Sovereign class escape pod
From Memory Alpha, the free Star Trek reference
The Sovereign-class escape pod was a type of escape pod designed for use in Sovereign-class starships.
The USS Enterprise-E was equipped with these pods. When that ship traveled back in time from 2373 to 2063 to stop the Borg from altering Earth's history, the ship was boarded by the Borg, forcing Captain Jean-Luc Picard to set the Enterprise to self-destruct. As a result, all crew were ordered to abandon the ship in these escape pods. The pods landed at various remote points on 21st century Earth, where Picard hoped the crew would "stay out of history's way."
Fortunately, the Borg were defeated without the need to destroy the Enterprise, and the crew, along with the escape pods, were returned to the ship before it returned to the 24th century. (Star Trek: First Contact)
[edit] Background
[edit] Design
The script for Star Strek: First Contact called for a scene were the crew was ordered to leave the ship by way of the escape pods, something that was not seen earlier. Unbeknownst to each other both John Eaves and Alex Jaeger started design on the shape and launch sequence in the opening months of 1996.[1] "Lifeboats were never used on the last Enterprise, but this time a number of them are jettisoned from the ship when Picard orders the evacuation. They had been incorporated into the ship design-as triangular shapes on the hull-but we had to determine wheter those shapes represented some kind of a hatch covering a lifeboat or the actual exterior surface of the lifeboat itself. We went with the latter idea, with the exterior surface serving as a kind of reentry heat shield", Jaeger recalled. (Cinefex, No.69, page 116). The producers went for Jaeger's approach. Eaves, whose design was remarkably similar but with a covering hatch, remarked,"I liked the the beauty and simplicity of Alex's creations, and how he utiulized the top of the pod as a heat shield for planetary re-entry." (Star Trek: The Next Generation Sketchbook: The Movies, page 114) It was further theorized by Jaeger that the pods were automated and had parachutes for landing.[2]
[edit] Studio Model
Once approved ILM's Bill George built a study model needed as reference and texture extraction for modeler Michael Bauer who built and mapped the CGI model. Animation and lighting the model was done by Habib Zargarpour. "Having used Dynamation for awhile, I figured there had to be a way to extract the motion data from a pod and calculate its acceleration. After establishing the position and direction of the retros, we could then figure out which thruster groups would be firing at any given time to change the lifeboat's attitude. I did some R&D, a lot of math, and wound up with fully automatic retrorocket animation on each pod, using Dynamation software", Zargarpour observed on the choreographed movements of the flotilla of pods leaving the ship. (Cinefex, No.69, page 116-117) The ice crystal particles and the gaps left on the hull of the Enterprise-E were added digitally.
