Spelunking down-under: "Q'apla!"

Yes, this story hit the interwaves a couple of  weeks back... and if you did miss it, it's worth a smile and a read—and my added note, below:

nuqneH! Australian cave tours available in Klingon

SYDNEY (AFP) – An Australian cave system is offering tours in Klingon, the alien language featured in cult science fiction series Star Trek, in what is believed to be a world first.

Jenolan Caves west of Sydney, the inspiration for Star Trek spacecraft the USS Jenolan, will offer audio guides in the fictional language from August 22, catering for the show's fans who flock to the attraction.  ...

BTW--Then-TNG writer Ron D. Moore had vacationed there in Australia over the 1992 hiatus, then came back and did name Scotty's transporter-loopy craft after the caves he had visited—but he misspelled it accidentally in the script for "Relics." Thus, that ship is officially the Jenolen, while the caves are actually Jenolan.

But how far have we come such that even the tourism folks see fit to play up that obscure Trek connection? The Intertubes is an amazing thing, even Down Under....where they apparently read the TNG Companion, too.

TECH-ing the (TECH): 1998 Hutzel VFX ship scales

By request from Boris at Memory Alpha:

I'm opening up the vaults a little early—before we formally launch the larrynemecek.com site and its archives section—to share the actual shorthand note from onetime TNG & DS9 visual effects supervisor Gary Hutzel, now famously the VFX producer on revamped Battlestar Galactica and soon Caprica.

It was May 5, 1998: We had just done our annual end-of-season wrap-up interview for his shows from DS9-6, and Gary provided his note sheet for my Fact Files research (and the legacy of all future techheads). The bottom four entries are my writing, added from Gary's verbal addenda that day— fresh from the "Operation: Return" episodes and the season finale's First Battle of Chintoka. Here you see the intended ship length, the models' actual length (or foam-core CGI stand-in), and the resulting scale and ratios needed. The list itself goes back to the end of Season 4, obviously—note the little tug and the Curry (stay tuned!).

Part of the duty of latter-day ship ner-- er, archivists -- is to contrast and compare the varied VFX chiefs' scale with the final onscreen effort to try to make sense of it all. Ha!

In the future, I'll just blog about these photos and notes here as "TECH-ing the (TECH)" —all you script and technobabble fans should get that one!—or TTT, and link you to the archive page.

But for now ... Enjoy! And comment away!

LN Photo (above): Gary Hutzel, Judy Elkins: Cooper Building, Trek post-production offices, 5/5/98.