I’ve collected gobs of screen caps from the movie, and from a few TNG episodes. I also came across some photos of the original prop when it was the Saratoga in DS9, and the Brittain/Lantree in TNG. These will be my primary reference.

I’ve been utterly disappointed at the lack of accurate, quality blueprints for this model. Honestly I would have expected something decent (like the pocketbook prints for the connie refit) by now, but sadly there seems to only be several iterations of two main sources of blue prints. The first source is the set of prints made by John Nielsen in 1983. These are ok but talk about way over simplified. There are serious proportionality problems, many of the parts appear to be copied from the pocketbook connie prints, and other parts are just plain wrong. However it does have a few correct aspects to it that are kinda useful (lie the tilt of the nacelle pylons) so they’re not a total waste. (I picked up a set on e-bay a while back). Fun for collecting but I won’t be using these much.

The second set is the ones made by Michael Ruppert over at Federation Frontiers. His are much better, but they too have some serious deviations. Well he actually mentions that his prints are not supposed to be the ‘Reliant’, but rather are a ‘reliant-like’ version so I guess we can’t hold him to that Overall they’re better, so I’ll use these to get started, and to rough things out. However, I will stop using them as reference pretty early on and rely almost entirely on either prop photos or movie/tv screencaps.

(note to general public, if you have any decent photos or screencaps you’d be willing to share, I’d be very grateful! Pleae post or pm me)

Ok enough talk, I got my image planes setup in Maya and created some base layers to get the scene basically setup. I’ll start with the bridge tomorrow.