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TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name @lemmy.world

Admiral Patrick @dubvee.org

8mo ago

Nailed It!

I may not know much about warp theory, but I do know the Nebula Class looks ridiculous.

Imagine the TNG opening but with the Nebula Class Enterprise D zooming across and also the theme is played on a tuba.

31 comments

I fucking love all the kitbash ships and shuffled part ships.
Especially the ugly kitbashes.
I always thought the nebula class was neat. The mission pod is cool. Being able to swap out for combat or sensors or whatever else you need by heading to a space dock, pressing a few buttons and waiting for the worker bees to swap them out in half an hour or less (or your dilithium back)
- I love the Nebula-class and I will stand with you against the slander in this comment section.
  
  Some people make it obvious they never built model ships (possibly in bottles) when they were young.

Kitbashing is a time honored tradition. I just assumed everyone who works at Utopia Planitia really loved model making as kids.
- True, true.
  But the Nebula Class looks like either a Galaxy Class assembled while drunk or they never unpacked it from its shipping configuration:
  
  Flat-packed starships
- Did nobody else make ships in bottles when they were boys?
  
  I did sir
  
  I was never a boy.
  
  I feel like Mariner would say something like, "No, why would I waste time doing that when I could just replicate one?"
  
  One or two. Had to stop when I became a girl though (for obvious reasons).

And of course if they'd given it saucer separation that wouldn't look even more goofy, nope, not at all
- Looks like ET.
  
  You look like ET

I opened the link on my phone and it scaled the images horizontally. Squart Class:
- It looks like a real life version of a chibi version of the anime version of the enterprise D.
  And I'm not sure how I feel that that's my first thought...

There's a few other derpy ships. This ship in Prodigy is apparently Centaur Class. What is being done to it is probably for the best.
- I realize the AI upscaler used here had a very bad case of pareidolia, but I, too, always thought the Klingon battle cruisers looked like derpy smiley emojis wearing sombreros:
  
  When I see Voyager all I can see is :D in the deflector dish. Looks more like :0 at this angle, though.
  
  Janeway: “It’s right behind me, isn’t it?”
  
  I kind of.. want one.

Wasn’t the inspiration for this also the Northrop Grumman E-2 Hawkeye since they’re meant to be science craft with large sensor arrays?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grumman_E-2_Hawkeye
- I have no idea, but that would definitely be plausible.
  
  I always thought so but can’t find where I may have read that from… maybe just an assumption I made because it looks like it and they are often used in science/sensor roles
  
  Found it. The AWACS.
  https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Nebula_class_model
  The design upgrades for the Nebula-class were done by Mike Okuda and Rick Sternbach and the model was built by Greg Jein. In Drexler's blog, Okuda elaborated further: "As so often happens with this kind of project, we didn't give Greg enough time to accomplish this, so we decided to retain the original scale of the Galaxy-class ship saucer. I suggested the original 'AWACS' pod in response to a producer's observation that the ship might otherwise appear unbalanced. Unfortunately, the AWACS pod didn't look as elegant as we had hoped in "The Wounded".

Pffft. Who needs an owners manual when you have red shirts to sacrifice while you learn?
- Red shirts are command by TNG era. It would be the gold shirts (engineering and ops) that would be sacrificed to the dark lord of starship construction.

Thinking about it, I feel like having the nacelles as close to the middle of the ship might actually make more sense. If they're creating a warp bubble around them, it would be centred on the nacelle, so having it centrally placed would balance the 'amount' of warp bubble around the entire ship
- The old school justification for ship designs having the nacelles far from crew-occupied parts of the ship was that they were powerfully dangerous. That really isn't a thing any more, which has freed the model designers to make some creative new shapes, which is pretty cool. (I still love the iconic old designs though.)

31 comments