessel" and "transport" designations of the ship. There could be a sensor module available as well...
posted
Timo: Ok first of all I'm not going back and redesigning my schematics since all the points you have raised there have already been discussed and the design was effectively frozen almost a year ago. I do appreciate the constructive criticism and I have by no means abandoned the Antares, in fact I have been tinkering with it lately and you should expect to see some shiny new plans in the next few months. But if you'd like to know the reasoning behind why the ship looks the way it does I'll tell you.
Deflector pod Early on in the process I did try several ways of attaching the deflector including, as you suggested, the FJ style mounting as well as several different ways of integrating it into the secondary hull. None of them looked very good and I was never satisfied with any of them. As you might guess the pod was my favourite solution mainly because it had never been done before (AFAIK) and it added alot of character to the design, it also reinforced the modular nature of the design and supported the apparent multi-role nature of the "Charlie X" ship. As an aside I thought that such modular components would be useful to a ship that could be operated by such a small crew (10 or 15 wasn't it?).
Cargo pod That is something that I always intended to me more modular and adaptable that it appears, I simply was not able to show that it is infact composed of several wedge shaped modules at that time. Also the ventral "wedge" was always supposed to be a sensor module with a downwards facing sensor array for scanning planetary surfaces while the two flanking pods were meant to be the cargo containers, hence their proximity to the airlock.
Phasers Again the look of these phaser banks were meant to look modular so they could be "un-plugged" and removed to allow the ship some flexibility in it's power needs and armaments, something that wouldn't be so easy with NX-01 style pop-up turrets. Oh and that red warning triangle is actually the symbol I took off a DS9 cargo label to represent Starfleet Transport Command's logo. Having no contact with the original artist I have no idea what his intention was here, so I took some artistic licence.
Scale I've already down scaled this once, I'm not about to go through all that hassle again.
quote: Originally posted by Masao: Someone was serious
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