Ships of the Line decommissioned

I hope you're all enjoying your first month of Ships of the Line 2013 calendar, as unfortunately it seems it will be the last of the brilliant starship packed series - A few weeks ago Doug Drexler posted on Facebook announcing the end of the series, citing competition from online images bringing about the downfall of the calendar.

I find this particularly surprising given the apparent confidence in Star Trek calendars for this year, which saw the usual two calendars of recent years balloon out to eight different designs from four different publishers! Could this over-saturation of the market have caused the demise of Ships of the Line? - Particularly the competing nuTrek ships calendar, which was available instead of Ships of the Line in the UK. It will be interesting to see if this decision impacts the other calendar series for 2014.

Alas I guess we will never see the final version of Andrew Probert Wolf 359 clean-up image, which was teased some time ago, or the image Mark Rademaker mentioned would feature in Ships of the Line 2014, when commenting on his own blog a little while ago.

However, as if to prove a point about the availability of Ships of the Line style images online, some of the regular artists have been busy showing off their wares lately. Starting with Doug Drexler himself, who posted an entire gallery of images of the Enterprise NX-01 on Facebook; that includes both CGI renderings of the ship, and photos of the interior sets. And this image, by Alain Rivard, from this year's Ships of the Line:

Mark Rademaker has also been busy, here is a new shot of the USS Curie:

Anyone that has followed Mark's work will know he is detail crazy; he's also posted a colour chart for use on the Merian class fleet.

Finally Tobias Richter has been posting some very impressive flyby videos of new CGI models on youtube: