From the moment Romulans became known to the Federation one thing has been very clear; it is the way of the Romulan Star Empire to manipulate circumstances to their advantage and fight as many battles as possible from a distance. As a result they considered it a significant boon to set their hands upon an MCRN light frigate modeled precisely after the storied Rocinante which fought in the UN-MCR War. Intending to revive memories of that costly conflict and the historical propensity of humans to war amongst themselves, the Romulans brazenly parade this vessel along the borders of the Neutral Zone. They harbor no illusions that this will result in any drastic reaction, but the senate has learned that by making the proper moves an enemy’s future defenses can be shattered by introducing a crucial perceived flaw in the present.
After 11 days it becomes clear that Starfleet is scraping the bottom of the Repurposed Starship Design barrel. But it was a proud day for a low-level Petty Officer possessing an uncommon familiarity with parallel realities where other Terran Federations reigned. One such Federation was famously opposed by a political dissident known as Roj Blake and his band of 7 rebels onboard an alien craft known as Liberator. This ship housed a central computer known as Zen, which became Temporal Pen Pals with Zora aboard the USS Discovery in the 32nd century and…and then they….. Look guys, I just wanted to redesign the ship from Blake’s 7 as a Starfleet ship. It’s a deep cut, what can I say?
And then there were Vulcans. After a particularly rambunctious night attempting to revive the centuries-old Vulcan pagan celebration of Rumarie, along with an ill-advised experimenting session with Trellium-D, a group of Vulcan students decided that what was missing from their festival…was SPEED! This was what led to a group of 40-55 year old Vulcan youngsters stealing a conveniently parked Corellian light freighter and turning it into their personal stellar hot rod, speed-running through the Neutral Zone while arguing about whether the console readout showing “parsecs” was referring to distance or time.
TrekAdvent Day 10. Ben, Ken, Len, Pen, Men, Den, Hen, Zen and Yen. Rhymes achieved.
The Cardassians, having acquired a taste for borrowing ships designs after the success of repurposing Earthforce Starfuries, once again adapt human engineering by taking possession of the Tau’ri BC-304 known as the Daedalus Class battlecruiser. While some may expect the hangar bays on either side to house a compliment of Starfuries, Central Command confounded expectations by converting the bays into massive warp nacelles and converting the primary hull into densely packed barracks, allowing the vessel to transport a formidable detachment of ground troops while maintaining high warp speeds for considerable lengths of time. Their solution for delivering combat fighters will soon be revealed.
TrekAdvent Day 9, fresh like pine, classy as wine, making the day fine. I don’t know how or why I started incorporating rhymes into my posts so we’ll see if it sticks around. While we wait, let’s have a peek at the newest craft rolling off the Dominion assembly line. After the defeat of the Shadows at the hands of the Vorlons and an alliance of the younger races, the ancient race of insect-like manipulators wouldn’t have much need for their ships. That’s where the Jem’Hadar come in. Having recently acquired their new fleet of converted TIE fighters they need someplace to dock them, and this Shadow Dreadnought (as Sheridan called it) fits the bill. Along with the massively powerful weaponry and durability common to Shadow vessels the Jem’Hadar develop a deep respect for their First Principles, chaos through warfare, evolution through bloodshed, perfection through victory. And as we all know, Victory is Life.
Wait, while I state, that eight is great. Day 8 of TrekAdvent is upon us, as is an unstoppable wave of Klingon warriors in yet another “borrowed” class of starfighter. Here we see a craft familiar to members of the Rebellion; the X-Wing. After deciding that the sounds and overall adorableness of the pre-installed astromech droids were a bit too reminiscent of tribbles, the KDF extracted them and replaced them with the reprogrammed heads of A500 androids, having stolen many storage containers of their deconstructed parts after the rogue synth attack on Mars in 2385.
So yeah, I missed December 5th. What can I tell ya? Stuff happens.
But we’re back, and we begin with a Starfury fighter craft from Babylon 5 press ganged into service by the Cardassian Union. Perhaps with these agile vessels at their disposal the Central Command would have fared better against the Maquis.
Starfleet makes a serious departure from their normal style by acquiring some surplus Ha’Taks from deposed or deceased System Lords among the Goa’uld. After the Starfleet Corps of Engineers completed the retrofits allowing these behemoths to move from Naquadah-based power to Deuterium-based warp drive they became the envy of all alien civilizations that based their culture on the Egyptians of ancient Earth.
We revisit the Star Wars franchise here on Day 4 of TrekAdvent as the Galactic Empire’s ubiquitous TIE Fighter gets a glow up from the Dominion as it becomes the newest weapon in the Jem’Hadar’s arsenal. The enemies of the Founders will see scores of fighters crashing upon them as “Victory is Life” echoes across the stars. Imperial TIE pilots will be heard asking why they never got a cool battle cry.
Welcome to the return of the TrekAdvent Project! Every day from now until Christmas Eve I will post an image from a themed collection created for you, the graphic-art-loving internet wanderer.
This year, the theme is “Space vessels from various franchises designed by Star Trek races/organizations.” As I was unable to post on December 1st, this late night update on Dec. 2 will include TWO images!
The first image peeks into the Star Wars franchise to see what Boba Fett’s “Slave 1” would look like if it were designed by Starfleet. The second image, in honor of this month’s Doctor Who specials, presents the TARDIS as a vessel of the Romulan Star Empire.
These images will also be posted to the PlanetRise Creative Facebook Group, so feel free to visit the group, join it and start some conversations.
This is a poster I have been working on for some time now. The idea was originally conceived well over a year ago, and in the past several months I have managed to put aside time now and then to chip away at it. With my schedule opening up quite a bit recently I found myself able to make the final push and incorporate all the elements into what you see here.
My first step was to make a list of all the properties and franchises that came to my mind when I asked myself “what genre television and film series have impacted me most in my life”? The resulting catalog certainly isn’t comprehensive (I found HBO’s Watchmen series to be some of the most impactful television I’ve ever seen) nor should it be viewed as a Top 26 necessarily. But every title and character represented here has relevance to me. Once I had curated the list, which included removing properties that I haven’t gotten around to seeing but will certainly deserve a space here once I do (I’m looking at you, The Expanse), I had to begin the more difficult task of deciding how to represent these individual franchises and what layout those representations would take.
As one can likely tell by looking at this website’s page menu, Star Trek stands atop the list as my favorite science fiction franchise. Accordingly, I knew that would be given a priority placement; larger than most of the other depictions and prominently placed. The simple Starfleet delta would send the message, which in turn made me look at the rest of the list with simple logos or symbols in mind. For many that would work out fine, but a decent number of the properties I had selected never had strongly representative logos like we see in Star Trek, Ghostbusters, Thundercats, etc. so I separated the list into “logos” and “recognizable elements”. When I thought of Futurama, Back to the Future and Firefly the first thing I pictured was the vehicles those series focused on, and pictured them streaking across the poster in some fashion. So I selected six properties to be depicted by ships (or a car) and began collecting images of them to work into the design. In the end I needed to recreate Futurama’s Planet Express ship and the virtually forgotten Earth*Star Voyager in photoshop using reference images as the Planet Express ship had few top-down images available, and the only image of Earth*Star Voyager I could find was a low resolution behind-the-scenes- shot of the filming model. (Stay tuned for a future post about why the Earth*Star Voyager TV movie is awesome and how no one will convince me otherwise.)
Next I moved on to franchises with no logos and no ships. First among them was Quantum Leap, which immediately conjures the image from the opening credits with Sam Beckett standing in the Quantum Leap Accelerator, nearly silhouetted amid blue lights and smoke jets. I knew that pose would be the image and began placing the silhouette in various places on the poster. Yes….I already had the silhouette in my image files. Don’t ask questions. I decided that QLeap wasn’t quite high enough on my priority list to take a central placement so I toyed with showing half of the pose coming in from the side, which opened the door to allow Highlander to be referenced not by MacLeod’s katana, but rather MacLeod himself experiencing a Quickening in the opposite corner from Beckett. That left two corners still up for grabs, and since I was still playing with the idea of using the exterior of the TARDIS from Doctor Who as all or part of the poster’s background I gave it the top left corner. That’s three corners predominantly blue, so it was a cinch to place SeaQuest in the remaining corner.
By now I had selected Star Trek, Babylon 5 and Stargate as the three central franchises to occupy the poster’s middle. Creating screen-accurate replicas of the three different Stargates in Photoshop was not a task I was prepared to undertake, so I lifted those from online and positioned them concentrically in the middle, with a ghostly image of a Logan’s Run Lifeclock in someone’s hand showing through behind it. The two logos above and below, the three to either side and the four on the diagonal were all created in photoshop from the ground up using reference images, some specifically for this poster, others already in my files. From here it was just a matter of deciding what goes where, and what direction to have the array of vehicles traveling. During that process I remembered a few additional properties like Torchwood and Alien Nation which became “graffiti” on the TARDIS, and while it maybe wasn’t anyone’s favorite show, I realized Dollhouse could get some representation literally riding on the back of Firefly.
Some trial and error, a little reorganizing of Photoshop layers, adding in some background effects and I finally arrived at what you see here. The full size image measures 18″x24″, and down the road I am planning to either print and frame the poster, or have it printed on canvas, mounted and shipped through a website I have used before. There is already wall space waiting for it. But I would like to know what you think of this piece? Does it show off the various franchises clearly? Can you identify the 26 properties? (It’s 29 if you count spin-offs individually. Bonus points for naming everything.) Which is your favorite, and do you think any of these are under appreciated nowadays? Any and all feedback is welcome in the comments. Unless you’re mean. We’re not keen on mean here.
PlanetRise Creative 