General / Off-Topic Star Trek Axanar - the Vulcans are stealing Imperial IP :)

[Jack Schitt]

There are a couple of other Axanar threads in here but their latest posts are from last year and I didn't want to necro them.

I'm a bit behind the curve on Axanar stuff but having just watched the opening scene teaser I was struck by how much the new Vulcan ships, while heavily influenced by Enterprise-era designs, also have an almost ED Imperial vibe to them. The lighting, colours, even little disc-shaped things that look a bit like thrusters. They could be straight out of the Gutamaya shipyards.

Spoiler

[video=youtube;hrlNSGbgrlQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrlNSGbgrlQ[/video]

I'm not suggesting for a moment that there's any direct influence here. As with other artistic endeavours fantasy spaceship designs tend to go through phases, and shiny things that looks like Jony Ive designed them seem to be in vogue at the moment. I just thought it was kind of cool. Or maybe I've just been playing far too much ED.

 

[Julissa Silver]

For what it's worth, Vulcan ships have had a circular warp nacelle substructure since the very early concepts of much earlier developments than ELITE: Dangerous.

 

[Jack Schitt]

The circular warp structure was the Enterprise-era influence I mentioned. Everything else (light coloured hull, blue/orange illumination, tapering lines with distinct "wings", "thrusters") is what reminded me of Gutamaya. Perhaps I should have spelled that out more clearly to avoid confusion, since ED Imperial designs do use circular elements for their capital ships albeit horizontally oriented.

Either way, remove the circular bit and these could easily be medium-sized Gutamaya ships.

 

[Julissa Silver]

They could be, but I tend to see the influences the other way (if they exist at all). All the vulcan styled ships have tended to be smooth-lined, somewhat rounded and 'flowing' in appearance (with the notable exception of their drop-ships/landers). That the one in the image has 'wings' is more to do with the overall small size of the vessel and the need for superstructure to support the warp nacelle, I suspect.

The colour... Eh. I always thought the vulcan vessels were closer to a reddish tan than anything - could that image be the result of lighting effects?

 

[Jack Schitt]

Most of the Vulcan ships in Enterprise, and the lander in First Contact, definitely had a rusty hue. The ones in Axanar... hard to say until the film is completed but the opening shots in the teaser are in orbit of Vulcan (a predominantly red world) lit by what I'm going to assume^[1] is 40 Eridani A, a K-class orange dwarf. If the ships were red I'd expect them to still appear so under reddish-orange light, but these definitely have a lighter white/grey tone during the beauty pass. Smaller, shuttle-class ships seen nearer the surface later in the scene also seem closer to white or grey than to rust, but it's hard to say for certain because the scene is lit with low-angle sunlight filtered through the atmosphere, which ironically gives everything a slightly reddish tinge.

^{[1]40 Eridani A has never been canonically identified as the Vulcan star but with [I]Axanar[/I] being a very well researched project I'd expect them to go with this [I]de facto[/I] location that's so often used in licensed works and other fan fiction.}​