Star Trek III & IV Spacedock "Tug" Shuttle

Another picture of the "orbital shuttle" with the ST:IV decals and dirtier paint job:

orbitalshuttle_zps8bacd086.jpg
 
If anyone EVER does a kit of this, I hope you remember to add me to a list of buyers. Can't afford a scratch built commission, but I LOVE this little shuttle-tug. 'Been trying to find someone to build me one for years...I'm afraid a scratch-built attempt by me would be fairly worthless :)
 
Gotta wonder though why they have to wear space shuttle ACES ascent and landing pressure suits...

Yeah, it's kinda goofy, but Bill George intentionally used pressure-suited figures in the model as visual shorthand to indicate this was a "heavy-duty utility vessel" and not just a typical passenger shuttle.
 
What a view! :D

Gotta wonder though why they have to wear space shuttle ACES ascent and landing pressure suits...

Technically they would be S-1030A pressure suits (SR-71 use, adapted for STS-1 thru 4 missions). Trek III (when this model was built) came out before Challenger and the first LES suits didn't fly until STS-26 in 1989 (the partial pressure LES pre-dated the full pressure ACES suits by about five years). That is it for your "useless NASA trivia" of the day. :)

Anyone know what those figures were that were used? I'm thinking something Fisher Price based, but honestly don't know. Now that I know what they look like up close, I was chuckling a little when I was watching Star Trek IV this past week and they had more than a few shots where the figures were very visible (at first I thought it was a green screen effect with actors on previous viewings of the film until I realized what we were seeing in the cockpit WERE the pilot figures).
 
Yea, good question, why bother changing them?

Well, they changed the numbering decals (from "7" to "5"), increased the weathering, and added some funky bits to the dashboard (what are those black things – small hoods concealing new lighting?). So why not change the pilots too? Maybe they wanted to make them more visible.
 
Yea, good question, why bother changing them?

Well, in III it was flying around the dock in isolation, where in IV it flew ahead of the Travel Pod, in which the crew were very visible. I'd guess it was to get the apparent scale to match.
 
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