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Reactor-Axe-Man — We Shouldnt Be Needing a Course Correction
#black #explorer #hole #palomino #spacecraft #starship #theblackhole
Published: 2019-11-17 19:32:35 +0000 UTC; Views: 4819; Favourites: 96; Downloads: 39
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"2130, Day 547... Unscheduled course correction due at 2200. Pre-correction check, rotation axis plus three degrees. Nitrous-oxide pressure forty one hundred, rising to five thousand. Quad jets C and D on Pre-Select. Rotor ignition sequence beginning in three-zero. Thruster line reactors on standby."
USS Palomino, one of the United States' Deep Space Exploration Vessels, cruises through the void on the slow return leg of its two year mission to discover life beyond the Solar System. Their careful calculations and alignments for their Space-Time Catapult drive have proven for naught, as their trajectory has taken them off their projected course. Only a great disturbance in the local space-time could have caused such a thing, but even the highly trained crew are not prepared for what they are about to discover.
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The model is 99% complete. I would like to lard it up with some posable gadgets and such, maybe a stab at an interior you could glimpse through the viewports even, but like many of my 99% complete projects, this may never come to pass. This ship is a fond childhood memory even if it was from a movie Disney might like to forget. When I first started on the project I was disappointed at how plain the studio model was, even a little sketchy, compared to the vividly unique USS Cygnus model. You can see where they spent all their modeling budget for sure. I wanted to make my Palomino more detailed, in my own style of course, and also to try to address some things about the ship that it was lacking (radiators being an obvious area of concern, but that's true of almost all sci-fi spacecraft. Even The Expanse chickened out there.) For one thing, it is such a tiny ship compared to the behemoth Cygnus with a tiny crew (one of whom isn't even a spacer or a scientist, but a journalist!) How do those big engines get fed? There isn't any visible tankage for propellent, so those engines must be very efficient ion drives, and the ship must have some sort of "wilderness refueling" capability, but I will get into details about my design in a future post. I also need a good black hole image for a background that doesn't immediately scream Gargantua from the movie Interstellar. Don't get me wrong, it's an amazing image, but Gargantua was at the bleeding edge of the possibility curve in size and spin for a black hole, and could not simply have been 'lurking' in space anywhere within a thousand light-years of Earth for the Cygnus to discover and the Palomino to stumble upon unawares.
Modeled with Trimble SketchUp. Rendered with Kerkythea. Palomino concept from Walt Disney Pictures.
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Comments: 81
Harry Booth is quite clear in the movie that the Cygnus project was considered a fiasco. I am not sure how conscious of that idea the writers and producers were when they came up with the Palomino concept, but to me it seems quite reactionary. The Cygnus was a big, expensive, manpower intensive boondoggle, and the Palominos were almost a reflexive backlash against that: way smaller, far less capable, almost too small to get the job done. The pendulum swung too far the other way.
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Palomino looks like a futuristic, suped-up Lunar Module!
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I guess in a pinch the ship could land on a Luna like world.
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No its not a "hover-ship" like the Enterprise, her design suggest she can land and she did on the Cygnus platform!
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The thing is, you can build a small fleet of Palominos for the cost of one Cygnus and you can cover more space with them. And if you loose some it's not such a big loss. Tragic for the crew, sure.
Still I agree. The Palomino's are probably a little too small and should have had at the very least more robots on board.
Though, combining the Cygnus as a base ship for the Palomino's, providing parts, supplies and a place for some R&R?
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That is precisely where I was going with the Palomino. Cheap to build, cheap to man. Build dozens and cover way more space for the same expense as the Cygnus, and if a few ships never return, that's why you get the Hazard Pay to ride one. Some kind of tender vessel for the Palominos would make sense, especially with an expanding frontier. You don't want to spend all your time getting to and then having to return from the frontier when 2 years is all you get for endurance. (My copy of The Black Hole Storybook assures me that Charlie Pizer was pretty unimpressed with the dehydrated turkey and sides for the approaching Christmas dinner, but I'm pretty sure he'd be eating spirulina algae and krill from the ship's life support system most of his days, and would jump at the shot at something approaching real food for the holiday.)
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Thank you! If I thought I had the constitution for such a project, I'd do the Cygnus too.
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Too bad, I'd love to see more of the Cygnus, but I understand. The Cygnus is daunting.
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It's like trying to build the Eiffel Tower, in space.
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A very apt description
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Thank you! One of the elements that puzzled me the most about the original studio model comes from a quick exchange right as the Cygnus first lights up. Captain Holland immediately stabs some buttons and declares "locking warheads into firing position" complete with warning tones from the ship. The Palomino has missiles? I looked all over the stills of the studio model, the 'blueprints,' watched the movie numerous times looking for where the missiles were. No such luck. I have corrected that issue with my version.
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Sometimes we have to accept, that the creators of movies and other entertainment did not have the knowledge, ability, time or budget to think things through.
Which is the reason I'm much more critical with current Science Fiction than with earlier entertainment. There are a few things someone in that business has to understand. How big space is and that you have to think your spaceships through in advance. I consider those two as the basics they must have.
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I won't quibble with you on that. You're quite right. It is frustrating to wonder at why a writer, or a director or producer makes the decisions they do, especially when they don't seem to have actually given any consideration to the things that we fans do. To them it is meaningless, but to us, it means everything.
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I'm glad that we have a pulp Science Fiction series that usually has a good idea about the space ships in the series, how they are build and so on. This is a cutaway from the latest hero ship of the series done by a fan and was published in an issue of the series: www.rz-journal.de/Downl/2751.h…
And here it is on an official cover: www.perrypedia.proc.org/mediaw…
This series has been doing something clever for a while now. The hero ships are among the largest normal people use. This one has a diameter of 3 kilometers. The embedded spheres have a diameter of 500 meters and are battle cruisers, the same that are part of the regular fleet. The clever thing? We know the main characters of the series won't die and in most situations we know the ship will also make it. It can reach other galaxies and they won't simply strand the heroes there. But these battle cruisers and their crews? They have no such plot armor and being fully independent from the mother ship. they are often used for missions when they don't want or can't involve the mother ship. Since the introduction of the main ship they have lost or sacrificed several of them, though most of the crew survived. The battle cruisers as well as the mother ship also carry other, smaller ships with them.
Among the many features the ship also has a nature habitat with a diameter of 1800 meters which you may be able to make out in the cutaway, though it's much easier to notice if you know where to look.
Sadly the series had no luck with translations into other languages including English.
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I'm getting a Connection Failed page when I try the first link. Perry Rodan has long intrigued me from afar, but you are right that a lack of an English available media has hurt its status. Isn't it supposed to be the longest running sci-fi series of published works?
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Usually the series has story arcs of 100 issues, though there were exceptions, so every two years there is a good spot to start reading it. However the series is also the reason I am disappointed with other series or shows. They plan story arcs of 100 issues with different writers and they rarely make any continuity errors. Sometimes they retcon details when science discovers something new or corrects something.
For example, Venus was a jungle world in the beginning, but it got retconned and terra formed, so nothing else needed correction.
Multi-million dollar franchises can't get shows with 24 or 12 episodes per season right while this commercially little series manages to get 100 issue story arcs right with a weekly publication? Star Trek has gotten too complicated?
Perry Rhodan managed to get me nostalgic about a story arc that came out decades ago as the results of it made it into the current story arc. And I haven't even read the original story arc.
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100 issue arcs? That's amazing.
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It can drag sometimes, but it allows them to build huge stories and the scale goes from grand to epic.
Though the move to stop the main character's aging gives them a lot of freedom.
In the current story arc they mixed things up a bit. Some of the main characters and their ship spend the last 500 years in a temporal stasis and things have changed. The great star nations have lost on influence. A new species says they are enforcing order in the galaxy though it's discovered that their methods are more than questionable. If a star system does not stop a conflict after they have been ordered to, satellites are placed around their world which drain the very life force of the population which makes them apathetic until they simply die out as they are so apathetic they don't reproduce. The same is done with prisons they have for individuals. Another new species seems to be completely made up by pirates that plunder whatever they want, though their pirate fleet seems to be huge bordering on the size of the larger nations.
And to top it all off, Terra has become a myth, even humans seem to have forgotten their origins and by the messages they get there is another planet and moon in place of Earth.
The race is on to reconnect with their friends that are also not aging, find out what happened in the last 500 years, what happened to Terra and the Moon, why is Terra a myth, where did this new species come from and why are they in the Milky Way Galaxy in the first place,
We are 40 issues in and while some questions have been answered, a few more have arisen. Some of the characters are now trying to find out more of what happened in the Milky Way Galaxy and what is going on tight now while others are following a trace where these newcomers came from and why they are here in the first place. Most of them don't know that either and they trust their superiors. Essentially everyone knows enough about that to do their jobs. In any case, they are now in a Galaxy that is 260 Million Light Years away from our Milky Way Galaxy.
While the story often goes to other galaxies, this one is the farthest they ever went and it's only possible because Perry managed to add another mark of his long list of diplomatic accomplishments and was able to borrow some upgrades from a new machine civilization that has been introduced a while ago.
While I'm not happy about the general direction the series has been going, it's still the best ongoing science fiction entertainment I know. Sadly they made a similar mistake as Marvel Comics had and the movie rights sit with a company that does nothing with it and does not have the resources to do something. As mentioned it has not been able to establish itself elsewhere. Not even with the reboot that exists in it's own universe where the story starts in the year 2036. I haven't been following that one though.
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(www.rz-journal.de/Downl/2751.html)
It is the longest running sci-fi series no matter the media. It started in 1961 and this week I'll be reading issue 3040. That's the main series, there were spinoffs, novels and comics in addition. And no, I haven't read every issue.
One thing about this series is unique as far as I can see. In the letters section there are sometimes people that have to give up their collection, often because they don't have the space anymore, but they are usually not for sale. You just have to pick them up. After 400 issues I went digital myself because of the space problem.
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Gotta correct you on the TOS Enterprise. There is a turret at the bottom of the planetary sensor dome. If you look at closeups of the studio model they are obvious. Roddenberry and Matt Jefferies intended that to be the phaser emitters, but the filming of the model rendered the turret basically unnoticable against the bright light of the dome itself, so the fx guys couldn't determine where it was to animate the beams. So the decided to just have the beams fire from the dome itself. I can kind of forgive that. The issue I have is that the photon torpedoes were supposed to be fired from two launchers that were supposed to be built into the lower part of the saucer above the lower dome, but never were. So the fx guys just decided to have them fire out of the dome too. They could have at LEAST had them fire from the three portholes at the front of the saucer edge, as they sort of put you in mind of some kind of weapon array.
But yeah, there IS a phaser cannon turret on the studio model, they just could see it in the shots to properly place the beams due to its size and the glow from the dome obscuring it.
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And you are wrong. It is a turret with two tubes on the bottom sensor dome. It is VERY tiny. Most fans call it the ion pods and claim that is where the accident that causes Kirk's courtmarshall occured, but it was intended to be a phaser cannon.
I never said they did put tubes on the model, so don't put words in my mouth. I said they PLANNED to do so and the modelmakes didn't.
And I HAVE seen the phaser turret, in photos and in person. The model has been reburished MANY times, and it is possible that one of the most recent ones may have been forced to remove that part as it may have been damaged beyond repair. And since most people have never even noticed it it would make no difference.
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I have the 40cm telescopes in the bow performing double duty as laser arrays. (You can see one of them - the second one is opposite and out of camera view.) One, I think the ability to lase a distant object like a comet or asteroid and perform spectrographic analysis of the vapor created is very useful for an explorer, and two, it serves nicely as a defensive armament. I don't imagine ships like the Palomino were armed beyond a basic concern of "we don't really know what (or who) is out there," and the fact that they are armed at all is a nod to this very basic concern.
You are probably right about the disconnect between script and the 2nd Unit people for the film. When I took this project on, I studied everything I could about the ship and the background, but obviously the Disney creative people were not overly concerned with a self-consistent or rational fluff. That unfortunate task belongs to the fandom. 
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Yeah, they really didn't pull any punches in the movie. Mutiny and murder. Lobotomized human slaves no better than robots. Durant getting the Cuisinart Treatment. Booth incinerated when he tries to take the Palomino. Reinhardt's slow grisly death and transfiguration. Pretty gruesome stuff for a Disney flick.
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Reading the words 'The good Doctor' for Dr. Reinhardt is not something I was prepared for. Nor can I keep the laughs down. The idea calling him that...
But that's actually the thing why I don't want a remake. There aren't many actors around with the right age and skill to replace Maximillian Schell as Dr. Hans Reinhardt.
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I agree on all points. Though sadly sometimes changes must be made due the differences in the medium. I must admit, that there are very few adaptations where I don't mind the changes. Stardust for example. In my opinion the changes were done so well, that I'm not comparing the movie with the novel.
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Ain't it just? Heck, now that Disney+ is out, I wonder if a lot more people will see this movie as a result?
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Now I'm wondering how kids these days will react to Maximillian. The movie is rated PG after all.
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Small kids will find him scary, I think.
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