• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Trying (and failing) to Understand How Starbase Yorktown Fits Together

Serin117

Serin117

Commander
Red Shirt
Yo,

Watched Beyond again over the weekend, and thusly decided to resurrect a file I started and gave up on back in 2016.
This time around I've armed myself with a bunch of reference shots from the film, and a much advanced set of skills.
I've been roughing it out with some 500m x 500m cubes, just for the sake of my sanity. Detail later, maybe.
Won't lie, I'd love to get to the stage of actually throwing in some of the cityscapes, but boy oh boy is there a long way between this and that stage.

So, here's where I'm at.
I'm pretty sure I have the main structure down, even if the sizes of things are a bit off.
Here are its various components.

GJAoBCJ.png


PlxD32b.png


BRlIdNJ.png


And here's what happens when you put them together.

PosmGfQ.png


The parts I'm the most unsure about are those inner offset-by-11.25° rings around the core in orange.

Note that the Starbase symbol seen around the base itself is just an ortho of its structure with some bits removed. Sneaky design nerds are sneaky!

9mafGqg.png


Br68s9Z.png



I've uploaded it to sketchfab too, coz why the hell not.

https://skfb.ly/6MVYw
 
Annnd a sanity check camera position shot, taken from what I assumed was the 'front' facing airlock limb.

WNqdogJ.png


What makes me doubt that assumption is the limb missing from the upper left third of the screenshot.
 
^^^ OMG you actually made me LOL for real.

Serin117. Dude. You are insane for even attempting this. Beyond was my favorite of the Kelvin-era movies so I've watched it several times, but that starbase (which they might as well have christened as Starbase Escher) gives me literal headaches every time I see it. My queasy stomach just can't abide all the crazy angles the "arms" take inside the sphere, especially since they don't seem to correspond to anything approaching the laws of physics or spatial orientation as we puny 21st century humans are capable of comprehending.

(I will admit, though, that I just love that bit when the Enterprise is catapulted out of the dock at some appreciable fraction of light speed. It appeals to the eleven-year-old inside me. VRRRRROOOOOM!)
 
The madness kinda comes from a desire to understand how the structure works from a design perspective.
To kinda get into the heads of the artists who created it, all in an effort to improve my own creative toolset.

For instance,
Those mid-sphere limbs are just another set of offset rings. Took me waaay too long to grasp that, but its why I'm doing this.

sbmGarl.jpg
 
There is no logic to how that thing was made. It was intended to be pure eye-candy to cover up the fact the directors/producers had never watch Trek before being hired to make a Trek movie. They figured that if they put pretty stuff on the screen, nobody would notice the plot holes and the misread of the characters. Oh, and put a lot of pew-pew in for good measure.
 
Last edited:
King Daniel Beyond said:
You could always try reaching out to Sean Hargreaves, who designed Yorktown. He is a very busy man, though. It's one of the most spellbinding designs in all of Star Trek.
Click to expand...

Tis on my list of things to do! Though yeah, I imagine he's likely got better things to do than confirm or deny whether this is anywhere near accurate.

Also, love this shot. Been a little busy with uni so I've got really gotten much further.
xTqjdQt.jpg
 
Wow, lot of shitting on Yorktown here. I remember back when people talked about the Mushroom Starbase like that.

Well, I liked it. "Technology Unchained," but actually looking like a cool place to live and not a Marriott hallway inside a top-heavy saucer with a vestigial engineering section flopping off the side like a male anglerfish. And that last establishing shot sweeping through the city and ending with us seeing the Enterprise passing under the canal still takes my breath away.

One thing to consider when you're camera-matching close-ups is that no one is above selectively removing elements to improve shot-composition. If there's a shot that seems to be missing an arm visible elsewhere, it's entirely possible that it is, and you're not mistaken about how the whole thing goes together.
 
Last edited:
David cgc said:
Wow, lot of shitting on Yorktown here. I remember back when people talked about the Mushroom Starbase like that.

Well, I liked it. "Technology Unchained," but actually looking like a cool place to live and not a Marriott hallway inside a top-heavy saucer with a vestigial engineering section flopping off the side like a male anglerfish. And that last establishing shot sweeping through the city and ending with us seeing the Enterprise passing under the canal still takes my breath away.

One thing to consider when you're camera-matching close-ups is that no one is above selectively removing elements to improve shot-composition. If there's a shot that seems to be missing an arm visible elsewhere, it's entirely possible that it is, and you're not mistaken about how the whole thing goes together.
Click to expand...

Yes indeed. Never fails to fascinate how so many seem to be unable to appropriately distribute the news of their hating a design. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And yeah, I think I've run into that here already. The removing assets from the design for shots thing. Already factoring it in.
 
Well I'm certainly not shitting on it. The scenes before and during the Yorktown were my favorite parts of Star Trek Beyond (even if I got a wee bit spacesick during some of the shots!) Gene would have loved the depiction of Starbase Yorktown. All of those aliens, living and working together in peace. The whole docking sequence was magical.

And I still say you're off your rocker for attempting this, @Serin117, but I continue to enjoy watching your progress. :techman:
 
David cgc said:
Wow, lot of shitting on Yorktown here. I remember back when people talked about the Mushroom Starbase like that.

Well, I liked it. "Technology Unchained," but actually looking like a cool place to live and not a Marriott hallway inside a top-heavy saucer with a vestigial engineering section flopping off the side like a male anglerfish. And that last establishing shot sweeping through the city and ending with us seeing the Enterprise passing under the canal still takes my breath away.
Click to expand...
Yes, indeed. I applaud the OP for their work, but good grief the Kelvin hatred never dies does it.

@Serin117 I appalud your eye for finding the different shapes within the design and look forward to your progress, if you make any. If not, well it's still a reminder of how truly epic of a design Yorktown is and my enjoyment of it in the film.
 
Yorktown's designers certainly seem to have a "let's just go crazy!" approach to construction, giving it a haphazard feel. Personally, I have a function-over form mentality that abhors waste and Yorktown's madness feels more like abstract art than something a growing culture would make in 200-300 years or so. Having thus admitted my predilections for O'Neal colonies and FJ's UFP Headquarters with their elegant simplicity, watching this thread progress has me thinking of the place in a different context.

In-universe, Yorktown is sculpture. It's a wild declaration of will over nature. I suspect it has its functional core holding the thing together as a structure, but outside of that, those wild, twisting arms and spires are intentionally counter-intuitive as an artistic statement. Perhaps as a celebration of the improbability of so many cultures coming together.

The thing is huge and should have taken years to design and build, at least as we understand the process in the real world, but there are technologies on the horizon in our world that might drastically accelerate such a project if taken to their logical conclusions. AI designers that start with simple rules and are then allowed to run amok, for example, coupled with swarms of 3D printers executing those designs. Given those kinds of approaches, Yorktown is, if anything, too conservative!

Why build it like this, though? Why not go with the original UFP Headquarters design? Why not lay down a collection of counter-rotating O'Neal colonies housing tens of thousands in every cylinder? I can imagine this project may have started in the very early days of the Federation. Bureaucracy being what it is, representatives from so many civilizations probably debated the idea and even the reason for such an artificial location for decades before coming up with this. Humans wanted a bigger version of UFP Headquarters, Vulcans sought the logic of simple geometry elevated with higher-order math, but ... one overlooked species had a designer, perhaps a beloved madman who sculpted amazing visions in the early days of that species' adventures in space. And as ideas bounced around in UFP chambers and hallways filled with bickering delegates, ideas that looked too human or too Vulcan or too Andorian slowly lost ground to designs by a madman. Sentiments changed from "how preposterous!" to "but how could we make it work?"

So, Serin117, good job exploring this crazy collection of Ezekiel's wheels! I'm enjoying how your efforts are slowly making me fall in love with a design I once dismissed. The UFP is huge ... and it absorbed the astro-engineering accomplishments of dozens of star systems. There's plenty of room for giant hubs and cylinders and spheres. There's also room for stuff that would make Yorktown look sane.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

ColdFusion180
Star Trek: Lower Decks - CF073 - "Sub Rutherford"
Replies
1
Views
594
Robert Bruce Scott
Robert Bruce Scott
A
Peak of Fools - a friendship/adventure story
Replies
0
Views
381
a troubled tribble
A
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top