[Punisher454]

For sure the launch tube exits are WAY too big for a 1 mile ship. Whats even more grossly out of scale are the scenes of vipers landing in the landing bays. But we really didnt notice it much in 1978. By the standards of the day those SFX were really top notch.

I agree with Maudib on the fact that nothing in TOS was properly to scale and indeed it was a total mess (scale-wise).
Since My goal requires a functionsl interactive 3D environment primarily on the interior I have settled on trying to recreate the "Look" of the sets.
I have come up with a group of scale references and made them to work together. Of course someplace compromises have had to be made, but I have settled on compromoising what I felt impacted my objective least. That being launch tube length.
If I was doing still or motion renderings of launch tube sequences then I'd have really long launch tubes. But I'm not doing that So I shortened the tubes to fit. they're a little over a hundred feet right now .

My scale reference chain is as follows:

1. interior shuttle studio drawings combined with footage of the shuttle flight deck gives me the size of the shuttle passenger cabin.

2. The shuttle model scale is adjusted so that the windows closely aproximate the full size interior set layout. This gives me a plausable shuttle scale. (I ignore the scenes at the shuttle main hatch which use the 1/3 scale shuttle facade ).

3. I look at the SFX shots of the shuttle entering and leaving the landing bay as seen from inside the landing bay. I adjust the size of the battlestar model until the landing bay entrance has about the right scale proportion to the shuttle. Now this step is where I initially had an 8000 foot long battlestar. I really wanted the battlestar to be more like 1 nautical mile so I decided to make a slight adjustment to the landing bay opening proportions and it brought the ships length back down to ~6080 feet. I was satisfied with that.


About the rivets, I agree they are totally ridiculous. They have been outdated since Keizer started welding Liberty ships in WWII (right here in Vancouver where I live), but they did serve a real purpose on the BSG set. When you look at those columns and bulkheads your brain says "thats a heavy duty steel structure". I have thought about ditching the rivets too, especially with what they do to my poly count. but decided to keep them since its so easy to just bake them into a normal map (or even a parallax map).

But in the end everybody modeling for BSG (or anything else) should do it their way. This is 'ART' of course. I for one like to see some of the variations that from peoples different interpretations of the same thing.