In Google SketchUp, I have a DS9 model, a runabout model, a Defiant model, and a Galaxy Class model, along with some little blue figurine dudes for scale, and I have them all scaled correctly. SketchUp lets you create 'scenes', meaning you can carefully place your camera, adjust your field of view and zoom and such, and basically get a picture looking more or less like you want it.
I'll be reporting more on this soon (hopefully sharing images for comparison against DS9 screencaps). But first, I just wanted to say that David Stipes and his dramaturgical rescaling routine is really, really annoying. I knew it would be going in, but it truly boggles the mind to actually watch it unfold on my screen.
In any case, this is just a quick note about the little mini-project. Remember the DS9 opening credits with those welding dudes? Yeah, even if the station is a 'mere' 1097 meters (as designed), those dudes are over 24 feet tall. (James Cameron, eat your heart out.) To get 1.8 meter humanoids to look anywhere close to correct against the station, it must be shrunk to around 335 meters.
Goofy.
In lighter news . . . well, I won't name names, but someone posted a screwed up model of the TNG shuttlepod . . . the one they made super-boxy so that it would be cheap to build. A shuttlepod! Good sweet heavens, man! I realize it isn't a cube, but it isn't that complicated either . . . no curves, no complex curves, no nothing. Just simple angles.
Now bear in mind, I respect these guys . . . I sure wouldn't want to do any of this mess. I'd probably die trying to get the TOS Constitution right. But good grief . . . I have to draw the line at a screwed up shuttlepod.
I'll be reporting more on this soon (hopefully sharing images for comparison against DS9 screencaps). But first, I just wanted to say that David Stipes and his dramaturgical rescaling routine is really, really annoying. I knew it would be going in, but it truly boggles the mind to actually watch it unfold on my screen.
In any case, this is just a quick note about the little mini-project. Remember the DS9 opening credits with those welding dudes? Yeah, even if the station is a 'mere' 1097 meters (as designed), those dudes are over 24 feet tall. (James Cameron, eat your heart out.) To get 1.8 meter humanoids to look anywhere close to correct against the station, it must be shrunk to around 335 meters.
Goofy.
In lighter news . . . well, I won't name names, but someone posted a screwed up model of the TNG shuttlepod . . . the one they made super-boxy so that it would be cheap to build. A shuttlepod! Good sweet heavens, man! I realize it isn't a cube, but it isn't that complicated either . . . no curves, no complex curves, no nothing. Just simple angles.
Now bear in mind, I respect these guys . . . I sure wouldn't want to do any of this mess. I'd probably die trying to get the TOS Constitution right. But good grief . . . I have to draw the line at a screwed up shuttlepod.
3 comments:
That's funny. Did you notice that 335m = 1098' (very close to 1097m).
Maybe fx guys screwed up on the unit conversion?
..meant to say very close to the 1097 in the 1097m that you wrote :)
That's highly probable. I know how many problems I had in finding out the displacement of certain naval ships. People convert from Imperial long tons to metric tonnes to short tons. Then they screw up their units and re-convert metric tonnes to metric tonnes (as if they were long tons) and you get all sorts of weird numbers. There's also the problem of mismatched or confused metric prefixes. A guy I talked to over the net was baffled as to "why do the German specifications erroneously say the Bismarck had 1.5" guns" when he knew they were actually 15". The answer? The Germans expressed the calibre in centimetres instead of the usual millimetres. Sorry for the digression, but I don't consider it all that unrelated to the problem of scaling.
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