John Eaves’ designs for Deep Space Nine’s defensive weaponry, used to fight the Klingon attack force in The Way Of The Warrior.
Before Eaves settled down to design the new weapons, he consulted the visual effects department who would have to make his drawings into reality. “They said, ‘Don’t make too many,’ because they’d have to show them firing all the time.
"I just broke it up into groups of three because that’s how the station is configured." He adds that the VFX team also told him he only needed to design phaser arrays. "For effects, they could have photon tubes wherever they wanted, because they wouldn’t necessarily have to show any ports for them. That was more a budget thing; if we showed the ports we would have had to put them on the station, and since the model already existed they would have to add them. It was such an elaborate show that they just had them fire off when they gave the verbal command, and we didn’t really see a specific source they fired from."
Eaves decided that most of the weapons would either pop out of the structure or emerge from behind hatches. The station’s heavily textured surface lent itself to this approach, but he had to make sure that he didn’t accidentally use a piece of equipment whose function had already been established. Fortunately, he says, he could turn to an expert for some help. “Mike Okuda knew all the technical layout of the station, so I’d look at his drawings and go, ‘What about putting that there and there.’ On that little inner ring. I didn’t know that was where the runabout bays were, so he showed me so I could put stuff on the towers - they were just for docking. He show me where the they wouldn’t disturb what already existed.” When they filmed the weapons appearing, the effects team built small sections of the station that showed the relevant areas in detail. This meant that Eaves could make subtle changes to the texture of the station.
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[Source: Star Trek: The Magazine: Issue 17]
