Bird is the word – The updated classic made the episode “Minefield” a special event for fans and the art department.
Unquestionably one of my favorite Enterprise ships, the iconic Wah Chang design as it was restyled by John Eaves. John embued the Praetor’s pride with a candy coat of elegance, it’s updating complimenting the restyled NX-01 Enterprise. The one missing element we all let out a collective sigh over, was the predatory bird painted on the bottom. How does THAT get left off?! Well, that order came from on high, and all we could do was scratch our heads and go about our business.
Usual brilliant modeling job by the internationally revered Koji Kuramura, who also happens to be my hero.
3/4
Side
Top
Bottom
Front
Back
Screen grabs courtesy of the indefatigable Jörg!
Wow, she is a beauty! Normally I’m most eagerly looking forward to the orthos, but the first two perspective shots really make the ship look spectacular.
No bird on the bottom?
WTF?
(At the producers, not you guys.)
^^^ No kidding. Doug, did you ever figure out why they didn’t want a bird emblazoned on the belly?
Yup, shes a BEAUTY !
John had posted on his Blog some
I don’t have the link, but I think John said he
time back about this ship. I was shocked myself when he commented
on how they DIDN’T want the “BIRD OF PREY ” image on the underside !
Shows how ” out of touch ” the guys running the show were to what
the fans love…
DID make an update graphic for the ship ?
Very nice.
Probably one of my favourite designs from Enterprise as well, so much so I built my own, not to same standard as this one unfortunately. Thanks for the renders.
I’d be hard pressed to say that I thought this looked believably pre-TOS “Wah Chang Bird of Prey” as opposed to looking like a regal companion to Commodore Probert’s fearsome 24th Century Warbird, but by jiminy that is a good looking ship all on its own. Inspired work by the redoubtable Mr. Eaves!
Say what you will about Enterprise, the show did give up some great looking starshipss. The 22nd BOP looks like a good ancestor to the TNG era Warbirds.
To indulge my trek-tech geek side for a moment, I have to ask: Was these BoP’s meant to have warp capability?
Ah yes! I’ve been looking forward to this one putting in its appearance ever since Doug posted the Star Trek Enterprise ship size comparison chart a couple of months back. Again, what’s great about this site is that up to that point I had no appreciation really for how cool the Enterprise-era Bird of Prey looked; it’s such a gorgeous model! (Bird of Prey graphic or no – I’m easy!) Well done John! (and Pierre!!)
Cheers for the cool renders Doug!
John Eaves’ page on the Romulans, complete with concept art with the bird and some vintage BoP model shots:
http://johneaves.wordpress.com/2009/03/24/romulans-from-enterprise/
I too love the John’s BoP. It has that TOS Feel of the original and an alien feel all at the same.
Doug, I’m curious. You have a dimensions available for her? From the CGI, she looks much larger than the Enterprise.
Raspberries.
All Romulan ships have to be big green birds? I’ve never liked that. And what happened to the Roman influences?
I’m a sucker for Romulan warships, and loved John Eaves “refit” of the BoP…it definitely shares the same lineage that resulted in the D’deridex. Yes, it does look like a bit of an anachronism when compared to the TOS BoP design, but I’ve rationalized it by imagining the ship in TOS was of a different class altogether!
This is one of my all-time favorites from all Trek, not just Enterprise. I never got the whole too advanced for the 22nd century argument with this ship. Clearly the Vulcans had been warp-capable for centuries, as had the Romulans. Vulcan starships look REALLY advanced (hell, they even have those weird annular warp drives), yet no one ever complained about that! I have to suspect that there were just a lot of people who never got over the delusion that the Romulans didn’t have warp drive at all until TOS. Of course, the Romulan war would have been less a war than a massacre if Earth had FTL capabilities and the Romulans didn’t!
A good, strong and elegant design, worthy of a proud race with a long space faring heritage.
Hey there Doug, Doug!! I haven’t been here in a while!! work to busy,,me sad!!! but just went thru a few weeks in ten minutes and you’ve posted a lot of fun drawing times from the show!!! thanks so kindly MR.!! Here is the link to the lost BOP belly art to go with your post today!!! Stay well Buddy and thanks!
http://johneaves.wordpress.com/2009/03/24/romulans-from-enterprise
I love this ship design! However, I agree with a lot of people that it looks way too advanced for the 22nd century. It looks more akin to other 24th Century Romulan designs. I would have no trouble seeing this flying along side D’Deridex-class warbirds.
Cryptic brought back this baby for Star Trek Online, so it will be flying along the D’Deridex.
Very sweet lines! The sleek curvature makes it feel fluid…you almost expect the “wings” to swoop downward as it flies. This is a beautiful take on a classic design, and one I didn’t fully appreciate until seeing Pierre’s color work ups and these gorgeous caps by Jörg.
Nice work, John and Pierre!!
Nice work, thanks for the detailed views as usual.
Man! This site is an encyclopedia of great ships and Star Trek reference –
Can you be thanked enough??
All canonical groaning aside, I have to agree this is one of the best ship designs in ages. Thanks for posting.
This really should have had the bird painted on it. Would have made a beautiful design perfect.
Nice ship and all, but I think it would have fit better in the 24th century as a follow on to the original, rather than act as a predecessor. BTW, did they ever say why they didn’t want the bird on the bottom?
On the Bottom view the ship looks like it has a mouth.
If you check out John Eaves’ post I’m sure you’ll agree it looks MUCH better with the bird decal on it.
Anyone who knows why B&B ordered the decal to be left out, please DON’T tell me. The answer would probably scare me too much.
Well, originally they wanted an Akira class painted on the bottom, but Doug managed to convince them otherwise…
LOL! Ohhhhhhhhhhhh!
Good one, Mr.!!
I would have loved to have seen this as a DS-9 foild for thre Defiant.
The DC
I would have loved to have seen this as a DS-9 foild for the Defiant.
The DC
Typing with my toes, apparently!
The DC
Your toes type better than mine do!
i’ve always said, if the TOS series actuallly had a decent budget or had newer technology, the ships would look alot cooler, so I persionaly like to think of ship design as skiping over the TOS series in away. so my idea is if they had the money, the enterprise would have looked like the TMP enterprise, and not the tos (though cool design as it is) with all the details put in, so when ENT came on, i didn’t really care that they looked a “little” more advanced than the TOS stuff because, who would watch a show who’s ships were just undetailed cylinders and spheres? ala old flash gordon stuff? so i hold me suspention of belief in that it looks darn cool, and pushes cgi boundrys as it should!
Love this little ship, wish they showed it more than they did…!
” … who would watch a show who’s ships were just undetailed cylinders and spheres?”
I’ve been watching it for 30 years.
Agreed! Many did and still do, in fact. Had the truth been otherwise, we would not have had so many movies and series since!
THE DC
No offense intended Valkyrie, but if you think TOS ships were “Undetailed cylinders and spheres,” then you need to go back and look again. There was plenty of detail on the 1701, the Klingon cruiser and the bird of prey. It was just a bit hard to see because of the limited camera techniques of the time.
Sometimes, the excessive detailing on modern CGI creations tends to hide good design. The new Transformers movie is a prime example. The robots have so many bitz and pieces that it is hard to tell what they are actually shaped like.
As far as the ENT bird of prey, it is probably my favorite of all Eaves’ designs. Nice lines and not too many uneeded parts.
Can’t argue with the Transformers complaint much. Granted that they want to make Optimus et al. and their interactions with the human actors as believable as they can, and yet there are moments…
Well, if you compare this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:V%C3%A4in%C3%A4m%C3%B6inen.jpg
to this:
http://www.vastavalo.fi/albums/userpics/11462/tornio_81_vk_tb.jpg
you might say the former ship is full of details and greeblies, and the latter is just a simple bunch of boxes. The former also looks more formidable with its gun turrets and other visible gear.
But the fact is there’s 80 years of technological development between them. Were they to face each other in combat, the newer ship would probably sink the older one with its missiles, long before the older one could even detect it.
the ENT Romulan Bird of Prey is a awesome ship, I don’t mind the missing graphic on the underside.
Nice Job and thanks for sharing
OMG. Thank you! Thank you!
Utterly beautiful Rommie ship. I could look at it all day…
Love how sleek and very bird like this design is! John really did a great job on capturing the feel of the original in a crazy awesome variation!
So…projecting eight decks on this baby?
I share the love for this design, a great takeoff on the original BOP. A lot of people have said it could fit into the 24th century but I could see it as the sort of Romulan BOP equivalent of the Connie refit. It’s a shame we never got to see a Romulan ship in the classic movie era.
Anyway, while this BOP fits in just fine in Enterprise, like I indicated, do I think it looks a bit advanced…on the other hand, I’m not sure the look of a technology necessarily has to indicate how advanced it is — I think say, a Supermarine S.6B looks much sleeker than an F-15 despite the F-15 being of a much more advanced design. There could be any number of reasons the 22nd century would produce designs that could look more “advanced” than the 23rd — a different design aesthetic or philosophy or some such…
In the 1990s DC Comics featured a “TOS Film Era” Romulan battleship. It was a fun hybrid of TMP’s K’t'inga and TNG’s D’Deridex. I thought it was very cool.
Wasn’t that particular design from Rod Whigham’s pencil-work?
Might be interesting to see a CGI version of it…
Ha ha! I’m going to say this every time I see the ENT BoP, and nobody can stop me!
I’d love to see it without the pointy Dominion-style nacelles, and instead an off-center (hull more towards the bottom) ring drive, connecting where the nacelles should be. Little tip o’ the hat to the big surprise in Balance of Terror.
Cloaking was also a surprise in Balance of Terror…
Yep, continuity blunders abounded in that episode.
Fortunately, everything else in the episode was brilliant! The EVA stuff was really well-done, I thought, from a VFX and set standpoint, Bakula and Keating really did a wonderful job, and real story and character development and drama after years and years of solving every problem by remodulating the interphase of the inverse tachyon beam was stunningly refreshing.
Well, that can be explained by the Romulans having a new type of cloaking technology that Starfleet sensors didn’t penetrate as easily as they did in Minefield.
Hmmm…that is a fantastic idea!
I can see it now — someone at Starfleet Command finishes reading Kirk’s report on the Romulan incursion from Balance of Terror, is mulling over the apparent link between the Vulcan and Romulan peoples. He or she then recalls a detail of early Romulan ship design, pulls the files and whispers to him/herself ‘well I’ll be damned…’ They always assumed Romulan and Vulcan use of ring designs was the result of parallel development.
“In the 1990s DC Comics featured a “TOS Film Era” Romulan battleship. It was a fun hybrid of TMP’s K’t’inga and TNG’s D’Deridex. I thought it was very cool.”
Now that you mention it, I have seen that — I actually have one of those issues in fact. It was pretty cool.
Hi Doug,
Actually I built the model. Also when I built the model. The bottom geometry was built to represent the missing graphics of a bird. Look closely at it and you should be able to see the shape of a bird with it’s wings spread out.
and Doug…
Keep up the great work. Love this webblog…
Koji
Koji! My hero! Fixed the entry! Love ya!
The idea that the designs of the ships’ physical structure should resemble such predatory avians makes sense to my eyes. I sometimes wonder if the bird-painting wasn’t part of a particular phase in Romulan design and psychological warfare thought that came and went.
I believe my answer to “no bird” would have been something along the line of “go to hell”.
In my mind, it’s sort of like the president dropping into NASA and saying, “Ya know boys, this part really isn’t needed here”.
You nod your head at his sage wisdom, and then you ignore it the moment he leaves. Some things are best left to engineers or designers.
Koji, I can just barely see what you mean. Good work on getting something in there at least.
Cheers,
Frank
F.E. – That sounds great in theory, but in the real world if you act that way with the people who hire you, you will end up unemployed!
Yeah, not wise to bite the hand that feeds you.
Frankly, it could be easily explained that the Romulans adapted the Firebird on their hulls during the Earth-Romulan war as a type of intimidation.
Yeah, I know.
I’ve been guilty of that mistake a few times. Thankfully, I tend to be enough in demand that I can get away with being an ass. Except in extreme circumstances.
Too much of my grandfather in me I suppose. He was a Trek fan until his dying day, and some of the continuity errors used to drive him nuts. He knew how the system worked, and he would always say “I’ll bet some twit in management made that call”.
I think he would have loved your take on things Doug.
Cheers,
Frank
And this is why Doug has lasted so long in the biz. I wasn’t cut out for these choices. He knew when to compromise and when to recognize a fight not worth having. He knew when it was not his choice to make, regardless of his opinions. It is a real skill. It is a reality of the business.
The DC
Nice ship. Other than the nacelles, it actually has that early sci-fi / flying saucer type of look to it.