Looking for ships from Doctor Who.

Posts

• spacefighter2 Posts: 0Member

  June 2014 #2

  i gave up on doctor who during matt smith's second series but if memory serves me right there weren't actually many ships in it and in some ways it's not really a space based sci-fi, yes he travels through space and time but then all the action takes place on a planetary surface(or occasionally aboard a huge space station, one large enough that you can forget it is in space and for all plot purposes it usually might as well be a huge office block or an Antarctic research station). i know there are a few doctor who ships available in sketchup format on the google 3d warehouse(a sontaran ship is one of them) but i don't think that a huge number of doctor who ships have ever been modelled because they don't usually get seen in a cgi scene for very long, there might not even be three view ortho images out there if no-one gets a good enough view of the ship. as another point what exactly you need the model or 3 view image for might give a better idea of the quality of model needed. in some ways your best bet might be going through the dvds on a computer and taking screenshots, it might be the only effective way to start working out the full shape of the craft.
• ravencwg0 Posts: 0Member

  June 2014 #3

  spacefighter wrote: »

  i gave up on doctor who during matt smith's second series but if memory serves me right there weren't actually many ships in it and in some ways it's not really a space based sci-fi, yes he travels through space and time but then all the action takes place on a planetary surface(or occasionally aboard a huge space station, one large enough that you can forget it is in space and for all plot purposes it usually might as well be a huge office block or an Antarctic research station). i know there are a few doctor who ships available in sketchup format on the google 3d warehouse(a sontaran ship is one of them) but i don't think that a huge number of doctor who ships have ever been modelled because they don't usually get seen in a cgi scene for very long, there might not even be three view ortho images out there if no-one gets a good enough view of the ship. as another point what exactly you need the model or 3 view image for might give a better idea of the quality of model needed. in some ways your best bet might be going through the dvds on a computer and taking screenshots, it might be the only effective way to start working out the full shape of the craft.

  
  You are right in that Doctor Who is not a "ship-centric" series. While spaceships in Doctor Who are common enough, they are seldom the focus of attention, which is probably why you don't remember most of them. More often than not, the ships in Doctor Who are simply places where stories happen. Consequently, we're seldom given any specific details about the ships, their technology or tactical capabilities beyond what is absolutely relevant and necessary to the plot of an episode.
  
  That said, I could name off AT LEAST a couple dozen ships and space stations just off the top of my head that have appeared in Doctor Who episodes over the past 9 years, more than half of which were featured fairly prominently in their respective episodes--at least as much as the typical "ship-of-the-week" on Star Trek. Yet unlike with Star Trek (or Star Wars, Stargate, or Battlestar Galactica, etc.), where there are 3D models, side-view renderings and/or schematic-type drawings for virtually every ship to have ever appear on the show, no mater how obscure the ship or brief its appearance, there is simply no equivalent treatment given to the ships of Doctor Who--not even for the most obvious examples, such as the Dalek saucers. As I said before, this seems extremely odd to me; and its more than a little frustrating.
  
  You asked what I'm wanting the models or images for. Well there are a number of applications I could name, but the single biggest reason I'm looking for them is to add these ships to my ever growing, ever expanding sci-fi size comparison chart that I am building (patterned after Jeff Russell's brilliant STARSHIP DIMENSIONS website, with well over 1000 entries at last count, and well on its way to being the most comprehensive compilation of its kind). In terms of quality, I don't necessarily require super-hi-res, super-detailed, super-accurate images for what I am doing. Higher quality is, of course always preferable when possible, but ultimately as long as the image is reasonably accurate and recognizable I'm happy.
  
  As to the Sketchup models at 3D Warehouse you mention, I am aware of them. The Sontaran battleship isn't too bad; however the two or three other Doctor Who ship "models" that are there (if you can even call them that) are just plain awful and completely unusable.
• spacefighter2 Posts: 0Member

  June 2014 #4

  interesting to see you are making one of those charts, would like to see it once finished. regarding the lack of pics and models i think you have already given the reason for this situation yourself "spaceships in Doctor Who are common enough, they are seldom the focus of attention". also i think the sort of people who like space based sci-fi with ship on ship combat and such aren't so keen on doctor who(i'm not these days). another thought is that some of the ships shown in doctor who might not have been fully designed, we often see so little of them that the designer and modellers could easily get away with only designing a small part of the vessel. i remember one ship i liked in doctor who, which was the ship in the episode "42"(that is the episode titled 42 not episode number 42), but as i don't know it's name(and most of the ships in doctor who don't get names) it's hard to find any of them. it might come down to taking screenshots from the footage, then using these screen shots as jpegs and using a weird feature in sketchup which lets you import a 2d image and process it in such a way you can work out what the object may have looked like from other angles. that way if you got an image showing an "iso" view you could fiddle with it such that a side view could be approximated.
• wibble1141 Weimar, GermanyPosts: 510Member

  July 2014 #5

  

  The Ship in the Episode "42" is called the "S.S. Pentallian" and there is at least one model of it out there:
  http://www.moddb.com/mods/doctor-who-invasion-of-earth/images/ss-pentallian