Top: Lateral vector transporter from the Walker-class USS Shenzhou
Middle: Phase discriminators used to trap the Red Angel in the titular episode
Bottom (left): Exocomp
Bottom (right): Medical device from the Automated Repair Station from Dead Stop
One of the things I liked best about The Orville was its homage to the TOS aesthetic. “Just go to IKEA, buy a bunch of tables, chairs, and bookshelves and paint them.”
Cheap sets are a key to the charm of Star Trek. When it gets too CGI-ey you know they’re off base.
coughDiscoverycough
Cheap sets are a key to the charm of Star Trek. When it gets too CGI-ey you know they’re off base.
Arguably the same for special effects too. TOS is nice in that way, since it feels like the only show that doesn’t go overboard with the pyrotechnics.
Even TNG had support beams, explosions, and an entire welsh quarry rain down from the ceiling, and that just got a bit silly.
and that just got a bit silly.
Not as silly as literal flamethrowers on the bridge which spew fire when the outside of the ship is hit in any location.
I never liked the whole “we can’t build a ship in which the bridge electronics are even semisafe” let alone believing that there’s thick gaspipes in several locations.
Who designed these?
“We can use this for anything at any time.”
The Tucker Tube is just a crappier version of the Billups Tube lol.
But I respect that they don’t even try to disguise those as anything else; just throw a new function out every appearance.
You’re right. The Billups Tube has three lasers.
Although I think he probably shouldn’t have left off the protective shielding…
But…but…but…the third tube and lack of protective shielding is why it’s seven picocochranes more efficient.
I just saw these (again) in TNG “Datalore” 😂
Including a ton of different shows!
I swear I saw that in Airplane 2.
It was on the moonbase. Just like Shatner
Hey, at least they aren’t using liquor bottles as droid heads. :)
The owner of the Cantina doesn’t like droids, so my head canon is that he’s repurposed scavenged droid heads as drink dispensers. Kind of a “drinking from the skull of your enemy” type thing.
This would have been my logic anyway. It’s a rat hole bar in the middle of nowhere. Gotta reuse where you can and if you’re going for cool aesthetic, droid head drink dispensers are pretty metal (pun intended)
wasn’t that an aircraft engine irl?
Something, something Rolls Royce:
I could totally see that station being an ancestor of the Exocomps. That’s one of my favorite ENT episodes
It would explain why the exocomps are so good at engineering tasks. They are descended from B’Elanna.
Oh, I like that theory. The station survived at the end, so maybe Doctor Farallon didn’t invent them rather than find and repair one.
He could have even invented them, after studying the station. You can’t tell me the Federation wouldn’t want self-repairing ships, even if O’Brien would hate it
Now I really wish a current / future show would revisit that station in some way. It started rebuilding itself after Archer destroyed it, and it was already presumed to be at least several hundred years old (one of the abducted species was a Vaudwaar), so I would imagine it’s still out there somewhere.
I never noticed it had a Vaudwaar! That’s so cool!
I don’t think I noticed it when I watched it last, but Memory Alpha does confirm one of them is, so I’m going by that.
They did this with the body armor from Starship Troopers as well. There was at least one episode of Power Rangers where it was used.
I remember they used that armor all throughout Power Rangers In Space/Power Rangers in the lost galaxy.
And it’s used as the body armor for the Alliance military in Firefly! One of the first times I can recall picking up on Hollywood prop recycling.
Poor Peanut Hamper. She deserves better than life as a knee replacer.
Well Peanut Hamper is a stupid name!
They were hilarious. I love that it was their time to shine and they just noped out.
The exocomp is so sophisticated it makes all other props obsolete
Sometimes you kit bash, sometimes you just need to kit grab.
I guess it makes a kind of practical sense from a production budget standpoint. They make some fairly complex props that are used in a single episode, so it’s understandable they may want to use them a few times.
Kitbashing is a long an storied tradition. It was one of the things Adam Savage talks most about from this time at ILM.
Here’s a vid I watched a few months back that shows off some of the best ships that the props department had to make in a hurry.
