Paint Schemes for Full Thrust - Reply

> John Medway wrote:

Quoting Robert Crawford:
> ... The SFB minis have almost no surface detail, making it tough

> Yeah. Even Micromachines beat the snot out of 'em on detail.

> I really liked the level of detail that the Star Trek ships (CinC ?)

I think you guys are being a bit unfair to TFG here. SFB is based on ST:TOS,
and if you look at the ships from that show, you'll see that they don't
_have_ a
lot of external detail. Heck, there's been an argument running for years as to
whether the original USS Enterprise had as much surface detail as the
Gamescience/TFG miniatures depict it as having (the infamous "deflector
shield grid"). So it's unfair to decry the accurate depiction of smooth ships
as lacking detail. The Micromachines TOS ships are quite crude by comparison
with the
TFG miniatures -- it's a limitation of the soft plastic that they use.

There's nothing to say that a real starship, if and when they are built, will
be smooth or lumpy a la the FT miniatures. My guess is that like, say, the
Apollo CSM, they may start smooth (for ease of construction) and grow lumps
'n' bumps as time goes on.

That said, I have to agree that the FASA miniatures were excellent, although
the
engine pylons on the movie-era Enterprise were much too thin. But the
surface
detail was terrific, and accurate, too -- the movie ships had much more
detail on their outsides than did the tv ships, and this was reflected in the
miniatures. Micromachines could use a lesson from these guys, because a lot of
the detail
on some of their TNG-era ships is very crude (not to mention the _weird_
paint
schemes...)

Phil