Starfleet Jedi

Now that several other Trek alum are blogging about Trek designs, John Eaves has thrown in.

Not only are all his ships alike, but he can't even write well. How the hell did this guy get so much Trek work? He must be a wonderful butt-kisser.

Sorry and all, but I'm just sayin'.

I don't care about how well he writes, since he has some awesome behind-the-scenes photos of the classic 11 foot Enterprise model! Most of them I've seen before, but never at that high a quality.
-Mike

Well, if you want to see the real thing, it's in the National Air and Space Museum in D.C. It's on the lower floor of the gift shop. The original filming stand is there too, complete with blue chalk used to make it blend into the bluescreen background.

You know what I just thought about? What if all those flying saucers people report seeing are really the enterprise coming back from the future, but the cloak is fucked up and the nacelles and the engineering hull are the only things cloaked?***


*** This message has been brought to you by the highness factor of perscription pain meds. The mystical-pharmacological complex thanks you for your support.

Cocytus wrote:Well, if you want to see the real thing, it's in the National Air and Space Museum in D.C. It's on the lower floor of the gift shop. The original filming stand is there too, complete with blue chalk used to make it blend into the bluescreen background.

I've seen and photogragh the Grey Lady herself. Fortunately that was in a time before Ed Miarecki got hold of her and ruined her forever during the so-called "restoration" of 1991. The photos on Eaves blog site are how she really was before she was damaged in the 1970's and essentially vandalized in 1991.
-Mike

Well for one, I agree with 2046. My trouble with John Eaves is that to me, he seems to prefer "form over function" approach, apparently without bothering to think how his starships would function (unlike, say, Rick Sternbach or Andrew Probert).

Case in point: Enterprise-E under-saucer detail. Eaves has incorporated two triangular shapes into it, as a homage of sorts to original Enterprise-nil. Only later he found out that on Ent-nil those triangular shapes are actually landing gear covers. So, does it mean that Ent-E has landing gear as well?

Somewhat surprisingly for me, once I've got over his aproach (and an absurd number of torpedo launchers), I must say that I like his Enterprise-E, because, to me, it looks like Starfleet vessels of the next generation. Everything in it is different, more shiny, more sleek, and yet, we can clearly see that this is Starfleet vessel, only more advanced than everything we've seen before.

(come to think about it, Akira class (also designed by Eaves) has an abnormally high number of torpedo launchers as well... and yet, both ships hardly used them :) )

However, having said all that, the nice thing about his blog is that we get to see many cool behind-the-scenes pictures :D

So I guess Eaves' designs aren't that bad, are they?
And I don't agree that they all look alike, if he designed both the E-E and the Akira.
Those ships are easily distinguishable from any other ship, or from each other...

The Akira was designed by Alex Jaeger.

When you come up with a ship design, I would like to see a ship that looks cool, as long as you just focus on the main things: engines, power core, bridge, some of the weapons and quarters. After that, you can always come up with surprises for the ship as the stories continue. Aside from that, I'd prefer a form over function.

Cocytus wrote:The Akira was designed by Alex Jaeger.

Yes, he was inspired by the U.S.S. Reliant from ST2: TWoK that was designed by Joe Jennings and Mike Minor, which explains various features on that class of starship, most notably the roll bar-mounted torpedo launcher.
-Mike

Kazeite wrote:Well for one, I agree with 2046.
Case in point: Enterprise-E under-saucer detail. Eaves has incorporated two triangular shapes into it, as a homage of sorts to original Enterprise-nil. Only later he found out that on Ent-nil those triangular shapes are actually landing gear covers. So, does it mean that Ent-E has landing gear as well?

I would wonder where that information about the ventral saucer triangles on the Constitution class comes from. I've certainly have never heard anything like that from Dick Datin or Matt Jefferies.
-Mike

Oh. So I stand corrected on the Akira autorship.

Regarding those triangles, here's the original quote:
For all the changes, Eaves says the design still has many, many traces of Matt Jefferies' original design. "There was a lot of stuff I wanted to keep from the old ship. There were the two triangles on the saucer, which I found out later were supposedly landing gear, and the big scoop on the back. Even though we had to change the ship, I wanted to show that these things still exist."

(from this page)
Now, to be perfectly honest with you, I was going by my memory and I realize now that he doesn't exactly say whether he incorporated those triangles before or after he'd discovered that they are landing gear, so my original point may not be supported anymore :)

Still, all his ships do look similiar, don't they? In fact, I think that Eaves might've been the perfect guy to design the next-next generation Starfleet ships :) - he just doesn't seem to do be able to "switch" to different era.