>>I'd love to see an actual rendition of Shepard's ship from Shepard's
>>Eleven; the Surprise? Didn't go look. I know its something in
>>between a Klingon Bird of Prey and the 3WA ship, but I've never really
>>been able to mentally pin down its specifics.
>
>It's essentially a Klingon Bird of Prey. Just in different colors.

I was about to say, there's basically no there there, but upon reflection there might be a little.

Here's the capsule history. In the UF universe, the Klingon B'rel-class bird-of-prey and its descendents are knockoffs of Utopia Planitia's widely used Predator-class corvette. (The latter class is most famous to the in-universe public as the type of ship most 3WA Trouble Consultant field teams use, but that doesn't mean they're supposed to look anything like any of the canonical versions of the Lovely Angel.) When Gryphon's Starfleet crew first see the Surprise in Manhunt, they think she IS a B'rel, so the resemblance is obviously very close, on the outside, at least.

Where the "there might be a little there there" comes into it is that, when the Surprise first appears, Gryphon's people have just bought her nth-hand at the Vesper used ship depot on Musashi, which is not exactly a Certified Preowned Starship Dealer. She's in pretty rough shape, especially on the outside, where generations of owners have neglected routine upkeep in favor of putting their limited resources toward trying to make sure the air stays on the inside - and she was last painted a cheapass green, so she coincidentally looks just like a Klingon ship.

What this means is that there's the potential for the ship's Shepard's 11 incarnation, which has obviously had a lot of work done sometime in between the two appearances, to have something of that "Y-wing fighter with the panels put back on" thing going on. As she appears in 2406, she probably doesn't look like a screen-accurate Klingon ship any longer. She's still the same shape, but the surface details would be different. Sort of the Klingon bird-of-prey if Ralph McQuarrie had been the art designer on Star Trek III instead of Nilo Rodis.

I'm not sure that's enough of a difference to really make it worth Adam's time, but it's an interesting thought. Of course, another problem with both the S11-era Surprise and the One-Hit Wonder is that they're black, which makes them stealthy in-universe and hard to illustrate out of it. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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