When Star Trek the Motion Picture was released, Andrew Probert was kept on to redesign the exteriors of the vehicles and environs for the movie "Enterprise" based on the initial designs for the abortive "Phase II" TV project. Of course, all Trek heads pretty much know this already. One of the distinctive ships in the movie was the Vulcan Shuttle that Spock travels on to intercept the Enterprise on its emergency mission. At the time, Probert stated that he also wanted to use this shuttle module design as the basis for a new shuttle design for the Enterprise, albeit in a somewhat more compact form. He included this design in his proposed matte views of the hangar deck and are included in "Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise" which still sits in my bookcase (The book also has a profile of this shuttle). In the end, the producers left the shuttle bay empty in the final matte painting and so this design is not considered canon, in fact considering the dearth of other references, it practically doesn't exist at all (There's a reference to it as an "SW7 class" shuttle, why...beats me).
Enter Arisia 2011, where I've been accepted to talk about sci-fi modeling and run a paper modeling workshop and the problem is how to make a model in 50 minutes. After setting up the proposal on the forum at starship modeler, I get some caveats about glue drying and folding and that it may be hard. Then I remember the Probert ST-TMP shuttle and think - it's really just a box right. So now I've embarked on kitting the shuttle. It's been an interesting process being the first time I've used modeling software (Blender) to do this as opposed to just trigonometry.
The end result has been a shuttle on one page that builds in under an hour. Now just to finalize the details. Maybe somebody can use it to recreate the scene in Andrew Probert's painting.
(Needless to say since this post the model was indeed finished - it's the next post Modelin' Monday: My First Paper Trek)
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