#progress blogging

total word count: 53,946

goal word count: 100,000

When I get too tired to do much of anything, I throw on Star Trek on my tv (I’ve reached DS9 season 3 in my rewatch. I have been tired A Lot 😅 Expect more holodeck-stats on the main blog soon). However, I’m notoriously unable to just... watch tv without keeping my hands busy with something. And I’ve found that the perfect way to keep myself busy is doing overly precise measuring and modeling in SketchUp.

So, for your delectation: My progress on the SketchUp model of La Sirena’s lower deck!

What I have so far (please ignore the mass of dotted lines. They’re guidelines, meant to help me figure out how those bloody beams in sickbay work 😅).

For context, the plan of the lower deck:

I’m finally adding the door to sickbay. Getting a door into the wall of a conical round room is a bit of a nightmare, but I think I’m finally getting there.

Still need to cut the workbench to size, but it’s slowly coming along.

I think I might have finally gotten the 3D model of the bed in Sirena’s quarters to a stage where I feel confident to leave it be. It’s far from perfect (for starters: the mattress needs to be made to look more... mattress-y), bu it’ll do for now!

Guess what my brain replied 🙈

Anyway, I was planning to start this series on the 29th December, then on New Year’s, but I never managed to finish the first post. Instead, I spent that time fiddling with the 3D modelling programme. Because of course I did.

Anyway, since this probably won’t actually end up in the Spotlight-Post-Proper, here are some shots of floor plates ✨in 3D✨

This is the floor of the upper deck, looking back towards the engine light. The semi-circular bits are the windows down to sickbay, and the transporter would be towards the back on the left-hand side in this image. The floor of the upper deck is about three times as wide as I’ve made here (think this bit of floor pattern added again on each side), but it gives you a nice general idea.

And here is some of Raffi’s furniture, to give you a sense of scale. (And no, the furniture is not supposed to be white, I just still haven’t bitten the bullet and committed to colours yet 🙈)

Anyway. Mappening Is Happening, folks!

But I had to make sure the my set-up was working, so I just very briefly let the first seconds of the episode run, and THERE’S A CLOSE-UP OF THE FLOOR PLATES!!!!!! 😭😭😭

Listen, I really love what they did with Sirena in season 1 and we wouldn’t have her without Todd Cherniawsky and his amazing team. And I am devastated that we’ve lost the red paint job and the season 1 logo because especially the latter is extremely important to me.

But say what you will, even just in the few scenes we’ve had so far in season 2, how the directors and cinematographers have chosen to shoot this ship is mindblowing! You get a completely different sense of her layout and scale and of all kinds of little details. Rios running along the length of the upper deck and the camera following him is so dynamic, and the shot looking up at him along the steps to the lower deck is just *chef’s kiss*

If I hadn’t gotten size confirmations through other means by now, I’m guessing this week would be the episode where a ton of my questions would have gotten answered.

I thought I’d give you all a little (hah!) update of what has been going on in the background of the mapping blog recently. I haven’t finished anything in a long while and I always feel a little weird throwing WIPs on here without the commentary I feel they deserve (that’s what twitter is for 🙈). But I’m trying to get better about that.

So, here is a ton of my work literally in progress. I hope you enjoy looking at a whole lot of very similar deck plans 😋

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I have an idea for a new mapping project for periods when I don’t have the time or energy to write long things. But it requires me having a usable map of the upper and lower deck of La Sirena.

My first idea was “eh, I’m going to take the set plans we got from the blu-rays and just clean them up a little, make sure all the markings are in the right place, add a few things that are missing, and re-do the labels. That won’t take too long, surely?”

“Yeah, that’s serviceable!”

But then I started working on the lower deck. Looking at the original plans, the first one is too warped and out of focus to use as a basis, but there’s a bunch of stuff missing in the second one (most obviously, the front of the mess with the stairs to the bridge).

“So. If I want to have a map of the lower deck in its entirety, I need to add the front of the ship and a bunch of stairs, make adjustments to the glass-plates - not to mention clean up the graininess from rescaling it to fit with the upper deck...... Okay, fine, I’m just going to retrace the entire lower deck, make it as clean, and as screen-accurate as I can get it, and add all the missing stairs and things.”

It helped that I already had a redrawn version of sickbay, because I’ve been adding furniture to that, too:

(Still missing a few things, like the shelves on the support beams, not to mention labels for the furniture. But it’s getting there!)

"Using that and the old plans, it won’t be too hard getting the entire lower deck redrawn, right?”

“Yeah, that’s good. That’s a good update!”

But to get there, I had to do a ton of work on the two sets of stairs to the upper deck to get them accurate. And it’s silly to only do half the stairs, so obviously I did the top half as well. But that, in turn, necessitated getting the railing around the stairs in the back and around the drop to the lower deck in the front right, so I knew how and where the stairs attached. “And while I’m at it, might as well do the railing around the panorama windows as well.”

“Also, I got some things wrong about the holodeck in my first redraw. For one, I’m fairly sure there aren’t actually any support beams sticking up straight through the middle of it, so those need to go. And I can get it cleaner, too.

“Also also: I already have outlines of the captain’s quarters and Raffi’s quarters, because I did versions of those with furniture!”

(Rios’s quarters)

(Raffi’s quarters with a marker for the skylight.)

“And I started on doing the same with the bridge. Didn’t get super far, but I have the floor structures down. So might as well add all that to the upper deck as well!”

“Yeah, okay, that’s kinda neat.”

Then there was a brief interlude where my brain got completely obsessed with the floor plates. I don’t really know what kicked me down that particular rabbit hole. Maybe it was just that the next step for the upper deck would have been deciding whether to do a full retrace, or whether to keep the cleaned-up version of the original plans, add the new things I had drawn, and leave it at that. It was probably also something about the set plan not being 100% symmetrical (it’s off by one pixel if you use a 1 pixel wide centre line) and the width of the beams and spaces between them not being 100% accurate. So I was curios whether I could get the floor plans to fit (and whether my estimation about their size was off, perhaps).

Either way, I spent two days completely obsessing over floor plates, and ended up with this:

(I was kinda tired when I did this and there are some very glaring mistakes that a very kind person on twitter pointed out to me. But it’s part of this odyssey, so I felt I should include it 😋)

“Okay. So I have an idea for the floor plates. Nice. But now I need to figure out a way to make the walls of the upper deck be above the floor plates, without getting interference from the markings on the floor and.... I’m gonna do a full retrace of all the walls and beams on the upper deck after all, aren’t I? WELP!”

And because my deck plan file already consists of 94 layers and I love it being so modular and able to show and explain a bunch of different things around the ship, might as well make the underlying structure of the upper deck as bare-bones as possible. That way, I can add and move things much more freely.

So, here is the skeleton of the upper deck. Maybe this is an approximation of what the ship looked like at its inception/before Rios added the Starfleet containers with quarters, holodeck, etc.

(I still need to decide what to do with the back of the ship and access to the engine room, since those sets don’t actually exist and nothing official has been said about it yet...)

After getting to the point pictured above, I spent the second half of my Saturday fixing my floor plate mix ups and adding in some new information. Unless I’ve overlooked something, any plates that still look flipped at this point are screen-accurate.

Clearly, there were some incidents near the bridge and at the back of the captain’s quarters that required floor plates to be switched out at some point - and it had to be done quickly, so there was no time to get them all perfect. Or possibly Rios was drunk and/or one of the holos was having a laugh. Any explanations are welcome ;)

(The plan above is not set-accurate, btw. If you look closely, you’ll notice that this is the extended version of the upper deck, with Rios’s cabin the size we see on screen, not the size built on the set.)

I’m going to have to do a massive write-up of this when the plans are done. Explain things like “screen-accurate but not set-accurate” (check the pinned masterpost for info about the captain’s quarters if you’re interested), point out all the things I’ve done to these plans to get them where they are, note all my observations and measurements, and provide evidence for some of my decisions regarding floor plate placement etc.

Just a quick WIP dump while I try to force myself away from the laptop to go grocery shopping.

This one I’m admittedly a lot less certain about than Raffi’s dresser, but I do like how it looks so far.

The desk in question:

And my recreation as of now:

It’s not finished yet, and there are a few things I’m very unsure about.

For one, the desk is apparently “fold-out” and you can kiiiiinda see something that might be hinges or some other mechanism when Agnes is hiding under her desk in episode 9. Unfortunately, I don’t have access to my good screencaps right now, so I can’t try to figure out how the mechanics of that might work.

My current thought is that the desk might actually be loose, so you can push it in towards the wall, or turn it 90 degrees and fold up the lowest part of the foot to fit it in under the the lower shelf somehow?