posted
I'm personally not a fan of having lifeboat hatches as an accurate assesor of when you see a ship. After all, the Sabre had squares, and every Galaxy seen after FC maintained squares too.
For Wolf 359, the big "muscle" ships we know of were limited to Bellerophon, Yamaguchi, Princeton, and Melbourne. Everything else seems to have been Excelsior-sized or smaller. I see no reason not to add an Akira or Steamrunner in there to shore up the canon ranks; there would be another Excelsior or two (with an E-B variant), a couple more Mirandas, and some older stuff. Certainly no Galaxies (which would be possible, but would really screw up anyone trying to catalogue the canon appearances), or anything else that big.
This project will also probably show one attempt at doing something besides the normal phasers and torpedoes route. Perhaps someone else wanted to try the deflector thing? A subspace field or the heavy graviton beam mentioned in Part I? Concentrating fire... Somewhere? Who knows - I dont' want to do anything too far out, but I would like to give Starfleet a little more credit than just hitting the cube with the usual twinklies.
posted
It'd be funny if some hapless captain tried the Picard manuver.
The Refit Excelsior is a nice idea...mabye some Klingons arriving too late to really help? Possibly salvaging the Endeavour.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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posted
I choose to believe the Endeavour was not there, and Captain Amisov simply had another encounter somewhere that he lived to tell about. It's a big galaxy, folks.
posted
Hmmm mabye you can show the Cube assimilating a few ships and some sort of smaller craft detaching from the cube, then heading towards Borg Space.
You could show the wreck of the Galaxy class Trinculo...
You could also show an Oberth fire some sort of weapon during the fight (we saw one during the FC battle after all, so why not?).
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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posted
Yeah I remeber there being talk of Klingon Ships in the battle from "Best of Both Worlds" but I have not seen the episode in a while and I'm not 100% sure. Also I seem to recall an infamous piece of wreckage which has been debated over as being a four-nacelled Nebula class.
Registered: Feb 2005
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posted
Wow. In Animation Master, no less. That's brave. The last time I used that program (which was a while ago) it was almost entirely focused on character animation with an alien interface mostly designed around organic modelling.
Cool project, though. Love the trailer. Let us know if we can help.
Registered: Sep 2000
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quote:Originally posted by Mars Needs Women: Yeah I remeber there being talk of Klingon Ships in the battle from "Best of Both Worlds" but I have not seen the episode in a while and I'm not 100% sure.
I haven't seen it in a while either, but I think there was a line like "the Klingons are sending some ships too". I don't think there was any confirmation that they made it in time.
As well as the starships we know about, how about fitting the shuttle Kotoi in there somewhere? We know it came from the Liberator, but was it used in an attempt to flee the exploding mothership, or was it part of an attack plan?
I remember there was a DS9 comic with a holodeck scene where some of the ships tried to beam people aboard the Borg ship in order to take it over, but the Borg raised their shields and all the crew rematerialised in space and died. In another attempt the ships used some kind of combined deflector beam which also didn't work.
posted
i can probably get you those ships in .max format if thats any good to you.
About the New Orleans nacelle size, LC modeled those using the ex astris blueprints so they wont be too big, its probably just the angle of that pic
Registered: Mar 2006
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quote: I remember there was a DS9 comic with a holodeck scene where some of the ships tried to beam people aboard the Borg ship in order to take it over, but the Borg raised their shields and all the crew rematerialised in space and died. In another attempt the ships used some kind of combined deflector beam which also didn't work.
Take over a Borg Cube?! Not only was the fleet desperate, it must have also been delusional. But then again, I can't blame them.
Registered: Feb 2005
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posted
I remember that comic. It was Sisko in the holosuite, early in DS9, who was basically trying to prove to himself that there really was NOTHING that he could have personally done to help at Wolf 359.
Yes, I understand that using AM is ambitious and that other programs would likely be easier, but it's working not-bad so far (Karl is more a character modeller, hence the choice of program). Is it at all possible to easily port 3DS stuff to AM? Karl tells me that it's very difficult. Every bit helps, of course. If we can port .ax ships in, then it would certainly kill a lot of modelling time to get new models in AM made up!
Mark
[ April 19, 2006, 10:13 PM: Message edited by: Mark Nguyen ]
quote:Originally posted by Mark: i can probably get you those ships in .max format if thats any good to you.
About the New Orleans nacelle size, LC modeled those using the ex astris blueprints so they wont be too big, its probably just the angle of that pic
The NO nacelles are fine. It's the Challenger's nacelles that are too big.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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posted
So if you try to beam through shields, or rather someone raises shields mid-beam, the matter stream bounces off and rematerialisation hapens just outside the shield? Rrright. . .
posted
Well, it was a comic. And I might not be remembering it correctly. Maybe the Cube "dodged" out of the way as the transport was in progress(yes, I know that's daft as well), or perhaps the Borg diverted the beam into space.
Just thought it was worthwhile looking at tactics other people had thought up.
There was a big gash on one side of the Cube in Emissary, wasn't there? Maybe the result of a ramming attempt?
posted
To my knowledge, converting things from other 3D programs to A:M is very difficult. A:M uses (generally) a 4 cornered patch-based system which is incredibly efficient for deforming character models (and it is a great little character animation program). But because 3DS and Lightwave (and pretty much everything else) are primarily triangular poly-based models, conversion is difficult. Especially getting hard geometric shapes. I have seen successful conversions, and A:M at least used to have a tool specifically for importing, but the results are very mixed and everything I read suggested I'd get better results rebuilding the models in A:M or using a different program. That's about when I switched to Strata/Lightwave.
I'm not going to suggest that your guy do it in another program, because, he should use what he likes, but he might have an easier time of it, especially when it gets to tearing ships apart and tricky camera stuff.
Registered: Sep 2000
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posted
Okay, here's a fun one. We're spreading the word of our project around, in search of modellers, etc. Here's one message we got back:
"i've been thinking about this project a bit, and i have a real annoying question for you:
how is watching 39 ships getting effortlessly destroyed by a big cube going to be entertaining to anyone but the creators?
i understand the enjoyment, skill and tallent that will be involved in creating those ships, but, really...
why?
you'll ultimately need to answer this question to get the kind of support you'll need."
I've got my answer - part "it hasn't been done", part "it's ITCHING to be done", and part "like Pearl Harbor, as a tragic battle it has many dramatic possibilities beyond a crappy Michael Bay movie". As a point of conversation, what would YOU say? Given the tools and the time, why would you want to create such a film?
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