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twistedmentat
Nov 21, 2003

Its my party
and I'll die if
I want to

Icedude posted:

I'm surprised there's been no mention of the ND-001 Nadesico yet, which is a shame as I love this stupid thing.

The Nadesico's very much a "what if White Base and the Enterprise had a hosed up baby" ship, but I love the weird forward-pointing nacelle design. I can't really remember what they're for (they might be the phase-transition engines, but I thought those were in the rear engine nacelles with the nuclear pulse engines), but I do remember there's also a bunch of vertical-launch missile tubes in them, so that's cool.

Its spinal main gun is a gravity blast cannon, which literally just rips targets apart with gravity which is neat. I couldn't find a gif of them using it in-atmosphere, but when they do it has a black beam with yellow lightning around it which looks way better than the generic yellow laser they use to get it to show up in space:


The bridge also has a really weird design too. The captain stands all the way up at the back on the next floor up looking down towards the helm, and then there's a giant video screen floor that the mech pilots all sit around (which is redundant as everything gets shown on hologram screens anyway). It's at the very tip of the 'saucer' and all surrounded by giant windows that makes even the Enterprise's bridge look armoured up. It makes no sense for a warship, but it gives some dramatic shots.


Later in the series, they add on the Y-unit to the ship which while giving it a ridiculous warcrimes gun that literally destroys the fabric of space, also it kinda ruins how the ship looks.

In that configuration it's called the Yamato Nadesico :nallears:

Oh, and the 'saucer' comes off too, just like the Enterprise:


In the sequel, a Japan-only Sega Saturn game, and underwhelming movie set after that, there's the NS-955B Nadesico B. It's blue and has a sick spoiler on the saucer, and an even more ridiculous bridge that I couldn't find a pic of:


There's also the NS-966C Nadesico C which is a bullshit Deus Ex Machina, and for some reason has a second saucer under the ship and a third front nacelle. It looks kinda dumb, but they turned the entire front nacelle assembly into a giant gravity blast cannon so that's cool:


Nadesico is a great anime, its too bad it was forgotten like so many 90s classics. It also has like the most meta anime thing where a lot of characters in into this pitch perfect Go Nagai 70s mecha anime series called Giekiganger 3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wl4JVo87L9w

I don't know if its streaming anywhere, i only have Crunchy Roll and i don't see it there.

Star Ship bridges, I always feel like they were designed more about shooting in the bridge over it making military sense. Trek bridges are great for this because you can keep the Captain in almost any shot while showing a good majority of the bridge.

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SlothfulCobra
Mar 27, 2011

I like the idea of making the cockpit able to detach from the rest of the ship as an escape pod, but it doesn't really seem to get used often. I guess if a ship's important, odds are the characters aren't going to just abandon half of it to the void. It still shows up in concept art every so often though.



I did also find this thing, where the characters in the show did escape by detaching the cockpit and flying off. Not really a looker, but I guess some interesting ideas. The "turtle tanker" A big ol' shell-type compartment for cargo and the cockpit can be a little zippy thing.



I guess another problem is that if the place where you control the engines detaches, then anyone in the rest of the ship is screwed unless there's some kind of secondary place to control the engines from. I think there's also a lot of interesting setups that can be done with the windows to give a good range of vision to the people inside. There's a lot of cockpits in Star Wars that have a basic 4 chairs pointing forward setup, but I guess if you want to give all the seats consoles and an equal amount of forward view, this stairstep thing can do that.



Also whoever owned this ship before sure liked their posters. It's surprising how many design documents from this show are lying around the internet. And also how much design work ends up going into random background elements that will never be seen again (unless somebody goes dredging through old files).

Item Getter
Dec 14, 2015

twistedmentat posted:

Nadesico is a great anime, its too bad it was forgotten like so many 90s classics. It also has like the most meta anime thing where a lot of characters in into this pitch perfect Go Nagai 70s mecha anime series called Giekiganger 3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wl4JVo87L9w

I don't know if its streaming anywhere, i only have Crunchy Roll and i don't see it there.

Star Ship bridges, I always feel like they were designed more about shooting in the bridge over it making military sense. Trek bridges are great for this because you can keep the Captain in almost any shot while showing a good majority of the bridge.

Yeah it was the first series I ever saw due to having a friend in high school who was obsessed with mecha anime but it seems to have dropped off the radar entirely. Specifically (spoilers for an obscure 90s anime??) several characters on the Nadesico were fans of Gekigengar 3 but halfway through the series, the enemy Jovians, which were always said to be alien lizards, were actually revealed to be humans from a failed space colony who also based their entire culture around Gekigengar and took it super seriously to the point of it being their quasi-religion. I loved at the time how a major plot element of the series was the anime version of the stock Star Trek "some space colony bases their entire culture around some random pop culture artifact left behind years ago" plot that was the plot of a lot of TOS episodes.

The flipside of Star Trek and such bridges being designed for easy shooting is all the big multi-level monstrosity anime bridges that have been posted recently, which were presumably designed like that since they weren't bound by the limitations of having to build a physical set.

MikeJF
Dec 20, 2003




It's a pity one of the more practical working aspects of the original Trek bridge was lost between design and reality. If you look you see how every station has one or two screens above it, usually showing a pretty spacescape?



In the original design Matt Jeffries did, they'd animate a series of status readouts for whatever each station's responsibilities were, designed to be read from the captain's char, that the captain could glance over to each station and immediately see the status of what its area was. They'd play those on a loop with rear projectors, so it would be clear the captain would always be able to be aware of all of the key information about the ship, the overhead screens feeding that back to him. Unfortunately, it turned out that union rules would have required each screen to have its own projectionist manning it, so it would've added a dozen extra union projectionists, so they had to scrap it and just make them general pretty screens with space pictures.

jeeves
May 27, 2001

Deranged Psychopathic
Butler Extraordinaire

So not only do the pilot and VIP leave the rest of the crew compartment open to vacuum but also the thrusters quickly burn everyone so that no one is left alive to be prisoners?

Checks out.

MadDogMike
Apr 9, 2008

Cute but fanged

twistedmentat posted:

Nadesico is a great anime, its too bad it was forgotten like so many 90s classics. It also has like the most meta anime thing where a lot of characters in into this pitch perfect Go Nagai 70s mecha anime series called Giekiganger 3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wl4JVo87L9w

Pretty sure what really killed Nadesico is the idiots decided to follow up a fairly light comedy (it had dramatic moments, but mostly acknowledged how silly the mecha genre could be) with a freaking grimdark movie, which I believe also had some plot points you only could know about if you played a video game that came out after the movie in Japan only. So yeah, not so much forgotten as murdered.

jeeves posted:

So not only do the pilot and VIP leave the rest of the crew compartment open to vacuum but also the thrusters quickly burn everyone so that no one is left alive to be prisoners?

Checks out.

Come to think of it, wouldn’t the back half getting thrust backwards also help ensure any unsecured people in the back (or those whose restraints got burnt by the thrusters) come flying out the open hole to be lost in space? Definitely feels like deliberate design feature here. Guess calling shotgun on a Lambda shuttle is a very serious competition indeed.

Hunter Noventa
Apr 21, 2010

twistedmentat posted:

Nadesico is a great anime, its too bad it was forgotten like so many 90s classics. It also has like the most meta anime thing where a lot of characters in into this pitch perfect Go Nagai 70s mecha anime series called Giekiganger 3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wl4JVo87L9w

I don't know if its streaming anywhere, i only have Crunchy Roll and i don't see it there.

Star Ship bridges, I always feel like they were designed more about shooting in the bridge over it making military sense. Trek bridges are great for this because you can keep the Captain in almost any shot while showing a good majority of the bridge.

Nozomi Entertainment's youtube channel has all of Nadeisco, on top of a lot of other older anime, all for free, which is pretty cool.

SlothfulCobra
Mar 27, 2011

So this here's the Moomo Williwaw.



It's sort of a class of ship that doesn't often get a lot of focus. Sort of a small-to-midsize gunboat. Maybe bigger than a house, but just loaded up with a bunch of guns. It's also an in-universe bad design. See, Star Wars is really big on outboard cockpits, but this ship has two outboard cockpits, and those are two cockpits with equal control over the ship. Not like some dual-bridge ships where the bridges are for independent purposes, just each cockpit with equal control. The idea was supposed to be that the copilots could have control over the guns on each of their sides of the ship, but in the hands of the Ithorian bounty hunter brother duo the Moomo brothers, they'd end up fighting over control of the ship and gently caress things up.

Before the ship was in Moomo hands, it has a further backstory. It was officially designated as the Pelagia Duplex Command Assault Gunship. It was actually derived off of a more successful model of gunship with a richer history, but the idea behind this ship was to just double the amount of guns, but it didn't really work out. Many of the guns interfere with eachother's arcs, and there's no real angle where most of the guns can be brought to bare on a single target, and the guy who originally commissioned it never even picked it up, so it just sat where it was until the Moomo brothers got their hands on it.

It also has some nice interior shots. Interesting to think about how much stairs there are when you have a ship that's built more vertically on the inside than horizontally. There's Malak in engineering.



And the main reason I got to like this ship is from finding Dustin Weaver's concept art. Just such a weird jumble of things.

twistedmentat
Nov 21, 2003

Its my party
and I'll die if
I want to

Hunter Noventa posted:

Nozomi Entertainment's youtube channel has all of Nadeisco, on top of a lot of other older anime, all for free, which is pretty cool.

OH sweet. It also has Dirty Pair and Utena too.


SlothfulCobra posted:

So this here's the Moomo Williwaw.



It's sort of a class of ship that doesn't often get a lot of focus. Sort of a small-to-midsize gunboat. Maybe bigger than a house, but just loaded up with a bunch of guns. It's also an in-universe bad design. See, Star Wars is really big on outboard cockpits, but this ship has two outboard cockpits, and those are two cockpits with equal control over the ship. Not like some dual-bridge ships where the bridges are for independent purposes, just each cockpit with equal control. The idea was supposed to be that the copilots could have control over the guns on each of their sides of the ship, but in the hands of the Ithorian bounty hunter brother duo the Moomo brothers, they'd end up fighting over control of the ship and gently caress things up.

Before the ship was in Moomo hands, it has a further backstory. It was officially designated as the Pelagia Duplex Command Assault Gunship. It was actually derived off of a more successful model of gunship with a richer history, but the idea behind this ship was to just double the amount of guns, but it didn't really work out. Many of the guns interfere with eachother's arcs, and there's no real angle where most of the guns can be brought to bare on a single target, and the guy who originally commissioned it never even picked it up, so it just sat where it was until the Moomo brothers got their hands on it.

It also has some nice interior shots. Interesting to think about how much stairs there are when you have a ship that's built more vertically on the inside than horizontally. There's Malak in engineering.



And the main reason I got to like this ship is from finding Dustin Weaver's concept art. Just such a weird jumble of things.

That thing is awesome, what is it from? It looks like what Dr Aphra wold pilot.

SlothfulCobra
Mar 27, 2011

It's from the old Knights of the Old Republic comic back in the Dark Horse days. The comic doesn't really draw too much from the games directly (especially with how different the depiction of Taris was) but it ends up as sort of a prequel with the protagonist and his friends zooming around the Republic during the Mandalorian wars. It's real neat, although the plot does wander a little after a while.

twistedmentat
Nov 21, 2003

Its my party
and I'll die if
I want to

SlothfulCobra posted:

It's from the old Knights of the Old Republic comic back in the Dark Horse days. The comic doesn't really draw too much from the games directly (especially with how different the depiction of Taris was) but it ends up as sort of a prequel with the protagonist and his friends zooming around the Republic during the Mandalorian wars. It's real neat, although the plot does wander a little after a while.

Weird, I loved that last era of Star Wars comics from Dark Horse and i honestly don't remember that ship at all. I do remember the Arkanian space elf girl being pretty cute though.

Robot Style
Jul 5, 2009

SlothfulCobra posted:

It's from the old Knights of the Old Republic comic back in the Dark Horse days. The comic doesn't really draw too much from the games directly
They did do a neat thing where Zayne's character was designed to mirror the new player experience with the game, with him also starting out not knowing any of the controls or how to use his abilities.

ConfusedUs
Feb 24, 2004

Bees?
You want fucking bees?
Here you go!
ROLL INITIATIVE!!





SlothfulCobra posted:

Starfleet is very anxious about being an armed military, so they put a lot of effort into justifying what a ship could do in peacetime.

What if instead of having a nice smooth hull for all your spaceship parts to fit inside, you just loosely tied all the bits together and went "good enough"?



This is a board game about building a spaceship and then flying through space on a perilous truck route.



Players have to draw an place tiles under a time limit and make sure that they get all the modules they want and that they're connected properly with no exposed connectors. You probably also want redundant connections between parts of your ship too, because if you get damaged and lose the one bit that connects parts of your ship, half of the thing goes flying off never to be seen again. I've seen a round where one ship loses everything but a single crew quarters sailing to the end, but managing to beat another ship that stayed intact but lost all its crew and never made it home.

Every ship ends up looking as a sort of monstrosity of parts all jumbled together haphazardly. These are actually really good designs by the game's normal standards.




There's also an app version that will show your ship zooming around.



Galaxy Trucker is great and the whole game is designed to make it feel like you really are hurling through space, with all its hostility, in a piece of poo poo made of space parts.

It's a very good game.

Bucnasti
Aug 14, 2012

I'll Fetch My Sarcasm Robes
Speaking of pieces of poo poo made from spare parts. I've been 3d printing "Uglies" for the X-Wing miniatures game.

Uglies are cobbled together space ships in the Star Wars universe, and I love them so much.






Yes, lets put an astromech in our nose.


They've been a staple of the EU for years but recently started to show up in the new comics.




If you put enough engines on it, anything can be a starfighter.

People make some really great kit bashed miniatures and models of these things too.

ConfusedUs
Feb 24, 2004

Bees?
You want fucking bees?
Here you go!
ROLL INITIATIVE!!





Bucnasti posted:

Speaking of pieces of poo poo made from spare parts. I've been 3d printing "Uglies" for the X-Wing miniatures game.

I've never understood why so many people like these things. But hey, if it gets people playing X-Wing, that's awesome. I love that game, and played it at a high level pre-pandemic.

Pennywise the Frown
May 10, 2010

Upset Trowel
My favorite spaceships are the ones Lowtax drew if you donated to him.

Oh wait. He never pulled through on that.

David D. Davidson
Nov 17, 2012

Orca lady?

Pennywise the Frown posted:

My favorite spaceships are the ones Lowtax drew if you donated to him.

Oh wait. He never pulled through on that.

Goddamn you mean Lowtax is somehow an even bigger con than Star Citizen. I'm impressed. He's still a piece of poo poo but still gotta give him credit.

Bloody Pom
Jun 5, 2011



Kinda digging that bizarro A-wing made from TIE and X-wing parts.

MikeJF
Dec 20, 2003




One of the things I was hoping for with the new Star Warses would be that the Republic Navy would be half old star destroyers that had been captured and refitted and kitbashed and added onto and painted to look friendlier and we'd see things like that. After all, they conquered an empire with tens of thousands of those ships and needed to shore up their navy fast. So we'd see a bunch of ships like this



maybe with a new different style command tower fitted onto it, mixed in with mon calamari ships and other new ships.

And we'd get battles between fleets of those and loyalist old empire star destroyers that were patched-together after being maintained for decades without their old shipyards, with scars of different materials and refits to add on new guns and things.

MikeJF fucked around with this message at 05:28 on Jul 21, 2021

Robot Style
Jul 5, 2009

That kind of happened, though when the Republic captured Star Destroyers they broke them down and used the pieces to build new ships like the Starhawk:




I'd say it would be bad for optics if the New Republic was tooling around in Star Destroyers with different logos on them while trying to convince the galaxy they were more than just the Empire with a new coat of paint, but half the Republic ended up seceding and joining the First Order by the time Episode 7 rolled around anyway, so it seems like a lot of people were jumping at the chance to become fascists again.

Ashsaber
Oct 24, 2010

Deploying Swordbreakers!
College Slice

Robot Style posted:

That kind of happened, though when the Republic captured Star Destroyers they broke them down and used the pieces to build new ships like the Starhawk:




I'd say it would be bad for optics if the New Republic was tooling around in Star Destroyers with different logos on them while trying to convince the galaxy they were more than just the Empire with a new coat of paint, but half the Republic ended up seceding and joining the First Order by the time Episode 7 rolled around anyway, so it seems like a lot of people were jumping at the chance to become fascists again.

That looks like a BFG with an engine block.

SlothfulCobra
Mar 27, 2011

Well, in the old EU the New Republic did use a lot of captured Star Destroyers, especially in its early days. The Rebels used anything they could get their hands on, there's even some references somewhere to the Rebels using CIS ships like the Lucrehulk, and the New Republic took a while to find its feet but still needed to fight off all the Imperial remnants, so the Star Destroyers they captured and the ones they could get out of captured shipyards came in handy.

When they managed to start fielding a fleet of entirely new ships, they did still produce newer Star Destroyers with their own designs. They were smaller and more specialized, meant to serve with a more diverse fleet of smaller ships. There may have been issues with public image, but the New Republic went through a lot of poo poo and needed a good military.



I don't know much about the new canon New Republic, but I think the story there is supposed to be that the Imperial remnants quietly faded away and the New Republic purposefully sabotaged its fleet so that it would be defenseless and easily forgotten when the sequels came around. So easily forgotten, it would never be referenced to exist in any movies. I don't really know what the Starhawk's whole deal is, but it keeps reminding me of EC Henry's design for an imperial Nebulon B.

twistedmentat posted:

Weird, I loved that last era of Star Wars comics from Dark Horse and i honestly don't remember that ship at all. I do remember the Arkanian space elf girl being pretty cute though.

I guess it's fair not to remember it much, since it didn't get a lot of time to shine compared to the ships Zayne and Gryph had before and after, and that portion of the comic got pretty confusing between changing artists and a dumb 4,000 year crossover event. The Moomo brothers themselves though are a lot more memorable. Embarrassments to Ithorians everywhere.

habituallyred
Feb 6, 2015

SlothfulCobra posted:

I don't know much about the new canon New Republic, but I think the story there is supposed to be that the Imperial remnants quietly faded away and the New Republic purposefully sabotaged its fleet so that it would be defenseless and easily forgotten when the sequels came around. So easily forgotten, it would never be referenced to exist in any movies. I don't really know what the Starhawk's whole deal is, but it keeps reminding me of EC Henry's design for an imperial Nebulon B.

Really wish they had played the former New Republic Admiral card during The Last Jedi. Maybe even double down by having the escape ship be a modified star destroyer, and the admiral a former Imperial officer. Alas...

Pennywise the Frown
May 10, 2010

Upset Trowel

Robot Style posted:

but half the Republic ended up seceding and joining the First Order by the time Episode 7 rolled around anyway, so it seems like a lot of people were jumping at the chance to become fascists again.

:911:

Disproportionation
Feb 20, 2011

Oh god it's the Clone Saga all over again.

SlothfulCobra posted:

I don't really know what the Starhawk's whole deal is, but it keeps reminding me of EC Henry's design for an imperial Nebulon B.

It's from squadrons afaik; the whole gimmick behind it is that instead of having a million guns it has a gigantic tractor beam to rip ships apart with.

MikeJF
Dec 20, 2003




I'm pretty sure the Starhawk is deliberately meant to be reminiscent of the Nebulon, as a kind of visual continuity of ship layout. Also maybe there's a little bit of hammerhead DNA in there too.

MikeJF fucked around with this message at 22:42 on Jul 22, 2021

jeeves
May 27, 2001

Deranged Psychopathic
Butler Extraordinaire
From the new Dune trailer it looks like ships’ and personal shields are properly portrayed.

You know, like what should have protected the big dumb First Order ship in Last Jedi.

https://youtu.be/f1TFYzYects

Leia’ unintentional face of “well that was pointless” really makes the scene.

Megillah Gorilla
Sep 22, 2003

If only all of life's problems could be solved by smoking a professor of ancient evil texts.



Bread Liar
Perfectly done.

Seriously, all Disney had to do was put in a 10 second scene where the creepy redheaded guy says, "Divert all power from shields to the forward battery, I want those ships vaporised the moments they get in range" and it would have all been fine.

Apart from all the other problems with the film.

SlothfulCobra
Mar 27, 2011

How about everyone's favorite ship from X-Wing Alliance, the YT-2000 Otana!

Bucnasti
Aug 14, 2012

I'll Fetch My Sarcasm Robes
That first pic looks like one of those inflatable planes they used as decoys in WWII.

ThisIsJohnWayne
Feb 23, 2007
Ooo! Look at me! NO DON'T LOOK AT ME!



Bucnasti posted:

That first pic looks like one of those inflatable planes they used as decoys in WWII.

The underside was actually supposed to be inflatable. Let me present the recent Mustard video on the VVA-14:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UD7xiWWs-bs

Farmer Crack-Ass
Jan 2, 2001

this is me posting irl
anyone know of artists who would accept a commission for a spaceship(s) drawing?

Twenty Four
Dec 21, 2008


Farmer Crack-rear end posted:

anyone know of artists who would accept a commission for a spaceship(s) drawing?

pretty sure lowtax could make you that failed promise! lol

banned from Starbucks
Jul 18, 2004




ill draw you a spaceship for $5

Fantastic Foreskin
Jan 6, 2013

A golden helix streaked skyward from the Helvault. A thunderous explosion shattered the silver monolith and Avacyn emerged, free from her prison at last.

banned from Starbucks posted:

ill draw you a spaceship for $5

Ha! I'll do it for $6

Vernii
Dec 7, 2006

Farmer Crack-rear end posted:

anyone know of artists who would accept a commission for a spaceship(s) drawing?

Adam Kop on DeviantArt does some great commission work, and there's a few others whose names I can't remember that I can look up later.

ecureuilmatrix
Mar 30, 2011

Vernii posted:

Adam Kop on DeviantArt does some great commission work, and there's a few others whose names I can't remember that I can look up later.

Seconded, Akop's body of SW work is really impressive.

Also: Colourbrand, Jetfreak-7

ecureuilmatrix fucked around with this message at 02:48 on Aug 10, 2021

Farmer Crack-Ass
Jan 2, 2001

this is me posting irl
Thanks for the recommendations! Jetfreak-7 definitely has a great look, will reach out to see if he's interested. :)


Twenty Four posted:

pretty sure lowtax could make you that failed promise! lol

pfffft lol :haw:

Jetrock
Jul 26, 2005

This is the tower of murder... it's where I hang out!
Here are a couple of my favorite ships, from two 1970s Saturday morning live-action adventure shows I watched as a wee, Star Trek and Star Wars crazed tot: Space Academy and Jason of Star Command. Made in 1977-1981, Space Academy was more like Star Trek, with self-contained episodes, while Jason of Star Command was more of a Star Wars ripoff but with shorter, cliffhanger-ending episodes in a single narrative a la Flash Gordon serial format. These were among my favorite shows as a kid, primarily because of its wicked cool spaceships.

Space Academy came first. This massive asteroid base was the home of both shows, although it wasn't quite explained how they interacted how Star Command was secretly hidden inside Space Academy's asteroid but obviously used the same bridge but different commanders. The 1970s were the Golden Age of Greeblies, and while the budget for this show was considered enormous for a Saturday morning kiddie show, it was hilariously small by movie standards, and the model makers streched every dime; the star field in the background of these photos is Christmas lights poking through a blackout curtain.


Here's a magazine article with the show's producers sitting behind the Space Academy model:


The primary ship used on the show is the Seeker, a compact exploration ship about the size of an RV, with lasers, tractor beams, and all the stuff you need for an away mission.




To save money, a lot of the spaceflight scenes were reused from episode to episode, but there were some great one-off shots like this scene of a seeker docking with a space hulk from an ancient battle.


The RV-sized proportions were no accident, since the Seeker body was built from another vehicle used for an earlier show by the same producer, Ark II, a show about a multiracial team and a chimpanzee who drive around the devastated wasteland of 25th Century Earth helping survivors and scavengers in order to rebuild civilization. Some of you may think a post-holocaust Saturday morning kiddie show is weird, and it was, but the weird part is that it wasn't the only post-holocaust Saturday morning kiddie show back then (the other was Thundarr the Barbarian.) Being a kid in the 1970s was kind of hosed up.



The interior of the Seeker was filled with blinkenlights and fascinating-looking buttons that made beep-boop noises, and the multiracial Space Academy cadets (Filmation was big on diversity and representation in their shows.)


Meanwhile, on the other side of the asteroid from Space Academy, Star Command was a more militaristic organization that apparently hired out independent contractors to do its heroics, in the form of off-brand Han Solo impersonator Jason.
Jason was backed up by a really great cast, including frickin' Scotty from Star Trek right there as the base commander (replaced in the second season when ST:TMP got greenlighted), the marvelous Sid Haig as villain Dragos, and fellow blaxploitation veteran Tamara Dobson as the powerful psychic Samantha.


Sid Haig's sinister helmet also included a lot of greeblies.


While "Jason" also used the Seeker, Jason's personal hot-rod was the souped-up Starfire, with bigger engines, more greeblies, and other go-fasta bits.


However, the ship was still basically just the "Ark II" hull with new bits stuck on it, and the interior was identical to the Seeker.


The Starfury had a small escape craft on its nose, the "Star Pod."


Dragos had his own badass looking base ship with arms that shot zappy beams and a mouth that swallowed captured ships caught in its tractor beam.


Dragos' base ship also launched swarms of drone fighters, and since Saturday morning cartoon shows weren't supposed to have a lot of killing and violence, their drone status made it okay to blow the crap out of them regularly. I like these ships though: big engines, pointy ends, lots of greeblies. Serious business.




The ship design for these shows was eye-catching and appealing, fairly cutting-edge for their day, and still look good (even if other special effects didn't hold up so well.) I liked the look of the ships, and as they used similar techniques to many 1970s SF programs (stick lots of model parts to the ship body) they were also inspiring to me as a model kit builder, and I got into kitbashing non-spaceship model parts into new spaceships: my personal favorite was a model of the Cygnus from "The Black Hole" with battleship primary and secondary turrets and other spare parts from a Nevada-class battleship stuck all over it that I wish I still had or even had a photo of. That ship's design was influenced by Space Cruiser Yamato and designed to portray a cruiser for the roleplaying game Traveller--I could probably do another post about the ships of Traveller but maybe I'll put that into the TG thread on that old tabletop RPG.

Jetrock fucked around with this message at 07:00 on Aug 11, 2021

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Farmer Crack-Ass
Jan 2, 2001

this is me posting irl
What's amazing to me is that some of the music for Jason of Star Command was reused from Star Trek TAS.

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