In this week’s Dispatch from Andromeda, SPACE.com’s Don Lipper speaks with Jim Finn, the show’s visual effects supervisor, about the series' two main ships, Captain Dylan Hunt’s shiny Andromeda Ascendant and scrappy Captain Beka Valentine’s rust bucket, the Eureka Maru. Evidently size does matter.

SPACE.com: The original teaser campaign featured a long rusty ship that many viewers just assumed was the Andromeda.

Jim Finn: It is funny because I track the message boards, and a lot of the talk is about the Eureka Maru because I think a lot of people believe that that's the Andromeda, and it's not. That ship fits in the corner of one of the hangers on the Andromeda. It would look like a single car in the parking lot of a huge shopping center.

JF: Yeah, it's quite a big ship. It's basically a freighter. Its original design of purpose was for carrying cargo, and the cargo pod on the back would be similar to the container on a container ship. Quite a bit bigger, but it would be the length of a football field I would think.

SPACE.com: Let's talk about the different character of that ship, because obviously it's from a different era?

JF: It's actually 300 years in the future, so it's 300 years more advanced than the Andromeda and it has a few enhancements than the technology on the Andromeda, but they're not disclosed early or often. But as far as how it looks, because of the collapse of the society, the beauty, grandeur, grace and opulence of the Andromeda era are gone.

They can't afford to build these beautiful ships anymore, so they reverted back to building ugly, rusty freighters and they still go just as fast, they still transit through slipstream, but the Eureka Maru is more of a tugboat and a sort of salvage ship.

My comparison of the two is that the Andromeda has all of the plumbing on the inside and the Eureka Maru has it on the outside. The pipes and the hoses and the steam vents. Everything that makes it a very classic looking spaceship.

SPACE.com: With a ship this big, showing it in motion must be tough.

We're trying to be as scientifically accurate as we can be. Especially with the way things turn, the way explosions and fire react in space. Motion is very difficult, because you keep wanting to bank a spaceship the same way you would bank an airplane in the atmosphere, and you get very used to seeing that in space shows, where a spaceship will be zooming across the frame and then it will tip and tilt and bank to make a turn.

Well you don't need to do that in space, you just, it just turns. But it can't turn until it slows down or stops, and unlike on the Earth where you've got inertia and you've got gravity to stop something, once you move something in space, it doesn't stop moving until you give it a cause to stop.

So there's a lot of laws of physics that we have been trying to adhere to, and Robert Wolfe has been religiously trying to keep the scripts and our creativity in check. It makes it difficult sometimes, but it also is giving us a very unique look that I'm hoping people will like.

SPACE.com: Does that mean when we see the ships move we'll see a lot more thruster fire?

It'll be gravitational. It'll be illustrated much more in motion than it is in the use of retro rockets and steam.

SPACE.com: With Babylon 5, the station created similar issues to the Andromeda?

JF: Especially trying to illustrate the scope, the size and the scale. Once you fill the frame -- especially a television frame -- with an image, it's very difficult to keep it looking very big, because once you have an object within the frame of a television set, it's very hard to make objects that show, that try and illustrate its scale visible on the screen because television screens aren't really big enough to show small objects.

On a feature film screen you can still have small objects, flying around it to show you how big it is. So like that station, you have to keep it very big and very close to frame, so that you can see other spacecrafts flying around it to illustrate its scale, because once you put an object within that small television screen it automatically shrinks in your mind's eye.

SPACE.com: And B5, because it was all CG, dealt with that issue by always having a planet in the background and a sun in the background so that you would see the scale of the station, but in the starfield that's really difficult?

JF: That's right.

SPACE.com: Another way they solved that issue was to have a lot of camerawork in and around the station?

JF: Very close to it. Yeah, we do the same thing. A lot of the moves that we do are created with the camera, and not with the actual ship.

We will track the camera, a lot of camera motion along the edges of it and, well, when you see the actual ship you'll be able to see that the ship was designed for us to be able to do those kind of moves and still see the background and still see the ship itself. ‘Cause if you had a great big block of the ship in the frame, you can't see anything behind it. So we had to create something that keeps its scale.

It's very difficult and it's also hard to illustrate speed, because a ship that size has to move quite slowly in order to keep the scale, and as soon as you start moving it quickly, it loses that scale.