I need more dilithium.
The only place I can trade for it is at the mercantile.
One of the big challenges this season is,
for our characters and for our world,
is the lack of dilithium.
So dilithium plays a big part in this season.
We were challenged with
actually making physical dilithium.
You know, we looked at a lot of the original colors
and came up with this sort of dyed acrylic.
One of the challenges was to
make it look as though it's a mined piece,
and how they would mine
is, they would laser-cut out of a rock,
so what we did was we took a big piece of this dyed acrylic,
and we sorta hacked away at it,
and then we laser-cut one edge.
It's a small detail that we'll really never see on camera,
but it's something that we know exists
and the actors know exists, so when they're handling it,
they know exactly that this piece was cut from,
you know, a larger rock.
So these are the dilithium pieces
that are so sought-after this season.
This year we'll meet a character called Cosmo,
a Betelgeusian who's chasing Book,
and this is Cosmo's weapon.
We were trying to push the,
push what phasers look like with our bad guys
and what different designs we could come up with,
so, you know, this was just a,
just an interesting shape, we started working with shapes,
and came up with this shape and
kinda went with it from there
and did some detailing breakdown on there.
One of the things about this season was that
we're in a bit more of a broken-down world.
We're in that sort of post-Federation
and post-shiny gleam on everything.
So what you'll see on a lot of our work this year for
our bad guys is a lot more grunge and a lot more
sort of a rusted appearance on a lot of things,
to give that idea that our world is a bit more broken-down
than when we left it.
So one of the cool technological advances
that we have in this season
was something called programmable matter,
which is a sort of, like, these tiny nano-molecules
that can redistribute themselves and redesign themselves
to become preprogrammed shapes.
One of those things that you'll see, this Starfleet box
with the Starfleet flag inside that gets unveiled.
Again, we wanted to give, you know, actors like
proper weight to feel when they're lifting that up,
so if you feel that, that's actually-
-: Wow. -: It's got, yeah.
That's actually a milled, aluminum piece, so it gives a bit of,
you know, like gravitas to the performance
when they're actually feeling this.
And then the great thing is,
because we didn't want to make the whole thing weigh a ton,
this thing's actually just 3D-printed in foam.
The flag was designed by our art department.
They update the Federation's flag,
I think it's like every 20 years of Starfleet.
For us, this year, we had to jump, you know,
quite a distance, so they sort of had to track through,
and it was a bit of a process for them, but they,
they really, I think, they came up with a really cool flag.
Only a commissioned officer may raise it,
and I've waited so long to see it on that wall.