Ships of the Line for 2009

I must admit, I expected a _Ship_ of the Line, again, with focus
on the reworked Enterprise, as this calendar had to have been
planned when it would have made a great Christmas gift at the
crest of the publicity for the movie, rather than an item on
which to mark the date of the premier of the movie. Actually,
there are no images of the Movie ship, unless they are surprising
us all by going back to the original design. If they aren't, I
suspect we'll see a lot of images _next_ year, when the calendar
will make a great Christmas gift along with the DVD.

Now, what we do have:

The Cover:
One of the dramatic highlights of The Motion Picture, the docking
of Spock's shuttle. I really like this composition, especially
that the whole frame is filled with the saucer of the Enterprise.
Possibly. It translates to darkness at the edges, and one corner
may be free space. If I have one complaint, it is that the
lighting is a little dim, especially as the selling display for
the calendar. The shuttle could really pop into 3D with a
spotlight directed at it from the nacelles. (Also the island of
the B and C decks has not had sufficient polygon smoothing. It
looks like it's been built in framework segments rather than
round.)

January "Never Been Done!"
TOS Enterprise in front of some kind of space anomaly. Puzzled
me for a long while; what is it? Not the Galactic Barrier. The
Enterprise is weirdly lit; the rim starboard of the impulse
engines looks to be glowing on its own, some type of special
warp? They've invented something new that the Enterprise was the
first to do? Looking at it from various angles, I got the idea
of a planet exploding. Could this be Psi 2000 from "The Naked
Time"? (I always have to look up that name, the James Blish
version, in a burst of verisimilitude, has it identified by an
unreadable string of letters of which the first few cause folks
to nickname it "La Pig," and adwriters for some edition of the
book chose to highlight that adventure as "The Enterprise
explores a planet named La Pig!") Then this is mixing matter and
antimatter cold, which Scotty says is, "...just a theory! It's
'Never Been Done!'" (Time travel, eh? A tie-in to the movie?)


February "Falling Prey"
E-D being shot by... what? Something Klingon, not the future
one, nor the Negh'Var made from it. Are the artists trying to
create a different look for the K'Vort cruiser-sized Bird of
Prey, or the Great Bird of the Galaxy-class size? No, wait...
it's the Bird of Prey designed to be an old one for ENTERPRISE,
seen from a new angle. Yeah, tension cables connecting the
"head" to the main body. Darn, there was a "grain silo and
bunker" on the top that would really scale it large if they were
the size of the ones on the D-7. I guess this shows the ENT
designs' lack of establishing scale, and -as with 2005's seven
Enterprises in a circle- lack of establishing technological
progression.


March "Too Close For Comfort"
A Federation shuttle (use of the default settings makes it the
adventuresome Galileo) gets a good look at the business end of
the D-7. There is a right side of the D-7 -the inside- and a
wrong side, and the designers made sure anyone on the wrong side
of the D-7 will be very, very worried about it.
The bulge underneath the D-7 head (and to some extent the
"bunker" atop) are unsmoothed, but the hull plating makes it
work.

As an aside, did any of the Remastered TOS put the lie to Kirk's
"I've never been this close" line from ST VI? I mean no more
than the original "Enterprise Incident" did?

April "Get Us Out of Here!"
In many ways a reprise of March, with a Runabout (too blurred to
tell that it is the Rio Grande) fleeing a Jem'Hadar Battleship.

May "Resistance Not Futile!"
Not if you're Species 8472! A small fleet of their bioships are
each lashing a Borg cube with lightning individually rather than
combining beams a la the Death Star.

June
A beauty shot of the refit Enterprise. And it does look
beautiful.

Centerfold
Here's a place for those who complain the computer model matches
neither the 11-foot nor 3-foot model, as it is used here to
represent working in the 1960s visual effects shop. I'll leave
it for experts to say if one can actually tell, as the image that
is undetailed, (de-detailed? derezzed, to borrow a word from
TRON) simulating a photo that was overexposed and/or posterized.
Real experts might tell us if the filmmaking equipment is of the
proper vintage. I would suspect the two people are not
recognizable folks of that time, but I could be wrong.

July
A beauty shot of the Voyager over a planet's rings, without the
reflection seen in the title sequence.

August "Around the Quadrant in 80 Days"
Boy, that's fast! Perhaps "Sector" should have been used... and
"8 Days," suggesting smallcraft have come up to the 1000 ly/year
speed of the large ships. (Or just admit it is a playful title.)
Crewmembers seen through the windows show that the USS Spirit
NCC-79995 is a small ship, although larger than the USS Pleiades
of this year, also by Mark Rademaker.
The last four calendars have allowed artists to create their own
ships: Spirit here, and Pleiades in 2008, an arrow-shaped
post-Galaxy ship and a conjectural refit Constitution in 2007,
and the NCC-1000 and a double-Oberth nacelle tug in 2006. The
last is the only one that works for me. Perhaps because it is a
work ship, and the others seem to be "superships." Or perhaps
that it's based on a known design and doesn't look as weird as
the others.
The Spirit does look a bit odd. The underside reminds me of the
ribs and belly of a racing greyhound, and the nacelle struts look
awkward. I wonder if the artists get any direction or feedback
from the calendar editor.

September
Kirk and Spock in the "Tholian Web" spacesuits among very
reflective ice floes. Looks like a dangerous place to be, a
particularly dangerous place to park the Enterprise.

October "Kobayashi Maru"
Is this Kirk's test? (The last time I'll try to tie in to the
new movie.) It uses the pre-D-7s John Eaves designed for ENT.
(Did they not appear in the show? I went to DITL.org to find a
name for the class, and I don't see any image of it.) Either
this model is well-smoothed, or the shapes are broken up by the
photorp glare that I can't see the polygon tessellation.

November
Another painting by Andrew Probert! And another new ship!
....well, shuttlecraft. ...actually, I have trouble believing
those curving things along the sides are nacelles, and with the
single-person seating, I think this is more a replacement for the
Sphinx workpod. Which would make its flocking fans to be the
pick-'em-up truck drivin' engineering division types.
It appears to be on the Starfleet Academy grounds with the Golden
Gate Bridge (or Lisbon, Portugal's 25 de Abril Bridge... look it
up!) in the background. In the San Franciso Bay (or Tagus River)
is what looks to be a submarine with a sail the shape of
Voyager's primary hull, and a rooster tail thrown up by I can't
see what... a super jetski? (warpski?)
Note the TNG shuttles around. Andy uses his idea of a hatch
being on the front, between the wraparound windows. The whole
side with the wraparound window seems to hinge up in the one on
the left, perhaps these are cadet repair practice items, with
easy overall access.


December "Warp Bubble Test"
An interestingly painted Constitution-class ship in a bay that
pays obvious homage to a wind tunnel. Only when one sees an
image of Kirk and Spock in one of the windows overlooking it does
one realize this is a model. (11 feet long?) Kirk and Spock
seem to be a still from the series rather than the modeled heads
used in September. I might object that a test article like this
would probably not be marked with the NX prefix, but the artist
may have done that to keep people guessing until they noticed the
observers. I feel like I may have spoiled his joke.
From the uniforms, I would guess we are watching a test of the
change from Second Pilot configuration to Series Production
configuration. Any objections that the model does not accurately
represent the Series Production miniature can be met by saying
this is not the *final* test.


In summation: an interesting and varied choice of ships -five
full months without any representation of the "star" ships- in
some impressive layouts. I think it's going to be a good year.

Oh, the series scorecard:
TOS - 5
TFS - 2
TNG - 2
DS9 - 1
VOY - 2
ENT - 2 (Giving it credit for the two early Klingons)
As for the Spirit, I don't think I've been crediting post
Generations Films to TGF, it can just stand off on its own.


.

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