Thom

New model on the table!

3 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

UPDATE 1:

Final on the Tomcat:

Calling this one "done" (whew!)

 

UPDATE 2:

Got this far on the Refit after someone using a car horn as a "doorbell" made me dump half a bottle of Microsol:

Beginning the Aztec pattern, but not using pencil...

 

...freehanding in pearlescent paint. We'll see how it goes...

On that note: wasn't a big fan of blackened botanical garden windows... so I did some "gardening"...
 

Planning to do a light blue glaze to simulate the lights on in there.

 

Stay tuned...

Nice finish on the 'cat! Feels good to finally get it done right?! And good looking repair on the Refit.

8 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

Well, yesterday my darling upstairs neighbors decided to have "Stompfest 2021" upstairs. >:(  They managed to rattle several things right off the table in our apartment (I SWEAR they must be dropping bowling balls and cinderblocks!) ; thankfully, the Tomcat was NOT amongst the items that fell from the table. it was safely in its' storage bin and thus was not a casualty.

 

However... the Refit WAS.

 

As it stands right now, both nacelle pylons are cracked apart from the Secondary hull. Thankfully, they both have a metal reinforcement rod (bent into a "u" shape") that supports the main weight.

That said:... I DID NOT NEED THIS:

I should be able to repair the damage with Plastic Welder; then it's a matter of repainting the areas that got cracked (ugh) and doing my best to hide the damage. But since I haven't slept since it happened (I cannot sleep when I'm upset) When I am a bit calmer, I plan on having a very detailed discussion with our landlord, which will include the price for a new tube of Plastic Welder, as well as any other amenities I may need to effect repairs. This discussion will also include the request for the landlord to issue a written warning against our upstairs neighbors (to be retained in the landlord's files and a copy for our own files), and the future possibility of summoning law enforcement/ legal action concerning them and their less-than-civil behavior.

It's a very small universe when I'm angry with someone.

Stay tuned...

 

 

Aw, damn man. There's only one response to that...

It's real shame when neighbors choose to be arseholes. Hope it can be smoothed over, and for the model too!

Absolutely outstanding!

While I have plenty of time, but very little mojo...

@Gabe Q that Super Val is looking sharp.

Maybe season will hint that it wasn't natural..? Maybe it could have been done by the alien-tentacle-AIs in order to stop the Romulan's Tal'shiar from their goal.

Though I really liked the Snyder Cut, I think it would have been better without the lead-ins to anything further than the three that he did. Anything having to do with Superman being turned by Darkseid and the Anti-Life Equation, in effect anything having to do with the dark future they showed, should have been shelved. Esp since they (WB) probably won't do anything with it from here on out. Leaving those out would have left us with a nice, buttoned up trilogy, rather than teasing a future series that, more than likely, will not happen.

Considering that it is about 6 hours long, it wouldn't be hard to trim the fat a little, and even splice in some of Whedon's version (apocryphal, I know), such as the end scene showing WW coming out of the shadows. A more up-peat ending rather than, again, something that hints to nowhere...

I wonder if anyone would do a plice like that..?

Yeah, it was just a Big 'Splosion! Which, really, was descriptive enough, as the reason for that was not essential to  the plot. It was merely the kick-off to everything else. 

As to S3 of Disco, I was so disappointed in that! I came in on S2, with Pike and the Enterprise, with a basically good story line, but they just crapped all over themselves with S3. Such a great mystery, with far-ranging consequences - but such an incredibly stupid resolution.

@Chronocidal Wow, is that ship looking good! Make some swoosh noises for us too!

@pengbuzz Looking really nice there, Pengbuzz! Really liking the shading.

@Gabe Q Can't wait to see it all fall together! Gonna look nice.

Well, the reason for how fast the super nova in the Romulan system progressed so fast was because of (insert-science-mumbo-jumbo.) Obviously!

3 minutes ago, tekering said:

You mean the Probe from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home?

 

 

Yes, thank you.   That one. ^^

5 hours ago, JB0 said:

Is the correct answer "every time it wasn't the Borg"?

Because they had multiple ships show up in Best of Both Worlds and First Contact. And those are pretty much the only cases I can think of for multiple ships between Earth and certain doom.

The Search for Spock Voyage Home. They were neutralized pretty easily, but there were a number of ships between the Probe and Earth.

7 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

It wasn't the blast itself that knocked Excelsior around, it was a subspace shockwave produced by the blast.  Excelsior was at impulse and still got knocked around pretty badly by it, but it's worth noting that warp drives aren't the only propulsion technologies that use subspace fields for propulsive effect.  Impulse drives do too.  It's possible ships at warp were hit even harder by it because they were running much more intense subspace fields, and were maybe tossed about to their own destruction.

 

It was one of those weird planar shockwaves that only exist in fiction... maybe Qo'nos got lucky and it just... missed?

Admittedly not any less unrealistic than the Romulans just failing miserably to notice their sun was ready to go supernova, something that any idiot should've been able to tell in the two thousand or so years they'd lived in the system after emigrating from Vulcan.

I don't follow back stories all that much, so I don't know if there was anything mentioned off-screen about other ships effected by the shock wave. Clearly, Excelsior was the 'only ship in the sector.'

As to the Romulan super nova, I thought they were aware of the impending disaster and that's why the Federation had time to start building the convoy fleet.

Here here! The first one was awesome!

2 hours ago, Chronocidal said:

Definitely, though part of me likes the idea of keeping the first print in a "stock" state, as a reminder of how it came out of the printer, kind of like a first molding proof.  I'll admit, there's also something fascinating to me about the raw textured surface.

As little as I want to make another full print, I probably will somewhere down the road, just to paint up multiple versions.  I still need to experiment with paintschemes and markings, after all, and if I do the canon scheme from Wing Commander III, it's actually a Heater-Ferris scheme derivative, so that's going to be all kinds of fun to mask and spray. 

Resin copies. Once cleaned, those pieces could be used as masters, either done by yourself, or maybe someone who works with resin regularly could help, and maybe getting a few free copies as payment.

@Chronocidal I'd say sand it. You've already put a lot of hours into it.

2 hours ago, Dynaman said:

It is best not to think about the science of that blast, AT ALL, since there was none.

Fair point.

27 minutes ago, mechaninac said:

Maybe the vast majority of the blast was facing away from Qo'noS, with the subspace shock-wave closing up to propagate in full force beyond the planet; what remained of Praxis acting as a shield protecting the Klingon home world from suffering the full brunt of the blow, but not enough to prevent the ozone layer from being stripped away... energy akin to a CME of gargantuan proportions or a nearly dead-on GRB inside of 500 light years.  Admittedly, a very convenient set of circumstances to deliver the results shown and stated in the movie.

Could be that it was placed on the far side for safety, which would probably make it the only safety measure actively used on Praxis!

@Chronocidal That is some great model making! Love the look and the size of it. We're all going wheeeeeeeeeeee!

@peter Great work on those decks. They look... great!

@pengbuzz Looking good on the Enterprise!

2 hours ago, TangledThorns said:

More likely several grand daughters at this point, lol.

So we can skip Mutt and just have Granpa Indy getting into an adventure alongside his tween granddaughter.

On 4/12/2021 at 2:27 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

Admittedly, I misremembered the scene from Star Trek VI so I misstated the nature of the Klingon problem.  Allow me to remedy that.

Star Trek's Klingons were always a thinly-veiled allegory for the Soviet Union and the events of Star Trek VI were very much ripped from the headlines... which made the whole schtick a lot more plausible.  The Klingons weren't incapable of solving the problem themselves and had half a century to work on the problem.  Their issue, and the reason they opted to try for peace with the Federation, was that the majority of the Klingon Empire's resources were committed to maintaining its military and they couldn't devote the resources necessary to sort their problem out without compromising their national defense against the Federation and Romulans.

(It's noted in a memo by Ron Moore, the writer who laid down a lot of the setting information for Klingons, that their homeworld is resource-poor.  The Klingon economy isn't quite as robust as the Federation's because of the resources invested in maintaining control over conquered worlds and their native populations and annexing new territory for more resources all the time.  Basically, while the Klingon Empire and Federation are about the same size, the Klingons are a lot less wealthy because of the difference in governmental policies, so their economy couldn't tank the hit of Praxis blowing up without having to divert resources from the military.)

 

When it came to the Romulans, it made a lot less sense because the Romulans were not as fractious as the Klingons and the disaster was simply the loss of one planet at a time when relations with their neighbors were arguably the best they'd ever been in the wake of the Dominion War.  

Accepted, but conditionally. Coupled with their mind-set, and the fact that factions would have gladly gone to war rather the demilitarize the neutral zone, I would say that their troubles were far more of psychological nature than a truly physical one. Being a multi-system empire, they had the means, but they had problems with the peace part of the whole thing. And the apparent inability to decentralize their energy production facilities... 

Another difference is that major relief was not needed for them as with the Romulans. Between the two, that is the one that I have the most trouble with. If this had happened to Bajor, then I could see the need for the Federation to offer so much assistance to a single-planet gov.

On 4/12/2021 at 4:30 PM, JB0 said:

I do note that Praxis was a VERY large blast, with effects carrying far enough in subspace to knock Excelsior out of warp on the Federation's side of the neutral zone.

Even assuming those wider effects are limited to subspace, they probably have significant short-term implications for warp travel within the empire.  

It was a very large blast, esp to be able to knock Excelsior around lights years away. But she wasn't in warp though. At the time, she was sublight cataloging gaseous anomalies... So I am assuming that there was nothing wrong with using warp at or around Qo'noS.

That does bring up another point about STUC. Qo'noS only lost its ozone layer in the blast. But considering the effect it had on Excelsior, again light years away, it probably should have blown the atmosphere clean off, and cooked half the surface for good measure.

3 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

 

The Klingon one was way more plausible.  It wasn't that the Klingons couldn't evacuate Qo'nos, it was that their economy had been so devastated by the Praxis disaster and so war-focused that they didn't have the means to repair the damage to their homeworld and they needed Federation help to clean it up... like the Chernobyl disaster it was based on for the Soviet Union.

The problem I have with that, in both instances, is that these would then not be multi-system empires, which we know is wrong. Both control dozens of systems, and more than likely, they acquired each for the benefits that they hold. One good hit, like Praxis or even the sun of the Romulan's capitol system, should not be enough to cripple them. 

Not to mention that, just like in Undiscovered Country, the Romulans, like the Klingons, can't seem to take care of themselves in the face of a crisis. Like the Federation, the Romulans have dozens, if not hundreds, of worlds and yet they are suddenly unable to handle a crisis without Federation help.

On the other hand, having a hero figure, even Picard, never stumble or fail, whether that be some great achievement or small personal belief, can get pretty boring. And unbelievable. People get old. People tire. They can get weary standing tall on the line year after year, decade after decade, especially if they end up standing alone. At some point, our heroes have to suffer a crisis of faith, otherwise they are no longer as human as the rest of us.

That is what happened to Picard, and the course of the series was then to show him battling back to the man he had been. Were they perfect in showing that? Sadly, no, but I think that was the ultimate point. At least until he died and they replaced him with an android...

Despite the novelty of a 'one for all' fighter, I would prefer a purpose built aircraft designed for a specific role. As they say, a Jack of All Trades is a Master of None. Rather than putting so much dependence on one is the wrong approach, IMHO. A plane like the F-35 should be a supporter of a true-bred fighter or ground attacker, rather than the one trying to do it all.

Does this mean I can put the Kite ensign on my new-series models now..?