TNGFly

What I Lack in Attention Span I Make Up For with Plagiarism

1989.11.15

Last updated: 2021.11.22

This is one of my favorites. I still enjoy watching it.

Way back when they were still making new episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, I was sitting in the offices of Silent Software with some colleagues, when the teaser for next week's all new episode, The Booby Trap, was shown. In the teaser, there was an incredibly brief (less than two seconds) shot of the Enterprise computer displaying a simulation of the NCC-1701D navigating through an asteroid field.

It was awful. As I recall, the entire room went, "Ewww!" upon seeing it. I glibly remarked that I've done better work than that in my sleep.

Later that week, finding myself with nothing better to do, I sat down at an Amiga and, from ground zero, started to do just that. 13 hours later, I had the animation finished. I wrapped it up and posted it to the Net the night before the actual episode aired.

The Enterprise-D object used here isn't even remotely accurate. I built it from scratch that night from memory. And you wouldn't believe how tough it was to create asteroids from scratch, especially when boolean object operators didn't exist yet. But even so, I think it came out looking pretty spiffy.

Animation Info

Items for Download

• TNGFly-anim.lha, 219K
• TNGFly-src.lha, 39K

These archives have an "extra" file named README.orig, which is the README file that accompanied the original post to the Net.