Jack Bohn
2014-12-10 20:22:33 UTC
The Cover: TOS Enterprise dramatically lit in red. That's enough to sell the calendar, but if you look closely, more is happening. The greebly background for the picture is the Vanguard station, its name and the UFP pennant (barely) lit. The bright light in the lower left-hand corner is in front of the station, so it's not a stellar phenomenon, but an explosion. Another explosion is almost off the right side of the picture, and almost hidden behind an angular structure which looks like it could be a Tholian ship, or the unRemastered S.S. Aurora made from the same model. Yeah, flying under the calendar title and hardly lit at all are definite Tholian ships. Knowing what to look for, I see many, many Tholian ships in the background, possibly attacking the station, given the title is "Vanguard Down" I have the first of the _Vanguard_ books, but I haven't gotten back into reading Trek, so I don't know if this picture is from the books, or is made up. What I really wonder is if Doug Drexler designed this as a "puzzle picture," or if this is a happy accident from it being composed as a two-page spread and having the sides lopped off to make the cover.
January: Everybody's favorite new toy, the NX-01 refit to have a scondary hull.
February: "Xindi Reptilian" shows two ships of that type scattering from the NX-01 Refit, providing us with two views of the design. I avoided the third season of ST:Ent, so I don't know what happened to the Xindi that we've never seen them since, or whether Enterprise could find some these few years later.
March: John Eaves gives a picture of the Enterprise-E doing saucer separation. My first thought was, "Man, that would have gone right *through* the Scimitar in Nemesis!" Exposed on the top of the dorsal connector is an olympic-sized swimming pool -- or, I guess, one of the shuttlebay decks. Interesting glimpse of the internal arrangement. I have a slight problem with it, in that I think there should be few connection points that could fail to close on separation, as there is no telling the emergency under which that could occur. I would hate to be standing in that shuttle storage if the containment field is iffy. Is there a giant metal door that can close over that hole? Maybe a bank of replicators along the edge that can form one? The title: "Zero Hour" makes me wonder if this is an occurrance in some post-Nemesis novel.
April: The early D-7 designed for ST:Ent, prowling around.
May: "Leif Ericson": The AMT kit, also known as a glow-in-the-dark UFO, slightly Remastered for the calendar. With the Enterprise flying alongside, you can almost hear Kirk saying, "DY-500?"
June: Titan, Riker's ship from the Titan series of books, approaching Vanguard station, ("Vanguard Back Up"?) or a Vanguard-type station, or -- would space stations have an architectural revival, with the 24th Cent. copying that of one hundred years earlier?
centerfold: "Starbase Bajor Proposal": I'd read that in the post-DS9 novels the Cardassian station had been destroyed, another station to be built to replace it; here Drexler shows the process. The station is of the type seen above Utopia Planitia. The basic dumbell shape is well towards completion, arms with domes on the ends are being brought in to attach to the central column. The whole thing is wrapped in the tubular trusses of the TMP drydock used for scaffolding. Scale? I'd have to work it out. The seven-segment truss is longer than 300m, I'm guessing not 400m; here, upended, and with 4m deck spacing, from 75-100 stories tall, or 11-14 per segment. Hmm... I'll say close enough, though the segments of the truss that bend do so too abruptly to fit the curve of the upper dome. What must be embarrassing to see in print is that the arms being connected to the central column are colliding with the truss. "Colliding" in the 3-D computer art sense. Intersecting. Passing through. It can most clearly be seen on the upper arm closest to us and the one clockwise from it. The lower arms are a bit busier and it's hard to tell what is happening without magnification, but from a distance my mind is telling me the truss is going behind the lower arms, while I can see it is in front of the upper arms: a weird Escher effect.
In other news, the Runabouts are pressed into service, and their modularity is on display as the aft cabin is replaced by some connection that allows them to carry a cargo train. Ah! the joys of categorization! I'd just decided -although USS Titan was set up in The Generation Films- not to assign that picture to that part of Trek. The ship didn't appear there, and when you look at the picture you'd have to know that aboard her are Riker, Troi, and whatever one-appearance characters the author could snag. Now what about a picture whose purpose is to NOT show Deep Space Nine? Is an Excelsior coming out of the wormhole enough to place it in that corner of the universe? Runabouts (technically, variants of them) incline me to, and it's decided by seeing one of them is the Rio Grande. (The other two probably are as well.)
July: Four Sabre-class starships, none of them the da Vinci from the Starfleet Corps of Engineers novels. They are the Peterson: NCC-61815, Sanders: 618...maybe22, Garza: possiby 61814, and Sentry: 6 narrow-number wide-number wide-number wide-number. On second look, comparing them to schematics and a garage kit of the Saber, they are not quite; the nacelles are more ornate, and they are missing a pentagonal box atop the tail. D.M. Phoenix has done a not-quite-Sovereign-class for a previous calendar. It's a nice change from kit-bashing. Hey, I haven't been checking the art in different orientations! No, pretty much everything up to now is strongly horizontal (the centerfold is strongly vertical); the cover is at a 45 degree angle, and could be tilted either way (as it's square, maybe I should go into stores and alternate their stock). You could hang this image any of the four ways, and I think I like it better "upside down"! I think I'd credited the previous calendar's not-quite-Sovereign to The Generation Films; I'm inclined to throw these that way as well. Did the Sabre make appearances on DS9?
August: The 1701-A encountering a Miranda-class ship. Actually, the label aft and below the bridge docking port shows it to be the Reliant, and the artist (Alain Rivard) can curse whoever decided to make sure a name or number was visible in any possible view of TMP-era ships. He had removed the one between the shuttlebays, and detailed an interior to the shuttlebay.
September: Andrew Probert designs and paints rescue/salvage ships in "Wolf 359 + 8 Days". They are painted a high-visibility orange/yellow like the sphinx workpods that operate from them. The two shown most prominently are in opposite orientation to each other; (they no doubt change pitch and roll to best face the pieces of wreckage the work on;) with the shape and nacelle design it does not look "upside down" either way, a small shuttlebay shows the interior direction of "down" in one ship, so that spacewalking personell on the other are walking on the bottom of the hull, as in "First Contact." From debris lashed to the hulls, they are not quite as wide as a Nova (?!?) saucer, and about as long as a Constitution-refit nacelle. I think that's consistant as a scale, the people may be out-of-scale large, but if that's necessary to see them...
For the wrecked ships he did his research. We have the Kyushu, Ahwahnee, and Princeton wrecks, a Nebula, and the Constitution-refit secondary hull (and they've found the saucer). There's also the Saratoga, but didn't it explode into points of light?
The picture doesn't work for me upside down, but I blame my own Earthbound experience. The ships are strongly lit from above and a bit to one side, and the more prominent ship shown has workpods and retrieved lifeboats (square and triangular) around it casting shadows onto the surfaces. These shadows are confusing to me when the ship is inverted so as to be lit from below.
October: Deep Space Nine under the Klingon occupation. Docked around the outer rim are k'Tingas alternating with D-5s for variety. It looks odd, as the D-5 was designed to look like very primitive technology for the ST:Ent era. As if U.S. paddlewheel steamers made port in Occupied Japan. A mood setting green nebula forms the background, or maybe an ion storm is coming in.
November: "Romulan War" by Dan Uyeno. A real eye catcher. Three Daedalus-class ships attacked by a new old Romulan ship. The Romulan green may be shading a bit into the white of TOS, and it has a bird of prey painted on its belly! The Daedalues (Daedelae? the addresses on the shuttlebay doors say NCC-189 Archon and NCC-173, which my notes say should be Essex, but which looks to have a three letter name,) are subtly tweaked; a few greeblies added, but still large expanses of smooth hull. The secondary hull is tapered from the formerly straight cylinder, and has a fairing on top with hatches reminiscent of a boomer submarine. From these hatches all three are doing a ripple launch of... Inter Planetary Ballistic Missiles? Lifeboats? I prefer the former. These primitive space vessels allowed no quarter, no capture. I would not be expecting a return of the Archons. The "horizon line" is near that popular 45 degree angle so the picture can be titled to be viewed through a letterbox or... maybe one of those tall windows like on the Enterprise-D.
December: "Sisters" A study of the NX-01 Refit next to THE Enterprise. The lighting brings out the whiter paint job, and the pennants. She can dress up like her big sister...
TOS 3
TMP 1
TNG 1
TGF 2
DS9 2
VOY
ENT 3
Maybe it's just that I know there's the Vanguard and Titan and post-DS9 series of books, and suspect there's a post-Nemesis Rikerless Enterprise-E series, and can't say for certain there isn't a Romulan War series, but this calendar really gives me a feeling that Star Trek is still moving on.
January: Everybody's favorite new toy, the NX-01 refit to have a scondary hull.
February: "Xindi Reptilian" shows two ships of that type scattering from the NX-01 Refit, providing us with two views of the design. I avoided the third season of ST:Ent, so I don't know what happened to the Xindi that we've never seen them since, or whether Enterprise could find some these few years later.
March: John Eaves gives a picture of the Enterprise-E doing saucer separation. My first thought was, "Man, that would have gone right *through* the Scimitar in Nemesis!" Exposed on the top of the dorsal connector is an olympic-sized swimming pool -- or, I guess, one of the shuttlebay decks. Interesting glimpse of the internal arrangement. I have a slight problem with it, in that I think there should be few connection points that could fail to close on separation, as there is no telling the emergency under which that could occur. I would hate to be standing in that shuttle storage if the containment field is iffy. Is there a giant metal door that can close over that hole? Maybe a bank of replicators along the edge that can form one? The title: "Zero Hour" makes me wonder if this is an occurrance in some post-Nemesis novel.
April: The early D-7 designed for ST:Ent, prowling around.
May: "Leif Ericson": The AMT kit, also known as a glow-in-the-dark UFO, slightly Remastered for the calendar. With the Enterprise flying alongside, you can almost hear Kirk saying, "DY-500?"
June: Titan, Riker's ship from the Titan series of books, approaching Vanguard station, ("Vanguard Back Up"?) or a Vanguard-type station, or -- would space stations have an architectural revival, with the 24th Cent. copying that of one hundred years earlier?
centerfold: "Starbase Bajor Proposal": I'd read that in the post-DS9 novels the Cardassian station had been destroyed, another station to be built to replace it; here Drexler shows the process. The station is of the type seen above Utopia Planitia. The basic dumbell shape is well towards completion, arms with domes on the ends are being brought in to attach to the central column. The whole thing is wrapped in the tubular trusses of the TMP drydock used for scaffolding. Scale? I'd have to work it out. The seven-segment truss is longer than 300m, I'm guessing not 400m; here, upended, and with 4m deck spacing, from 75-100 stories tall, or 11-14 per segment. Hmm... I'll say close enough, though the segments of the truss that bend do so too abruptly to fit the curve of the upper dome. What must be embarrassing to see in print is that the arms being connected to the central column are colliding with the truss. "Colliding" in the 3-D computer art sense. Intersecting. Passing through. It can most clearly be seen on the upper arm closest to us and the one clockwise from it. The lower arms are a bit busier and it's hard to tell what is happening without magnification, but from a distance my mind is telling me the truss is going behind the lower arms, while I can see it is in front of the upper arms: a weird Escher effect.
In other news, the Runabouts are pressed into service, and their modularity is on display as the aft cabin is replaced by some connection that allows them to carry a cargo train. Ah! the joys of categorization! I'd just decided -although USS Titan was set up in The Generation Films- not to assign that picture to that part of Trek. The ship didn't appear there, and when you look at the picture you'd have to know that aboard her are Riker, Troi, and whatever one-appearance characters the author could snag. Now what about a picture whose purpose is to NOT show Deep Space Nine? Is an Excelsior coming out of the wormhole enough to place it in that corner of the universe? Runabouts (technically, variants of them) incline me to, and it's decided by seeing one of them is the Rio Grande. (The other two probably are as well.)
July: Four Sabre-class starships, none of them the da Vinci from the Starfleet Corps of Engineers novels. They are the Peterson: NCC-61815, Sanders: 618...maybe22, Garza: possiby 61814, and Sentry: 6 narrow-number wide-number wide-number wide-number. On second look, comparing them to schematics and a garage kit of the Saber, they are not quite; the nacelles are more ornate, and they are missing a pentagonal box atop the tail. D.M. Phoenix has done a not-quite-Sovereign-class for a previous calendar. It's a nice change from kit-bashing. Hey, I haven't been checking the art in different orientations! No, pretty much everything up to now is strongly horizontal (the centerfold is strongly vertical); the cover is at a 45 degree angle, and could be tilted either way (as it's square, maybe I should go into stores and alternate their stock). You could hang this image any of the four ways, and I think I like it better "upside down"! I think I'd credited the previous calendar's not-quite-Sovereign to The Generation Films; I'm inclined to throw these that way as well. Did the Sabre make appearances on DS9?
August: The 1701-A encountering a Miranda-class ship. Actually, the label aft and below the bridge docking port shows it to be the Reliant, and the artist (Alain Rivard) can curse whoever decided to make sure a name or number was visible in any possible view of TMP-era ships. He had removed the one between the shuttlebays, and detailed an interior to the shuttlebay.
September: Andrew Probert designs and paints rescue/salvage ships in "Wolf 359 + 8 Days". They are painted a high-visibility orange/yellow like the sphinx workpods that operate from them. The two shown most prominently are in opposite orientation to each other; (they no doubt change pitch and roll to best face the pieces of wreckage the work on;) with the shape and nacelle design it does not look "upside down" either way, a small shuttlebay shows the interior direction of "down" in one ship, so that spacewalking personell on the other are walking on the bottom of the hull, as in "First Contact." From debris lashed to the hulls, they are not quite as wide as a Nova (?!?) saucer, and about as long as a Constitution-refit nacelle. I think that's consistant as a scale, the people may be out-of-scale large, but if that's necessary to see them...
For the wrecked ships he did his research. We have the Kyushu, Ahwahnee, and Princeton wrecks, a Nebula, and the Constitution-refit secondary hull (and they've found the saucer). There's also the Saratoga, but didn't it explode into points of light?
The picture doesn't work for me upside down, but I blame my own Earthbound experience. The ships are strongly lit from above and a bit to one side, and the more prominent ship shown has workpods and retrieved lifeboats (square and triangular) around it casting shadows onto the surfaces. These shadows are confusing to me when the ship is inverted so as to be lit from below.
October: Deep Space Nine under the Klingon occupation. Docked around the outer rim are k'Tingas alternating with D-5s for variety. It looks odd, as the D-5 was designed to look like very primitive technology for the ST:Ent era. As if U.S. paddlewheel steamers made port in Occupied Japan. A mood setting green nebula forms the background, or maybe an ion storm is coming in.
November: "Romulan War" by Dan Uyeno. A real eye catcher. Three Daedalus-class ships attacked by a new old Romulan ship. The Romulan green may be shading a bit into the white of TOS, and it has a bird of prey painted on its belly! The Daedalues (Daedelae? the addresses on the shuttlebay doors say NCC-189 Archon and NCC-173, which my notes say should be Essex, but which looks to have a three letter name,) are subtly tweaked; a few greeblies added, but still large expanses of smooth hull. The secondary hull is tapered from the formerly straight cylinder, and has a fairing on top with hatches reminiscent of a boomer submarine. From these hatches all three are doing a ripple launch of... Inter Planetary Ballistic Missiles? Lifeboats? I prefer the former. These primitive space vessels allowed no quarter, no capture. I would not be expecting a return of the Archons. The "horizon line" is near that popular 45 degree angle so the picture can be titled to be viewed through a letterbox or... maybe one of those tall windows like on the Enterprise-D.
December: "Sisters" A study of the NX-01 Refit next to THE Enterprise. The lighting brings out the whiter paint job, and the pennants. She can dress up like her big sister...
TOS 3
TMP 1
TNG 1
TGF 2
DS9 2
VOY
ENT 3
Maybe it's just that I know there's the Vanguard and Titan and post-DS9 series of books, and suspect there's a post-Nemesis Rikerless Enterprise-E series, and can't say for certain there isn't a Romulan War series, but this calendar really gives me a feeling that Star Trek is still moving on.
--
-Jack
-Jack