# Escape from the planet of the apes spaceship



## JohnM3 (Jun 5, 2009)

Looking for some detailed drawings of the ship.Think a scaled down version would make a neat little boat for the quarry lake at the campground.


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## Gemini1999 (Sep 25, 2008)

JohnM3 said:


> Looking for some detailed drawings of the ship.Think a scaled down version would make a neat little boat for the quarry lake at the campground.


Ask and ye shall receive:

http://www.cloudster.com/Sets&Vehicles/ApesShip/Sci-Fi&FantasyModels38/PofAsciFi&FantasyModels.html

At least I hope that's what you're looking for...

Bryan


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## Opus Penguin (Apr 19, 2004)

I guess this ship was like an yother 60's sci-fi ship in that it was impossible to have everything fit in there that was shown on screen. My question would be how the retro rockets work when the beds are right on the other side of the wall? There are no tanks to hold fuel to operate them. I still like the ship though. As a kid that never mattered to me.


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## Krel (Jun 7, 2000)

I always figured that there had to be a whole lot more to the ship then you saw. For the nose to stick out of the water that far, at least three quarters of the ship had to be submerged. Plus when you figure they were on a one way trip, they also had to have everything that they would have needed to survive for the rest of their lives.

The Icarus could have been a lander that detached from the main drive for landing, but the Icarus would still have had to be a lot larger to hold the supplies needed for exploration and survival. 

David.


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## newbie dooby (Nov 1, 2006)

The Icarus was not in Escape from the Planet of the Apes correct?

It was only in the original movie and the sequel beneath the Planet of the Apes.


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## Cro-Magnon Man (Jun 11, 2001)

newbie dooby said:


> The Icarus was not in Escape from the Planet of the Apes correct?
> 
> It was only in the original movie and the sequel beneath the Planet of the Apes.


 
I'm sure I'll be corrected, but I'm guessing that the Icarus was in the original movie AND Escape From..., because to escape back to the 1960's/70's Zira and Cornelius had to find and salvage the Icarus and start it on its return trajectory; as far as I remember, they didn't build their own copy of the Icarus.

But the Icarus doesn't appear in Beneath, at least in the storyline - that ship at the beginning of Beneath..., when Brent is tending to the dying skipper, must be another, similar craft, as at that point the Icarus is still at the bottom of the lake where it had crash-landed in the original, in the timeline of the story; the same ship in reality may have been used to represent Brents craft as well.


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## Gemini1999 (Sep 25, 2008)

newbie dooby said:


> The Icarus was not in Escape from the Planet of the Apes correct?
> 
> It was only in the original movie and the sequel beneath the Planet of the Apes.


I often wonder how the ship got the designation of "Icarus". It certainly wasn't mentioned in any of the films. The same ship was used in "Planet", "Beneath" & "Escape" films. The Icarus also appeared in the pilot episode of the 70's POTA series as well.

That website I linked to seems to be a focus point for information surrounding this particular craft. There are many sections to that site that have all kinds of information, photos, drawings & even some fan produced material showing different versions of the craft. You could actually spend quite a bit of time just by reading and looking at it all.

Here's a link to the main page for the Icarus that has links to all the various articles and information:

http://www.cloudster.com/Sets&Vehicles/ApesShip/PofA01.html

I think that it's fascinating that a SciFi craft such as this that really had such a small part in a film franchise gets so much attention. I'll bet that Bill Creber must feel pretty flattered that one of his designs has so many admirers.

Bryan


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## Richard Baker (Aug 8, 2006)

I like how the studio reused the Jupiter 2's full scale landing gear as part of the wrecked Icarus 'class' ship in the beginning of Beneath the Planet of the Apes.
Sad to see it that way, but a great send off for something that is usually scrapped instead.


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## SteveR (Aug 7, 2005)

Here's the Wikipedia article on the _Icarus_:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icarus_(fictional_spacecraft)


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## Krel (Jun 7, 2000)

newbie dooby said:


> The Icarus was not in Escape from the Planet of the Apes correct?
> 
> It was only in the original movie and the sequel beneath the Planet of the Apes.


Sorry, but I didn't know what else to call it. I don't remember it having a name in EFTPOTAs, and the Icarus moniker is pretty well known, so I just used it. 

I'm really sorry for any confusion I may have caused.

David.


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## jbond (Aug 29, 2002)

I'm sure we'll all get over it.


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## Sonett (Jul 21, 2003)

"I often wonder how the ship got the designation of "Icarus". It certainly wasn't mentioned in any of the films.".....

I believe the name was first applied by Larry Evans, a fan who drew up some blueprints of the ship back in the early 80's. I had a set of those I ordered from Star Tech back around '83 or '84 and his name was on them.

Also, I think Phil Broad knew him or at least credited him on his website as the fan who gave this great ship a name!


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## CaptCBoard (Aug 3, 2002)

Yes, Larry is the one who came up with the name. And the use of the name is optional. Personally, I don't use it. My feeling is if it didn't have a name, it shouldn't. That's just me. And Larry is a good friend of mine!

By the way, the ship was also used in "The Illustrated Man".

Scott


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## Carson Dyle (May 7, 2003)

Yeah, count me amongst those who despise the name Icarus as applied to the POTA spaceship.

Naming a spaceship after Icarus is like naming a luxury liner after the Titanic. You're just asking for trouble.


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## spawndude (Nov 28, 2007)

I would love to have one of these!

However, in my opinion it has to be one of the goofiest looking TV/movie space ships.

To me it always seems like the rear part of it broke off.


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## Richard Baker (Aug 8, 2006)

spawndude said:


> I would love to have one of these!
> 
> However, in my opinion it has to be one of the goofiest looking TV/movie space ships.
> 
> To me it always seems like the rear part of it broke off.


That's what I liked about it- you never saw the back of it, it was implied. It had to be big to support the front up out of the water like that. It is when they bobbed it off for the return to Earth in 'Escape' that it started to look silly.

.


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## Carson Dyle (May 7, 2003)

spawndude said:


> I would love to have one of these!
> 
> However, in my opinion it has to be one of the goofiest looking TV/movie space ships.
> 
> To me it always seems like the rear part of it broke off.


You have to bear in mind the ship seen in "Escape" was basically intended to be a futuristic version of a Gemini-style space capsule. In that regard I think the design works quite well.

Obviously we only see a small portion of the ship (the capsule part) in the first "Apes" movie, but thanks to production renderings we have a pretty good idea of the sort of Von Braun-ish rocketship Bill Creber was envisioning.

Far from being 'goofy' in relation to other movie spaceships that had come before, the "POTA" ship was one of the most credible depictions of an interstellar exploration vehicle to have appeared in _any_ film up until that time.


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## Old_McDonald (Jul 5, 2002)

spawndude said:


> I would love to have one of these!
> 
> However, in my opinion it has to be one of the goofiest looking TV/movie space ships.
> 
> To me it always seems like the rear part of it broke off.


When I first saw the movie, I had thought at the time that the portion of the ship we saw was a detachable re-entry vehicle. Since the rear of the ship was under water. I never decided if it was whole or just the front end having detached for re-entry. 

It wasn't until I saw Brent's ship in Beneath the Planet of the Apes that I realized it was too short due to the placement of the engine cone and concluded that the prop men goofed. Also, I had read the novel/novelization of the story and the engine was supposed to be nuclear powered emitting a type of plasma to gradually propel the ship to it's cruising speed. Brent's ship looked like a nozel of a chemical rocket, again, wondering if it was a detachable lifting body style vehicle..


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## X15-A2 (Jan 21, 2004)

I always took the ship in the first film to be the final landing craft that had detached from a much larger interstellar drive section which remained in orbit. It makes sense that the orbital section would also include a host of satellites which would be seeded in various orbits for communications, weather mapping and other data gathering purposes. These satellites would not last forever of course but they would be useful during the earliest and most critical years of effort to establish a permanent colony on the new world. Taylor's mother ship might also have robot cargo pods which could be called down in stages as needed over the course of this development. Naturally, four people do not constitute a "colony" so there must have been others coming up behind them. I would think that Taylor's crew represents the first-in scouts. Their job would be to do a general assment of the computer selected landing site and set up landing aids and pads for the ships to follow. Taylor's craft landed horizontally which allows the ship to become a "cabin" or house once on the new world but the follow-up craft would be dedicated orbit-to-surface cargo haulers with two-man crews and be tail landers, like Brent's ship. Brent's line about his being a "rescue mission" is totally idiotic considering it would be 2,000+ years after launch before a distress call could reach the Earth and must therefore be ignored. He just is part of the planned follow up missions, that is all. Of course there would have been other ships too and ones with hundreds or even thousands of people on board. These would be the real colony building ships with heavy lift landers capable of bringing down huge amounts of equipment and materials to build the permanent colony.

There was definitely more to Taylor's ship than what we saw and what was drawn on the studio blueprints. You will note that even the studio knew that the engines drawn at its rear made no sense and marked them with "hold" which means "don't build or use". His ship climbed, rolled and banked on its approach to landing which makes a good argument for it having wings. Wings would also allow for much lower approach speeds, which is what you want when there are no prepared landing sites. His ship would have to have a small cargo hold at least to hold surface exploration equipment which would surely have included a vehicle like the LIS "Chariot". I would expect there to be at least one other compartment containing a small laboratory and then there must at least be a lav too of course. The existence of these other compartments is implied by the presence of the hatch at the rear of the main cabin.

The novelization of "Escape" described Taylor's ship as a "lifting body" type but that configuration, although visually interesting, does not make as much sense as one with wings.

Just a few thoughts about my favorite ship.

(I also dislike the name "Icarus" for this ship but the argument could be made that this is what the cynical Col. Taylor named HIS ship, the ship TYPE having another name. Much like each U.S. space capsule had a type name (Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, etc) and a crew selected ship name (Liberty Bell, Molly Brown, Eagle, Gumdrop, etc))


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## MitchPD3 (Dec 27, 2001)

http://www.goingfaster.com/icarus/index2.html

Check out Chris Shields page concerning the Icarus. Fairly well thought out.


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## Carson Dyle (May 7, 2003)

I don't know who Vin Scimone is, but he really nailed it...

http://www.goingfaster.com/icarus/scimone.htm


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## Trekkriffic (Mar 20, 2007)

Irwin Allen could have designed this. No room for engines or fuel even if it is just a reentry vehicle.It was still a cool ship to me; I even made a few of these out of poster board and aluminum foil when i was a kid-I had to make up my own rear end though since that never appeared in the movies. They were all destroyed sadly.


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## Trekkriffic (Mar 20, 2007)

Carson Dyle said:


> I don't know who Vin Scimone is, but he really nailed it...
> 
> http://www.goingfaster.com/icarus/scimone.htm


Wow ! Did he ever ! Fantastic work ! Love the weathering !


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## JohnM3 (Jun 5, 2009)

The Planet of the Apes Spaceship and the Escape for the planet of the apes was the same vehicle.In Escape thet just left off the back section of the ship and added a heatshield.The drawings in the magazine are not correct.The studio blueprints say the ships 45 ft in length.I have sheet 2 of the 1/4 scale studio blueprints.Its sheet 2 of 4.Wonder whats on the other sheets.


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## StarshipClass (Aug 13, 2003)

X15-A2 said:


> I always took the ship in the first film to be the final landing craft that had detached from a much larger interstellar drive section which remained in orbit. It makes sense that the orbital section would also include a host of satellites which would be seeded in various orbits for communications, weather mapping and other data gathering purposes. These satellites would not last forever of course but they would be useful during the earliest and most critical years of effort to establish a permanent colony on the new world. Taylor's mother ship might also have robot cargo pods which could be called down in stages as needed over the course of this development. Naturally, four people do not constitute a "colony" so there must have been others coming up behind them. I would think that Taylor's crew represents the first-in scouts. Their job would be to do a general assessment of the computer selected landing site and set up landing aids and pads for the ships to follow. Taylor's craft landed horizontally which allows the ship to become a "cabin" or house once on the new world but the follow-up craft would be dedicated orbit-to-surface cargo haulers with two-man crews and be tail landers, like Brent's ship. Brent's line about his being a "rescue mission" is totally idiotic considering it would be 2,000+ years after launch before a distress call could reach the Earth and must therefore be ignored. He just is part of the planned follow up missions, that is all.


Your ideas make a lot of sense. Once Brent's ship arrived in orbit and was not able to contact Taylor, _voila! _ It's a rescue mission!

I imagine the bottom stage of Brent's to be like an elongated capsule of about the same diameter as the Jupiter II exterior mock up.

I tend to think of the first two ships as path finders for an eventual colony. They were originally meant to be visiting a nearby star but the flight paths of the ships took them through wormholes that may have damaged the ships. 

Or perhaps it was that the nuclear war had left enough radioactive material that particles from the ruins were often swept up into orbit forming a barrier dangerous to ship electronics.

The ships in orbit could have explained how the apes managed to blast off in _Escape_. They might have used Taylor's ship's controls to tell one of the mother ships to send a lander with extra fuel. After it landed, they might have attached Taylor's capsule to the top and taken off in it.

Anyway, fun stuff to consider.


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## X15-A2 (Jan 21, 2004)

I like the idea of something in the future Earth environment affecting the ships but the guidance failure that brought Taylor back home happened when his mission was launched, not after it arrived. It could be argued that Taylor's ship returned to our time at a point just after his mission was launched but before the rest of the colony mission put out to space. Thus the follow-up missions were programmed to return to Earth to rescue Taylor's crew and, perhaps more importantly, add members of the new Ape civilization to the mission as well. This would constitute a new "humanitarian" goal (apologies to any Apes on the forum) to the overall mission. Then the new combined mission would go on to it's original destination, arriving 4,000 years after initial launch instead of the anticipated 2,000.

Taylor himself may well have wondered how there could be a "rescue mission" but events prevented further exploration of that mystery by him.


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## Richard Baker (Aug 8, 2006)

For me the lander version wrecked at the beginning of Beneath th ePlanet of the Apes represented thecrafte which crashed in the lake- it is big enough to support the forward hull out of the water as we had seen and the forward section with the side rockets could be a return vehicle to the larger unseen FTL craft left in orbit (assuming extreme advances in engine power/fuel use). With Brett's arrival there would have been two TFL craft in orbit, the escaping Apes would have had a choice of which one to take. I am assuming as others have that a much larger interstellar mothership of which the Icarus detached would have been up there, as the lander section would not have had much interior room for survey equipment or rescued astronauts. The Icarus itself had minimal controls, mostly hibernation storage and two pilot seats- there needed to be more we did not see if the mission with four astronauts would be able to do anything when they arrived.

.


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## X15-A2 (Jan 21, 2004)

Taylor's ship is clearly not the same type as Brent's. Taylor's ship makes an approach to a horizontal landing while Brent's is a tail lander. At Brent's crash site you will note a circular burn pattern on the ground, made as the ship settles on it's tail (only to topple over after making contact with the ground). This is specified in the studio blueprints as well. Taylor's ship has an interior layout that simply will not work for a tail landing design.

The Apes may have been trying to reach the orbiting interstellar transport at the time of the Earth's destruction but they had no time to do so or to activate a FTL drive. Their ship was sent back in time by the force of the concussion from the exploding planet beneath them before they had time to do anything. Interesting to ponder just where they thought they might be going to once arriving on board the mothership.


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## Richard Baker (Aug 8, 2006)

Taylo's ship did have artificial gravity and the nose escape hatch did have a ladder which would have been useless in horizontal position. Perhaps both ships having the winged forward section descended one way and would alter position for landing- Taylor's craft was clearly not in a controlled flight as it came down. I do agree that the two ships internal configuration could have besn different as Brent's ship was hoping to return with four additional people in addition to it's flight crew while Taylor's was designed for a total of four.
It does not make sense to me to have the same vehicle design for two different planned landing modes- what would be an optimum design for horizontal would not be optimum for vertical, IMO...

.


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## Dave Hussey (Nov 20, 1998)

If you watch "Planet", "Beneath" and "Escape" in sequence, you will see that the ship is different in each case. In "Beneath". the ship has a long broken fuselage behind it; but its Brent's ship, not Taylor's, so the differences are reasonable.

But in "Planet" and "Escape", both ships are supposed to be Taylor's ship. In "Planet", the ship looks big enough to accommodate the sleeper section behind the cockpit where Taylor catches a few Z's for a thousand or so years. If you look at the Wilco Models kit, Sarge has done a fair job of showing how everything you see onscren in "Planet" could all fit in. But with no room for engines or supplies though.

In "Escape", the studio apparently wasn't worrying about continuity. The ship, even though its supposed to be Taylor's, looks like much of the rear cabin has been lopped off, leaving only room for the cockpit.

And while everyone has marvelously creative ideas to explain the differences, my bet is that they are simply due to continuity flubs.

IMHO.

Huzz


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## StarshipClass (Aug 13, 2003)

X15-A2 said:


> I like the idea of something in the future Earth environment affecting the ships but the guidance failure that brought Taylor back home happened when his mission was launched, not after it arrived. It could be argued that Taylor's ship returned to our time at a point just after his mission was launched but before the rest of the colony mission put out to space. Thus the follow-up missions were programmed to return to Earth to rescue Taylor's crew and, perhaps more importantly, add members of the new Ape civilization to the mission as well. This would constitute a new "humanitarian" goal (apologies to any Apes on the forum) to the overall mission. Then the new combined mission would go on to it's original destination, arriving 4,000 years after initial launch instead of the anticipated 2,000.
> 
> Taylor himself may well have wondered how there could be a "rescue mission" but events prevented further exploration of that mystery by him.


Okay, I see what you're saying regarding the in space portion of the mission. I had always assumed that there was some black hole or something that caused them to wind up back at earth. Your explanation is much simpler, however.

I was thinking to also address what went wrong when the ship was landing, rather than there being just one glitch to cause everything to go badly. It may be too much of a contrivance to add an additional problem but then there would be many unknowns regarding landing on _any _alien planet. It would also explain more clearly why some things worked as planned and others did not in a more realistic scenario applied to the back story of the _POTA _series.

If it was a landing vessel vs. being the entire ship, it seems to have launched/separated from the mother vessel successfully. Then something went very badly wrong when entering the atmosphere hence my suggestion of a radioactive dust layer

How about this regarding the overall mission: both ships were launched just a few weeks apart. Whatever programming glitch or astral anomaly that affected the first ship, also affected the second in the same way sending both of them back to earth. When Brent arrived in orbit, found the other mother ship but could not locate Taylor's landing ship or crew, _then _it became a rescue mission no matter where they were.

The overall mission divided between two ships could explain the horizontal lander that Taylor was in and the vertical lander that Brent was in as the first was a light base camp exploration mission and the second was the supply wagon.

The capsular design of the Icarus and Brent's ships could be the command/escape pod capable of emergency re-entry by itself if necessary such as when the apes arrived at earth in the past.

In such a rationalization of the movie story lines, surely there was something attached to rear of Taylor's ship--perhaps a half-round stage with wings and a flat section underneath for re-entry--roughly shuttle shaped. It would have contained certain supplies and a rover of some sort and so on but not heavy base camp/long duration necessities.

I would think that the planet they were aimed at would have been analyzed thoroughly from earth with spectrography and other remote methods letting them be fairly certain of a breathable atmosphere.

The mission could have been a "seeding" sort of mission with no immediate nor direct scientific benefits--obviously, considering the time involved--but was an idealistic and very expensive way to spread humanity beyond earth. 

The mission could have been originated from a constantly warring and powerful police state government mostly as a way to gain support from the populace and thereby consolidate more power. The political effect of the mission could have accustomed people more to the idea of a nuclear war being worth the risks since they had already sent out members of their own country to other planets in case earth's population did not survive.

In that sense, the whole impetus of the mission would have been roughly analogous to the propaganda goals associated with the very expensive US moon missions except it was guaranteed to succeed (after launch and leaving earth orbit--NO chance of failure) as far as the government and people could ever know. 

(Yes, I know about all the tech advances from the moon missions' side effect benefits and don't intend to get into a political/social/tech/culture discussion. One has to admit, no matter how much one supports the US space program of that era, that there was a_ huge _propaganda value for the US in competition with the USSR in regards to exploring the moon with manned vs. unmanned missions.)

That could also explain why the guidance failure occurred since there may not have been a huge amount of concern by the workers involved over what would happen in a couple of thousand years.


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## StarshipClass (Aug 13, 2003)

Dave Hussey said:


> And while everyone has marvelously creative ideas to explain the differences, my bet is that they are simply due to continuity flubs.


Well, of course!

The fun is the mental exercise of trying to fit all the disparate parts together so that some sense is made of it all.

Without such challenges, where would _Star Trek_ fandom be today?


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## geminibuildups (Apr 22, 2005)

The modifications created for Brent's spaceship from "Beneath" did not make too much sense to me ....... but I built one anyway. I pretty much made the rear portion of the ship out of "junk" from the plumbing section of ACE hardware. An extra set of Polar Lights Jupiter 2 landing gear came in handy too . Hope you guys like it . 

Geminibuildups
www.geminibuildupstudios.com


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## Richard Baker (Aug 8, 2006)

Dave Hussey said:


> If you watch "Planet", "Beneath" and "Escape" in sequence, you will see that the ship is different in each case. In "Beneath". the ship has a long broken fuselage behind it; but its Brent's ship, not Taylor's, so the differences are reasonable.
> 
> But in "Planet" and "Escape", both ships are supposed to be Taylor's ship. In "Planet", the ship looks big enough to accommodate the sleeper section behind the cockpit where Taylor catches a few Z's for a thousand or so years. If you look at the Wilco Models kit, Sarge has done a fair job of showing how everything you see onscren in "Planet" could all fit in. But with no room for engines or supplies though.
> 
> ...


The Escape ship also had a side hatch which had no way to work with the seen interior even chopped. The TV series premire showed an interior which would work withthe new side hatch, but it bore no resemblence to the movie versions.

.


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## geminibuildups (Apr 22, 2005)

The side hatch was a wierd thing. In the television series, it opened with the press of a button, but in Escape, it had to be propped up with a metal pole like the hood of a car.

Geminibuildups
www.geminibuildupstudios.com


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## JohnM3 (Jun 5, 2009)

I read in Cloudbusters website the mockup was in 3 sections for transportation so it didn't take that much to just leave off the back sleeper section for escape.Wonder whatever happened to it.The ship from the tv series looks like a different cockup altogether,Wonder how that would function as a boat.I have a site at a campground with an 80 acre lake.It used to be a stone quarry.Only electric motors allowed.A 1/2 scale replica might be neat,John ( wishful thinking) LOL,John


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## StarshipClass (Aug 13, 2003)

geminibuildups said:


> The modifications created for Brent's spaceship from "Beneath" did not make too much sense to me ....... but I built one anyway. I pretty much made the rear portion of the ship out of "junk" from the plumbing section of ACE hardware. An extra set of Polar Lights Jupiter 2 landing gear came in handy too . Hope you guys like it .


Beautiful work, there! Your details look dead on.:thumbsup:

You nailed it pretty well. Putting the pilots in there is the icing on the cake.

I imagine the lander resembling the J2 extended upwards conically (higher than what the crash seems to indicate) and faired into the rear section of the capsule. I think the proportions can make sense if you think of the fuel tanks and much of the skin burned completely away.


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## geminibuildups (Apr 22, 2005)

Thanks. 

The figures were really an after thought. I had a couple spare old Lunar Models Lost In Space figures lying around so I modified those. 

Here is the original photo I had to work with along with the finished model. I tried to get as close as I could. 

The complete gallery is posted on the website under "APES CRASH DIORAMA"

Geminibuildups
www.geminibuildupstudios.com


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## X15-A2 (Jan 21, 2004)

The full scale ship ended its days as a sign for a motel. It was later demolished (probably along with the motel). They only had one mock up throughout the various productions, it was simply modified as needed along the way.

It is true that Taylor's ship is not a capsule when it was launched. This just means that it was modified after the apes salvaged it. Why and by whom are points for further imaginings (I've already worked out the details to my own satisfaction. Your mileage may vary...).

Much is hinted at in the course of the first three films and there are really few if any details about the missions that cannot be explained, even if on the surface they appear contradictory.

It should be clear from the outset that Taylor comes from an alternate reality, there is no way that we would have developed interstellar drives of any kind by the '70s. His timeline probably landed on the moon just after or even "during" WWII. The Nazis got there first? Perhaps but they would have needed greater successes at Kummersdorf, long before Peenemunde was established. Of course there is also the work being done by Sanger at Trauen which might have led to a totally separate Luftwaffe project (Von Braun was working for the Werhmacht). Who knows?

There is much room here for speculative model subjects, which is one of the features that makes this whole story so interesting!


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## JohnM3 (Jun 5, 2009)

*Planet of the apes ship*

Thanks for that info.Ending up a signpost for a motel.Man thats depressing.Wonder how much money they paid to have that mockup built.Bet it wasn't cheap being made out of sheet steel.


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## JohnM3 (Jun 5, 2009)

In The POTA yahoo forum theres a pic of the ship standing on its end at the 20th century building.The ship from the tv series doesn't seem to me to be the same mockup as used in the movie.For one thing the ship from Escape took quite a beating when it broke free of its mooring during filming and got banged up against the rocks.The tv series ship was also thicker in the walls.I could be wrong.My wife is quite good at telling me.LOL, John


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## Carson Dyle (May 7, 2003)

JohnM3 said:


> In The POTA yahoo forum theres a pic of the ship standing on its end at the 20th century building.The ship from the tv series doesn't seem to me to be the same mockup as used in the movie.


The mock-up shown in the shot (I believe) you're referring to had yet to be reworked for its appearance in Escape and the subsequent TV series.


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## X15-A2 (Jan 21, 2004)

Taylor's ship did not have artificial gravity. Watch the opening sequence again and listen for the "clang" of his magnetic boots as he walks aft. A subtle detail but one that shows the higher level of thought that went into a ship that is only seen for a few minutes on screen. They had also planned to include a small hydroponic garden in the middle of the floor space between the bunks but this was dropped before it was even drawn. One sheet of plan view drawing of the interior shows a dashed outline where it was to be located and it is listed as a separate detail sheet to be drawn but as far as I know, it never was.

The ladder in the airlock only permits the user to pull themselves through the cramped space as we see them do in the film. It would be useless in a tail landing ship. You would get to the end of the lock then plummet to through the main cabin only to crash into the aft hatch (which is also pointless in a tail lander). The rear hatch in the cabin would be square or circular and there would be a deck built around it to stand on. There would have to be a ladder through the main cabin and the bunks would have to be oriented differently as well. No, Taylor's ship is not a tail lander.

Where would Brent be returning Taylor's crew to exactly? They are already 2000 years out and the return flight would bring them back 4000 years in the future. If anything, Brent's flight only became a "rescue" mission once he arrived at the "new world" and discovered that Taylor and his crew were missing. This means that his ship is configured for its original mission (up & down orbital transport) utilizing a two man crew. Presumably this would be for shuttling colony construction supplies and equipment down from their orbiting transport. Brent would only be rescuing them from whatever predicament they found themselves in, not returning them to Earth. Don't forget, there would be much more to this mission including a huge number of people, probably coming up behind them in a still larger ship(s).


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## terryr (Feb 11, 2001)

Taylors ship caries 4. Brents has 2. Unless the others died on landing. And those 3 things at the back. Are they legs or locking devices to the rest of the ship?

The ship in Apes and Escape have many differences. Where is the rear bulkhead in Taylors ship? The inside is wide open.

You could say Time Travel has altered the future. Taylors ship comes to the future. Then the Apes take it into the past. They change the past by their presence. 
Now when Brents ship arrives in the future, it is the altered design from the altered past. And now Taylors ship would look the same as Brents, if it was still there. But it has gone into the past before the change.
[ and I don't remember any mention of the ships launching in our time.]


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## X15-A2 (Jan 21, 2004)

Or Taylor's ship was modified into a capsule design after salvage. Remember, he lands on Earth where the ship was built. The implication is that somewhere on the future Earth human space flight technology has survived. That this was never shown in the films does not mean that it isn't so. We have no idea what the disposition of the rest of the planet is, only the small area ruled by the apes and an even smaller area ruled by the mutants.

There are many possible explanations for the change in his ship that don't rely on changes in his historical time line. One only need to flesh out more fully the complete colony mission program to find them.

When he launched:










And when he crashed:










Taylor also refers to Landon as the "golden boy of the class of '72" which indicates a time near their launch, presumably when Landon was selected for the crew.


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## X15-A2 (Jan 21, 2004)

BTW, I went to visit the fellow who was responsible for the electrical props used in the Fox sci-fi films and he told me about their work to create the digital clocks seen above. Apparently it took three racks of equipment to make them work which generated so much heat that they had to be actively cooled. The resulting installation made so much noise that they had to seriously sound proof it before they could record audio on the set. There were also a host of heavy cables running back and forth to the set from the equipment racks. The whole thing was expensive and difficult to work with. Add to that the fact that the set was built on a gymbal mount and you have one expensive ten-minute spaceship set!

Why they didn't simply use a motorized rotary switch to create the numbers instead of using actual digital displays I'll never know.


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## Sonett (Jul 21, 2003)

Small side note: I always wondered now the lower digital clock display became "broken" or pushed in. Obviously, it wasn't too important because it remained that way into production.


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## X15-A2 (Jan 21, 2004)

I always thought that it was cheesy of them to leave it broken, even in the close up! Couldn't they go over to and pull it back into place for the close up? I would think that it got pushed in when one of the cast or crew landed on it too hard when the set was at an angle. Possibly in rehearsal for the scene of the cabin flooding (when the set was tipped up). It is odd that they didn't put it back in place.


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## charonjr (Mar 27, 2000)

I remember, I believe it was 1970, seeing Beneath for the first time on television, as a primetime movie broadcast. A preview had one distinct scene in it that's missing in the movie.

The scene was an overhead shot of a cliff wall and a beach with the apes hoisting the Icarus up onto the beach with primitive equipment. Some of the apes were in the water guiding it.

It was a short shot, but having seen the first film in the theater, I assumed that shot was Zira's team rescuing the ship. This makes sense if they were going to later use it to escape the earth's meltdown.


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## StarshipClass (Aug 13, 2003)

1972?

Characteristic of most sci-fi: too optimistic in the short term and too pessimistic in the long term.


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## X15-A2 (Jan 21, 2004)

Scene of the Apes salvaging the ship? I doubt it. It is possible but I'd sooner believe that you are remembering something that you wished to have seen rather than something that actually made it to the screen.

The same thing happened to me. I could swear that the first time I saw the film it opened with a shot of a deep space star field. As you watched, a small light spec began traversing the view. It is the ship. We only see it as a spec of light, tiny against the vastness of space. Then the scene cuts to the interior where we saw the crew climbing into the bunks. Only then did it cut to Taylor who begins his final log entry before the long sleep.

Rob here on the board even thinks that there are stills of a model shot looking up at the ship as it sits on the pad!

Memory is a funny thing. Don't trust it.


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## drewid142 (Apr 23, 2004)

It is possible that you remember seeing the apes bringing down the doomsday missile... apes, ropes, and metallic spaceship-looking thing on screen... and lots of flashbacks to the cliffs in apes-1 mixed in with it in the preview. or... you remember correctly and all us sceptics are full of hooey! But I think a memory that old, it might be the doomsday missile scene mixed in with others in the previews. ...just a theory


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## treddie (Nov 17, 2008)

Sonett said:


> Small side note: I always wondered now the lower digital clock display became "broken" or pushed in. Obviously, it wasn't too important because it remained that way into production.


This is obviously a late reply, but in working on a set of interior plans for the ship, I could see that they really rushed through the building of it. There are numerous mistakes and one major one was the fact that they tried to fit the panels along the sides as straight edges against what they THOUGHT was going to be a straight line along the inner "cone". The problem with that is that the only straight lines in a cone, radiate from the cone tip and no where else. So when they put the panels up against the walls, not realizing that limitation and not being in a situation where they COULD line up the panels with one of those straight lines, they had no choice but to warp and bend the panels upward as they worked backward along the wall. You can clearly see the warping in some production shots. This put tension at the weakest point in the panels which is where they quickly transition from wide in the back to thin in the front...right where the timer displays are. So the timer being stiffer than the panel it was mounted to simply broke free since it couldn't bend along with the panel as a whole. That's my analysis anyway!


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## Tim H. (Jun 23, 2009)

That upsweeping aerial shot showing the ship in the water is a terrific visual shot but its also a "mistake" as it shows the escape hatch blown before the astronauts blow it and shows that there's no more ship under the water because that wasn't built. Possibly the ship was meant to disappear into the depths but the water was too clear or it was maybe an off-the-cuff creative shot (from the helicopter that brought in the prop?) which didn't consider that aspect.

Good ship though, like the command module theories.


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