Construction
& Painting
| Here, you
see the Warp Sled fully 'weathered' with some last minute work in
progress on the Shuttle itself. Note the Shuttle's side-mount cover panel is off. All miniatures required 4 to 6 places planed and designed into them from which they could be mounted on something (like the red stand you see here) in order to be filmed. The reason for so many connection points is to be able to mount the miniature from a side that the camera doesn't see. In addition to 'holding' the miniatures, these mounts usually contain power connections for lights, engines, or other remotely controlled items such as guns, radar dishes, grappler-arms, doors/hatches or even pilots heads. |
| The Robert Abel model builders did an
amazing job, from fabrication to painting. After
each was all finished & documented, I got to throw in my two cents
worth by adding 'weathering' to a couple of
the miniatures. Very visible here, and in the shot below, are the multiple RCS (Reaction Control System) yellowish nozzles. These were nicely punctuated during the docking sequence with the Enterprise. This was the first 'armed' shuttlecraft (note the phaser bubbles under the nose). And that bit of detailing below the phasers? It's made from two front cockpit pieces from the Darth Vader Tie Fighter plastic model kit. |
|
When people see the colors
in which this shuttle was originally painted, I get a lot of mixed
reactions.
But I won't go into those,
right now.
I arrived at this color because I'd been thinking about the various shades of gray that dressed 99% of all other cinematic spaceships and thought that a gray ship, in the red Vulcan atmosphere, would look sort of red-gray or magenta. From that, I asked for a magenta/purple paint scheme , and my art director, Richard Taylor, backed me up. The modelers came up with an amazing combination of colors and I came up with a custom decal sheet which were all applied,... yet, not everyone appreciated this unusual scheme. When it was filmed, the
colors were neutralized.
|
You can't win them all but I was VERY happy with it.
And, besides, the concept of a smaller vessel mated with a larger stardrive unit was brought back,
over two decades later, in the form of a Star Wars Jedi Starfighter and it's Hyperdrive 'Booster Ring'.
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