www.jimsdaleksite.com
© James Parker 2006-2010
www.jimsdaleksite.com
© James Parker 2006-2010
A fellow Dalek enthusiast called Ian Ledger provided me with a collection of screen shots from the 1974 serial Death To The Daleks, which allowed me to (finally) build a model of the projectile gun the Daleks used in that adventure. This is the result. Ian is something of a macro and wildlife photographer, and you can find his work on his flickr site.
Note that the first of the two wallpapers (the one on the left) has been revised since originally being posted.
New wallpaper. During an outbreak of hostilities between the Federation and the Empire, the USS Potemkin launches a surprise attack on a Klingon destroyer as it takes on deuterium from a tanker. The tanker, on the far left of the picture, is itself a converted destroyer. Both Klingon ships have had to lower their wings fully in order to come close along side one another, leaving them virtually unable to manoeuvre; this turned out to be a bit of a design flaw.
Regular visitors will be familiar with a sort of general-purpose spaceship I designed that has appeared in several of my wallpapers, such as this one. On the spur of the moment I decided to convert it into a Klingon vessel, with the result you see below. It's supposed to look like an early design, that would have been old but still in service at the time of the original Star Trek. A single vessel on its own would have been no match for the Enterprise, but two or three together might have given Kirk and his crew some trouble.
This gives you an idea of how the vessel compares in size to the Enterprise.
I definitely think it looks better as a Klingon ship than in its original form, but it could still use some work. The forward/command section could be made a better shape, and I'd like to add some stern chase guns. I should really do more work on the bussard collectors too (the glowing domes on the front of the warp engines, in the middle of the ship); I took them off the Enterprise model and made only minor changes, so they look more like Federation technology than Klingon. Still, maybe the Klingons stole the technology...or maybe Starfleet stole it from the Klingons.
I have remodelled the tail end of the Dirac's warp engines to make them a little more like those of the Enterprise, and I have also added phasers and photon torpdoes to the model (which, by the way, I'm now calling a light cruiser). I put the photon torpedo launcher below the main deflector, which seems sensible even if there is no precedent for a ship having a launcher there in any of the TV series or movies.
I think the actual photon torpedoes themselves need a bit more work. I was going for a ‘ball of plasma’ look, but maybe that wasn't the best option.
I've also rendered side views of both the Dirac and the Enterprise to exactly the same scale, so you can get an idea of their relative sizes.
I've been tweaking my Dirac class cruiser model, reworking the lower shuttlebay and adding more detail. Here are the results.
No new wallpaper, but here is the latest version of my hybrid Dalek combining classic and new series features. I've improved the base and added rims around the skirt bumps.
I decided to start adding design elements from the new series to my Dalek model. So far I've only done the base and the neck bin (that's the dark area behind the grill, between the dome and the shoulders), but I hope to add more features as time passes. In the meantime here is a picture of a hybrid Dalek with both classic and new series features.
This is a new version of a wallpaper I first did about a year ago, showing a group of Daleks in a vaguely tardis-like time capsule. I've replaced the Daleks with movie versions, used a more dramatic the camera angle, and modified the time capsule itself to include features I've recently added to the Dalek shuttle model that it was originally based on.
This is a view of my Dalek shuttle with the roof removed. This ship wasn't designed to look particularly cool: it's main requirements were that it be big enough to get several Daleks in it and still be able to position the camera far enough away from them to get a decent picture, and that it have lots of windows so you can see the Daleks from the outside. Once I'd achieved that I stuck engines and weapon pods on it and tried to make it look like a spaceship.
This is a revised and (hopefully) improved version of an earlier wallpaper.
I had an old laptop with a broken hard drive, so in an adventurous mood I replaced the drive, installed Ubuntu on it and then installed the Linux version of POV-Ray (up until now I've been using the Windows version). Well obviously I had to give it a try, didn't I? I didn't have any new scenes to render, so I modified an old one to use a different type of Dalek. As you can see it all worked fine.
Another good piece of news: the company I work for decided not to make me redundant after all. In fact it looks like they're going to be keeping me quite busy over the next few months, but I'll try to find time to render the occasional picture.
I haven't had a chance to do any new wallpapers, but I did produce these designs showing how the Special Weapons Dalek might have looked had it appeared in the 1965 and 1966 movies.
New wallpaper. A renegade Special Weapons Dalek storms a Dalek control room.
