Back story: For years I had been hearing, on the modeling forums, that this person, or that person, or another person was working on, or going to put out a 33", or 36" Original Series Starship Enterprise model. Unfortunately, none of these ships ever manifested, or the one, or two that did were excessively priced, or were of such poor quality construction and detail that they were not worth the price, or effort to try and turn them into decent representations of that famous starship.
Oct the 5th, 2006, I decided to go out to my garage and give it my best attempt. To make a long and convoluted story short, I'll get to the bare bones of the events. Essentially, as soon as I started making real progress and started gaining a good deal of interest within the community, there came a great hew and cry from some of those in the garage kit business. The simple fact is that I was asked to make my model into a kit and when I agreed to do so and to do it for the most economical price possible, those same people went ballistic. At that point, I started finding myself being inundated with hate mail and started getting banned from virtually every forum that I posted on, even when I was invited by the Admins, or Moderators. They were determined to make an example of me in an effort to keep others from doing the same thing, if "they" could not control them. They, being the powers the be at the time. You may wonder what all of this has to do with the Refit? It's real simple... I was perusing one of the forums that I was banned from and noticed that there was a guy asking for references for the Refit Enterprise from the TOS movies. I also noticed that this guy was being resoundingly ignored. Having had to deal with some of the small minds on these forums, I asked an associate that still had access to that forum to send this guy a PM and let him know that I had the references that he needed and that I would work with him to help him out on his project. My associate sent the guy a PM and the next day I got an e-mail from "Big Jim Slade." This was the beginning of the 50" Refit and the beginning of our friendship. This was Nov 13th 2006, roughly one month after I started on the TOS.
Originally "Jim" and I started trading references and working together to mine more. I had a friend in Hollywood that had worked with several of the in house CGI firms and he sent me a complete set of references that were used for the Directors Edition of The Motion Picture. This was an awesome bit of help from someone inside the industry until we found through further research that some of the details in the CG Enterprise used for that expanded version of the movie did not match up with the actual physical model. After much research on both of our parts we found the errors and omissions. At any rate, "Jim" started working in TurboCAD, while I continued to do research and we worked together to come up with a reasonable representation of the Refit Enterprise that ended up turning into an "Uber-Anal, Highly Detailed, Museum Quality" craft.
As soon as "Jim" started making real progress on the vessel I asked If I could post some photos of his work on some of the forums that I was still welcome on and where my stalker, the moderator (of one of the early forums that had banned me) and his clown posse' had not yet gotten to the moderators and admins. He agreed that I could post photos of his progress, with the caveat that he remain anonymous. I agreed to that and started posting on the forums i.e. Starship Builder, Trekbbs, Fine Scale Modeler...etc..
At that time "Jim" and I were only working on a set of blueprints. We didn't want people to have to go through what we went through to try and get some simple questions answered about the Refit, or any other model....
NOTE: To the easily offended and weak of mind and immature of emotions... I'm going to be brutally honest about my experiences and the shared experiences between "Jim" and I and the modeling and Star Trek community. With regards to that stalker.. There is a certain moderator of a certain forum that has trashed me, lied about me, stalked me, spread lies and rumors about me, my business and whom has engaged others to do the same. I will NOT be silent on this, because people like this need to be exposed for what they are. This same person has went to excruciating lengths to to keep me from ever getting a product to market, for no other reason than I stood up to him and called him on his hypocrisy and called him on his methods. This person made it "His mission in life to shut me down." That is a direct quote as relayed to me from a friend. You know, that smacks of conspiracy to me.
Moving forward.... As I started posting photos of Jim's work and our concerted research and so on, naturally the stalker and his clown posse' came out of their dark, lonely corners and started their crap all over again. They started trashing the blueprints we were working on, accusing us of using other peoples blueprints as the basis of our work and trying to nit-pick and rivet-count the ship to death, before it was even done. I'm still amazed at the level of jealousy, arrogance and hubris within the Trek and modeling communities. Some people think that they know it all and that they are the only ones that can do a thing and when someone comes along and tries to break out on their own and do their own creating they take it personal for some reason. I suppose it's because they are so insecure in their own abilities, or so afraid of competition that their insecurity turns to fear and they lash out from some form of transference of guilt and shame....???
After much discussion, "Jim" and I decided to abandon the forums for awhile and to focus on the task at hand. We moved on and kept working together, while we continued working on our own projects and dealing with all of those lovely things that life has a tendancy to throw at you.
Since Jim was building the ship in TurboCAD anyway and since we were both building that wretched Polar Light kit and kept running into the same fit problems and gaps and multi part engineering hull and rediculous primary hull, we thought... "Why not make a correction kit for the POS?" Later we shed the idea of having anything further to do with that kit and decided to come up with our own set of files and build our own ship. At this point we hadn't decided on a scale, or anything. We just kept moving forward until one day Jim started looking at the DeBoer's Hull and sent me photos. Considering the amount of time and research that we already had into this build we could clearly see that there were some things even with that kit that were short on detail and were not quite "accurate". Now, anyone that knows me, knows that I am not a rivet-counter, at least I didn't used to be.... It would appear, much to my shagrin that I have become one by this point.
When we started on the blueprints, we were going to give them away and even tried on more than one occasion. Pretty much all we got was crickets. I need to state that for the record, I did share many of my references with virtually everyone I was associated with that was interested. Funny that trying to be helpful and trying to share information would backfire on me, but it did. Not to long in the beginning of the process I had people come to me and offer to share references and work with us to get the project finished. Come to find out these people were only mining me for data, just to go work with others to try to beat us to the punch. You've got to love what pure assholes some people can be.
Remember.... Brutally Honest. You see, I've had moderators and admins and jerkwads try to censor me for five years now and I am not about to censor myself after all of the pure, unadulterated bullshit I've had to deal with. You don't like what I have to say? Stop reading.
