"Star Trek: Phase II" Enterprise

[Admiral Buzzkill]

This is something I've been fiddling with, off and on, for a long time. I've been fascinated by Jefferies' design for the refit Enterprise since I first saw Mike Minor's renderings of it in Starlog back in 1978.

The modeling is complete except for airlock and running light details. I haven't done any texturing yet.

As reference for this, I've used the Jefferies drawings available online as well as photographs of the partially completed model and Minor's color renderings. Where there are inconsistencies I've privileged the Jefferies art over the model and the model over the Minor renderings. I've done my best to ignore what I know about the TMP improvements, and invented, added and extrapolated very very little. Therefore the detailing on this version may be rather plain, even compared to the original TOS shooting model.

My intent was to get as close as I could to what Jefferies appears to have intended the ship to look like.

This is in Lightwave, and I'll release the mesh over at www.foundation3d.com as soon as it's textured - probably about two weeks, as I have some work I'm doing for other folks that needs to be finished up immediately.

 

[NiteTrek]

Looks good! In all the models of NCC-1701, I always wondered why they didn't have a rear firing torpedo bay at the same level on the neck (or close) to the forward firing bays. You could have the same crew man both bays or at least make it easier since they would be so close together.

 

[RobertScorpio]

This is something I've been fiddling with, off and on, for a long time. I've been fascinated by Jefferies' design for the refit Enterprise since I first saw Mike Minor's renderings of it in Starlog back in 1978.

The modeling is complete except for airlock and running light details. I haven't done any texturing yet.

As reference for this, I've used the Jefferies drawings available online as well as photographs of the partially completed model and Minor's color renderings. Where there are inconsistencies I've privileged the Jefferies art over the model and the model over the Minor renderings. I've done my best to ignore what I know about the TMP improvements, and invented, added and extrapolated very very little. Therefore the detailing on this version may be rather plain, even compared to the original TOS shooting model.

My intent was to get as close as I could to what Jefferies appears to have intended the ship to look like.

This is in Lightwave, and I'll release the mesh over at www.foundation3d.com as soon as it's textured - probably about two weeks, as I have some work I'm doing for other folks that needs to be finished up immediately.

Damn..my work computer won't let me view anything at photobucket...would love to see your material..and I love that PHASE II book. The art and all the behind the scenes stuff is fascinating. But, after reading those stories they were to have done, not sure if it would have gone over. Roddenberry's writing seemed stalled in the 60s...

Rob
Scorpio

 

[Gepard]

Beautiful work. I've also been interested in the unproduced Phase II version, so it's great to see it come to life.

How many faces does the mesh come out to?

 

[137th Gebirg]

Looks good! In all the models of NCC-1701, I always wondered why they didn't have a rear firing torpedo by at the same level on the neck (or close) to the forward firing bays. You could have the same crew man both bays or at least make it easier since they would be so close together.

In "Ships of the Starfleet Vol. 1" by Mastercom Data Center, they came up with the America class Heavy Cruiser that addressed this very thing.

 

[NiteTrek]

In "Ships of the Starfleet Vol. 1" by Mastercom Data Center, they came up with the America class Heavy Cruiser that addressed this very thing.

Cool! Are there any more "finished" pictures of this ship?

 

[Patrickivan]

Very nice- however in the movie posters in the comic books that I have, there seems to be a significant amount off windows. Especially on the saucer, though the egineering section seems to have many windows too. I assume you have seen these images, and if so, why leave them off the render?

I too thought this was a neat concept. A bridge between TOS and TMP Enterprise. It always seemed pausible to me that after the first 3 years of the 5 year mission, this could have been how the ship was refitted over time. In pieces that were replaced- first the warp nacelles, pylons, and engineering section. The bridge module is swapped out. Modifications are made to the neck and the photon torpedoe launcher. The saucer is refitted with more windows- and whatever. By the end of the 5 year mission, we have this ship, and it is this ship that is "Refitted" into the MP Enterprise. Making the transition to the motion picture "refit" more reasonable. Decker's statement is so much more reasonable because this one is closer looking in a lot of respects (especially the engineering section). This is a ship that seemed plausible in the Star Trek universe.

Well done!

 

[Bernard Guignard]

Very nice work.

 

[dru]

Excellent.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Thanks, guys.

Very nice- however in the movie posters in the comic books that I have, there seems to be a significant amount off windows. Especially on the saucer, though the egineering section seems to have many windows too. I assume you have seen these images, and if so, why leave them off the render?

Because the poster image you're referring to - which is very cool - is art created after the fact for marketing purposes related to ST-TMP. All of those windows and much of the suggestions of nerny detailing don't have anything to do with the actual design of the "Phase II" ship as drawn by Jefferies or constructed by Loos or rendered from those references by Mike Minor during the period that the series was in pre-production. Dynamic as it is, the poster image doesn't accurately reflect what was designed and (partly) built.

I based the window placement on the mesh directly on Jefferies' detailed drawings of the engineering hull, photographs of the interconnecting neck on the Don Loos model, and on the Minor art - the last indicates that the arrangement of windows on the saucer would have been very similar to the TOS ship, so I used that vessel for additional reference to fill it out a bit.

This mesh sits at about 75,000 polygons, I think.

 

[Shaw]

I've noticed that a lot of people add in the deflector dish on the secondary hull... this has been one of those details that has always troubled me because it is absent from every Phase II drawing I've seen to date, but Jefferies took great care in making sure that it was included (in detail) in the original plans for the Enterprise back in 1964 (comparison below).

I was wondering if you had found some additional details on this area that I've over looked or if this was (in the absence of concrete evidence either way) a style choice?

I love this ship though (even without the texturing).

It is great that between your work here and that of NBTrekie that we finally have some realizations of it that can give us some idea of what we might have seen had we gotten the series.

 

[Maurice]

Nice work!

If you're ignoring the refit, why are the warp grilles TMP purple? Just curious.

 

[Captain Robert April]

To paraphrase Vina, he has to color them something...doesn't he?

 

[Jon1701]

Great work, Dennis.

Are you going to do anything with the *say it quietly* Nacelle caps? Looking on your model you've greyed them out. I'm at work at the moment, so I can't remember the detail on that picture of the unfinished model.

Did he jefferies intend to have anything going on there?

Do you?

 

[NiteTrek]

Are you going to do anything with the *say it quietly* Nacelle caps?

I wonder how they would look with something similar to the sparkly glow of the original (of course you couldn't do the spinning effect.)

I really like this model, I hope once it's complete you would consider adding some cool background shots so we can use as wallpaper.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Well, let's see -

The deflector dish appears on the Mike Minor renderings of the ship, and doesn't appear to be quite flush with the front of the engineering hull. In fact I can't find anything in Jefferies' drawings indicating what his treatment of the dish would have been other than as Minor represents it, so - as Capt April said of the warp grilles - I have to do something with it. Minor's painting represents the best info I had available, in this case. There's certainly nothing that I'm aware of to indicate that they were going to light up the deflector ala TMP.

And yeah, the grilles are purple because it was either purple or blue and I'm sick of blue - there's a lot of dark or black detailing on the color renderings that just doesn't work.

Nacelle caps - now, there's something that will need to diverge from the color renderings but I haven't decided how yet. The problem with them as rendered is that the extremely dark blue/black treatment causes the caps to simply disappear into the black background of space. I don't know what they were thinking, there - a similar color treatment was applied to the main deflector dish. I've decided to eventually represent the dish as steel or a dark gun-metal color, but as far as the nacelle fronts are concerned...I dunno. I may try a variation of the unlit, blood-red caps from "The Cage."

 

[Jon1701]

What about using the same purple as the grills?

 

[dru]

Did he jefferies intend to have anything going on there?

It depends. There are some sketches when he's working out the new "power pods" and he indicates a glow on the top of the new nacelle caps. Those caps, however, are a different style than what was ultimately decided up.

There was also a note that he only intended to suggest a change to the nacelle and struts, and not to the rest of the ship, although in reality subtle alterations would exist.

We also know from seeing photos of the incomplete VFX scale model that there is only a solid mass on the front of the nacelle caps.

On the deflector dish, I asked Andy Probert on this board once and he replied he had no memory of anything special planned for the Phase II version such as a lighted deflector. The working sketches I've seen all indicate Jefferies planned to keep a classic TOS deflector dish. Why it isn't indicated on the finalized plans or schematics is a mystery.

Dennis, what Mike Minor images are you using? Are they online?

(Bless you for using purple and not the blue.)

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Here ya go:

 

[Maurice]

I think, as Dennis's renderd prove, it's a much better looking ship than some people give it credit for. It's not as beautifully refined as the refit we got—it's the last 20% that makes or breaks a design—but still nice ship.

From the renderings I've seen, and Minor's painting, above, it looks like the nacelle caps were intended to just be the hull color.

HOWEVER, it appears Minor kept reworking the painting as the show developed, and even refit-ized it once.


Click HERE for a bigger image

As it happens, I just found a magazine which features one version of the Mike Minor rendering from 1978 that looks a lot like the one posted by Dennis (previous message), but without the whoosh lines, and with an interesting detail that I haven't seen clearly elsewhere.

EDIT: here it is

A higher res scan is HERE: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2082/2523729984_bd14a6e79d_b_d.jpg

The scan, unfortunately, doesn't show the relevant bits as clearly as they appear on the original magazine pages, despite my best attempts. But the lines around the nacelle caps and the major lines on the inboard warp grills appear to be painted the same way as the glowing windows and lights on the rest of the ship. There's no black around the grilles, as on the TMP refit. Whether this means they were intended to glow, or if it was just sort artistic florish, I can't tell you.

The deflector dish, while in shadow, has a bluish gray cast to it in this painting.

I also noticed there's no NCC number or any of these pre-TMP design renderings. My guess is, when they decided to put the grilles on the outboard sides of the necelles, thye noved the registry to the secondary hull and deliberately left it off the nacelles.

Make of all this what you will.