This year marks the 40th anniversary of the popular science-fiction adventure television series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, starring Gil Gerard, Erin Gray, Tim O’Connor, Felix Silla & Mel Blanc, with a brilliant supporting cast and guest stars. (background art by Ali Ries)
I have removed a number of older images, work in progress of the USS Enterprise and such which have never had any trafic worth mentioning, along with my shift away from Star Trek and other franchies like Blakes’7 which was a great distraction away from ST I have spent far to long in that universe to the point I have Star Trek fatigue, my focus will be for my own designs like the Halcyon ship, I had in mind to design a mothership for this, and currently racking my brain to remember the ideas I had at the time.
In my imagination I thought along the lines of a huge design, a few miles long design perhaps never to return to Earth once launched, a generation ship. And this Halcyon ships/shuttles would act like Space1999 Eagles 🙂 the shape of the cockpit windows now make sense, yes! (Londo Mollari voice)
Will I hope to have some early designs posted asap.
Two subjects in one morning, what a day, if your old enough some might remember the Atari game Asteroids, while I was rendering another image with this background by Graham Gazzard aka GrahamTG (you can find his art on Deviantart).
I remember my Halcyon design having the same shape as the old game Asteriods by Atari from 1979, I remember playing that game a lot as a young fella, not on the console at home but in arcades, my father managed one in the late 70s and early 80s so I’d grab the keys and click in as many credits I liked.
I am returning to my own concept designs now, I have wanted to design and build the mother ship for this design, I might even refin the Halcyon design a little, this design is also for sale on my gumroad page
More Blake’s 7 renderings Liberator and Federation Persuit ships and one with the London, the Liberator is scaled at 780 m, if you look at one of the image’s with the approching London you can see a 6ft crewman.
Also playing with backgrounds from friends kind enough to share, Ali Ries, Graham Gazzard,
My second Liberator model, no textures, I built this in just over a week, a new record. London prison ship is older, 2015 when I was testing its plan and possible layout.
For those that enjoy such details, the Liberator is 780m long as with my older one, its the scale I favor most. the London if memory serves is 54m
The background art is by GrahamTG
This is my latest and final Star Trek model, made for my reimagined Constitution class
Class G Shuttlecraft
Registry: NCC-1701-7
Vessel Identification: Galileo
Owner: United Federation of Planets
Operator: Starfleet
Assignment: USS Enterprise
Specifications
Capacity: 1 pilot plus 6 passengers
Speed:
Impulse: 0.5c
Warp: 2.1
Armaments: None
Defences: Deflector shields
Length: 27’5.9563″
Width: 17’6.6658″
Height: 9’9.4119″
Hello for regular visitor’s to my blog, I have been looking at refining the look and content of this blog, I really have let it go and there is a lot of fat that needs to be trimmed back.
Over the next week or so I will be removing some content and old “work in progress” WIP images that really only take up space.
I also have a new Facebook Page, I will be posting work there and work in progress leaving the completed art or designs to be posted here with a far better resolution
Also, I will be offering some artwork as prints, first all ready available is my Nautilus cutaway currently hosted on ARTPAL and I am looking at other sources and will post links to it asap.
I finally completed my Jules Verne “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” Nautilus design, I took some time to think over and finish it.
I also had it printed, A1 size poster and I am well pleased, just need to have it framed, I am loading a small sample and a link to anyone who like to have it, I have recived requests from time to time for this, including in French, Itailan, Russian and I will add Spanish.
One of the most magnificent rooms on the Nautilus is the drawing room/salon/museum, ten meters long, six wide, and five high. This incredible room contained an organ, an art collection of great value and very large number of marine specimens. There was also a fountain made from a shell about two meters across
Artist : Painting and year completed
So being the obsessive chap I can be with some designs, I tried to find artist and painting suggested by Verne, though these painting are in museums collections around the world and are not entombed with the Captain and Nautilus for eternity beneath a volcanic island
Here is the list of artist and works I used, I tried to keep them all in a time frame that they where collected just before Professor Pierre Aronnax, a French marine biologist and narrator of the story and his faithful servant Conseil and Canadian Ned Land boarded the Nautilus and meeting the mysterious Captain Nemo.
Raffaello: Small Cowper Madonna 1505
Leonardo da Vinci: Virgin of the Rocks 1491 -1508
Correggio: Jupiter and Io 1520 – 1540
Titian: La Bella 1536
Veronese: Adoration of the Shepheads 1523
Murillo: Assumption of the Virgin 1680
Holbein: Portrait of Boniface Amerbach 1519
Velázquez: Luncheon 1617
Ribera: Martyrdom of St Barthomew 1630
Rubens: The Village Fête 1635
Teniers: River landscape & rainbow Flemish Landscape 1644-1690
Teniers: Château Drij Toren at Perck 1660
Gerrit Dou: Astronomer by Candlelight 1665
Gabriel Metsu: Le Vieux Buveur 1650-1667
Paulus Potter: 2 Horses Near a Gate 1649
Gericault: The Kiss 1822
Prud’hon: Portrait of the King of Rome 1811
Bakhuizen: Dutch Merchant Ships in a Storm 1670-1690
Bakhuizen: Seascape and Fishing Boats 1708
Vernet: Mediterranean night 1753
Vernet: Shipwreak 1772
Troyon: The Gooseherd 1850-1855
Delacroix: Orphen Girl 1823
Ingres: The Spring 1820-1856
Decamps: Children Gathering Flowers 1844
Daubigny: Bateaux sur l’Oise 1865
Meissonier: Chess players 1853
Jules Verne Voyages extraordinaires have found so many fans the world over, I hope my personal vision of the Nautilus is enjoyed half as much as I enjoyed seeing so many other designs out there, a notable mention has to be Harper Goff fantastic design from the 1954 Disney film “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea”.
Follow the link below
https://www.ArtPal.com/gmd3ddesigns
The fleet is in, or the 21 ships I named during my Constitution Class build in Lightwave3d from 2016 to 2018.
I have retouch the Drydock and moved the C&C from the top of the dock to the portside of the dock
I found this background on DevientArt simply called Warp Stock by Euderion (link to site below) a simple render, one I might tweak in the future..
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Another rendering using my Enterprise model and GrahamTG art as the setting, birth of a star perhaps, good enough title as any.
my appreciation to Graham Gazzard aka GrahamTG who makes his artwork available for us modellers who sometime get around to rendering..
This cover art has always inspired me. It was a collaborative effort; Production Illustrator Jim Martin designed the art, executing it in a series of progressive pencil sketches. The art was subsequently turned over to freelancer Mikido Uesugi and John Knoll.
Here is my version again using GrahamTG space art and Asteroids..
“Click on image to see full size”
I could not help it, after seen a beautiful space scene by a friend GrahamTG I had to render with my reboot / re-imagined design..
Its been so long since I used this model, it’s a terrible thing spending weeks or in my case months designing and building models and after the first test renders and a renders I take a little more seriously, the model is forgotten.
I have taken this out of mothballs and with the wonderful Spawn Nebula art by Ali Ries and have set 3 Ranger Class Destroyers deployed on patrol
The model is available for sale royalty free on my Gumroad page
My re-imagined constitution class, the biggest adjustment is the scale from “947 ft” to “1311’5 ft” & I made changes to deck height to fix as many issue as possible.. I did have it at 1260 ft thinking that it would fix the areas of interest. but that did not solve issues with the shuttle bay access corridors at the sides of the bay, so again I had to enlarge the design, which was creating a new problem for me as to the deck count, I always put that at 23 via The Making of Star Trek by Stephen E. Whitfield & Gene Roddenberry and I did not want to stray to far from that.
But one area I thought I needed to establish is the deck heights, what to use, other fans think 9.6 or work, which is fine. I chose to go with the set plans and make it 10ft for the deck heights for corridors as seen in Series, it is the visual established look for the series. I think if they are lower it would effect the look so right or wrong its what I used.
Some of the decks in the secondary hull are taller than the 10ft mentioned mostly due to the shape of the design, this included the dorsal neck and the Engineering section mostly helps in the area for fuel, maintenance and cargo, for example in the connecting neck I have turbo elevator maintenances area. with the rescale there is enough room.. just to do this..
One of my favourite sources is The Making of Star Trek by Stephen E. Whitfield & Gene Roddenberry 1968, and I have look to it for guidance in some areas, (I think its canon though I also think that as the book was published in 1968 (second season) many idea and thoughts on scale where in flux, busy enough just keeping the show on air.
In The Making of Star Trek book the shuttle bay height and width is 30ft by 60ft and 100ft long.. now I assume this is only the bay area proper and not including the corridors to each side we see in Star Trek Season 2, Episode 10 – Journey to Babel at this new scale there is room for a corridor, while there is very little room practically none with the established canon scale of 947ft, I think the following post from Memory Alpha is worth sharing.
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Constitution_class
“The dimensions of the Constitution-class, 947 feet (289 meters) long for the original configuration and 1,000 feet (305 meters) for the refit-configuration, are the ones that are universally accepted by production staff and fans alike, and propagated in virtually all reference works dealing with the subject, starting with the very first one, The Making of Star Trek, published in 1968. That being said and oddly enough, neither dimension has actually ever been canonically confirmed, as neither dimension was ever seen or referred to in any of the live-action Star Trek productions.
The original configuration length of 947 feet was first derived from Stephen Edward Poe‘s reference book, The Making of Star Trek, p. 178, and that dimension has been propagated in every subsequent reference work ever since. However, what Poe did not mention was that designer Matt Jefferies had originally produced that graphic in 1967 as a reference for Poe’s employer, model kit company Aluminum Metal Toys for their 1968 second edition retooled USS Enterprise model kit, No. S951 – where the graphic was displayed on the side of the box prior to its publication in the book – and not for the actual Original Series production. Remarkably, the dimension of the starship had been in flux until that time as producer Gene Roddenberry‘s memo of 24 August 1964 evidenced, “We anticipate a final design might see the ship as 200 feet in length, and thus even a 1½-inch scale would give us quite a huge miniature.” This figure, initially accompanied with a crew complement of 203 would actually more or less stand until Jefferies, utilizing his engineering background, recalculated the figures for his design three years later. (The Making of Star Trek, pp. 89, 134)”
So with that been said I have with some adjustment with deck scales (something I did not want to do), but you can see I found some workable changes, most decks are 10ft, but in the dorsal neck they have 12ft and this works with lining up portholes (assuming mine are close enough) then in the secondary hull all decks save 2 are 10ft ,, the top and lower most decks here are 16ft,, this is something I am not entirely happy with but,, these levels could have need for for structural supports for the dorsal neck and perhaps something else ,, antimatter storage or something.. but this works for me.
Latest Renders below
Length: 1311’5 Feet
Width: 577’5 Feet
Height: 319’11 Feet
23 Decks.
Crew Complement 430.
7 Class F Shuttlecraft
Total Escape Pods 192
164 Escape Pods in the Primary Hull (4 persons per Escape Pod is 656)
28 Escape Pods in the Secondary Hull( 4 persons per Escape Pod is 128)
Total Escape Pod Personnel Capacity is 768, including the 7 shuttles (possibly standard compliment) would mean that the upper limit of the crew would be around 800 (817 evacuation limit)
I have also included a large image of Doug Drexler’s
Master systems display of the U.S.S. Defiant and was seen in Star Trek Enterprise episode “In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II“. I think that this depicts the Constitution Class being even larger than my rescale of 1311’5 ft
Click on image to see the full images
Some details
A number of renderings I made after altering the Series Constitution Class to look like both Pilot designs The Cage and Where No Man has Gone Before, and playing with lighting and Ali Ries Background nebula art (used with permission), I also made use of my TOS version of the Dry Dock, I also gave the USS Constitution a NX desigination and had to tweak its placement.
I also tried to create a poster for The Cage, mixed results but fun exploring the process.
