In this week’s Dispatch from Andromeda, SPACE.com’s Don Lipper speaks with Jim Finn, the show’s visual effects supervisor about the recently released pictures of the series' title ship, the Andromeda Ascendant.

SPACE.com: What’s your role on Andromeda?

JF: We designed most of the ships, the Andromeda itself was a very collaborative venture between the production designer, the facilities that were building them and ourselves when we finally started animating them. You can draw a beautiful picture of a spaceship, but as soon as you build it and you turn it around, you start to see not the flaws in the drawing, but the angles of the ship that you wouldn't normally see, when you're flying around it.

It took four months to build the Andromeda, start to finish.

SPACE.com: And you built it all in CG?

JF: It's all CG, we have no models. We have no practical effects at all. All of the spaceships, the two starships of the show, the Andromeda and the Eureka Maru are completely CG. And the Eureka Maru has a character of its own as well, it's sort of the opposing character.

SPACE.com: Could you talk about the evolution of the Andromeda design, what was the first concept and how did it evolve into its final expression?

JF: We wanted something that was . . . because the theory was that technical advancement was so far ahead that building a spaceship was second nature, there was no problem building the ships or it didn't matter how big they were because they had slipstream drives that could take any size craft anywhere.

But the society was also very articulate, very well educated, very artistic, so the ships had to have a very graceful, very beautiful look. So each ship was individual, maybe the battle cruisers were the same design but they all had their own specific look, their own make-up, their own paint job.

So the skin of the ship had to be very graceful and beautiful. We wanted something completely different. It wasn't gonna be like anything before. It didn't have a bridge deck, it didn't have a big set of windows, or engines at the back that smoked and brimstone came out of.

So we pretty much had our free range with the actual design of the ship, but we also wanted something that, because it's so big -- the ship is over a mile long -- it has to look big on a television screen. Which is very difficult to do. And if you just have a big massive bulk in the frame, you can't see anything around it.

So the ship was designed to be able to see around it, to see through it, so that you could see pieces of the ship and still see the background. We had to see star systems and we had to see action happening in the background, we could have the ship in the shot, it would still appear to be very large and we could see the action happening behind it.

So we started with some rough drawings, we had some designers come in, we had the production designer, Ken Rable, working on it. The basic shape from the conception pretty much stayed the same. The skinning and the texturing changed dramatically from the initial concept that looked probably a little bit too warlike for what we wanted. We wanted basically a ship that keeps the peace. It's not made to intimidate until it goes into battle mode.

So we also had to create this beautiful ship that transforms itself into a battleship, and at that point then it has to be intimidating and warlike, so we did that with sort of an exoskeleton that grows out of the ship to protect itself and to arm itself when it goes into battle. But there's no morphing. There's nothing magical about it, we wanted to keep everything as realistic and mechanical as we could.

So the exoskeleton actually moves. It doesn't just appear or morph out of the skin. There's no laser beams, there's no magical propulsion system, the ship doesn't stretch into a line and then zap off into nothing.

So we had to create a whole new kind of propulsion system, sort of special plane for these ships to travel in. And it became a very universal form of transportation -- not only the Andromeda could use it, even the Eureka Maru could; they could both go at the same speed.

So the ship evolved . . . the basic shape stayed the same, the evolution was in the artistic look of the exterior and the way it deployed armament, the way that it received and exited ships that landed in it, the shape and design of its fighters and its drones and . . . it’s really the size of a small planet with its own colony and it housed thousands of people.

SPACE.com: So let's talk about the skinning of it. Originally was it a very smooth skin?

JF: It was never really smooth. If you've seen a very beautiful East Indian silver goblet that's highly etched and embossed with beautiful patterns, [that's the effect] because we were trying to express the artistic nature of the society.

So there was a lot of etching and embossing and very little color. It wasn't a painted ship, it didn't have streaking flames of fire running down the side. The beauty in that was that when you got in very close on the ship you could see the detail and also keep the scale, this massive scale when a spaceship flew beside it [and filled] the frame, you still had to have something to see instead of just a sheet of metal.

So it's a very beautiful ship and we retained a lot of that look in the finished product, we just scaled that look down because in a lot of cases that sort of full-on artistic look made it look a little too imposing and scary a vessel.

So it ended up that certain areas of the ship have the design on it and other areas of it are more sort of reverted back to a smoother surface.

SPACE.com: This would be a heavy cruiser?

JF: I guess you would sort of equate it to something like an aircraft carrier. It housed and carried great numbers of troops as well as fighters and drones and scientific equipment. Because it could deploy hundreds of battle cruisers it had to have its own defense system, but unlike an aircraft carrier that had destroyers and support ships, it carried all of that support within its own skin.

So the fighters all lived within it, the drones all lived within it. And its defensive system was built into the blades that deploy around the openings in the ship to protect it.

SPACE.com: When you're looking at the Andromeda, are there little signature things that you fought for, items that are now integrated in the design that you have sort of a personal relationship with?

JF: I guess the hanger decks, because what we're doing is we have this beautiful spaceship, and the set that we've built and designed for the interior of the spaceship is very, very big, but there's no way that it can show the size and the grandeur of the actual size of the interior of the ship, so a lot of the rooms that we see on the sets are computer generated as well.

So we have tried to recreate the interior of the ship as set extensions that try and sort of recreate the exterior of the ship and its size and scope. So that some of the hangars that we built where the actors walk in and out -- the observation deck where we see out into space, the hydroponics area where they grow most of their biological food -- they're these vast areas on the ship that we can't build practically that we've built in the computer.

And personally those would be our major contribution to the integrity of the inside and the outside of the ship. The outside's pretty much done now and it was a long process but now we keep getting to build new areas of the ship as the crew creates scenes within them. The engine rooms, recreation areas, etc.

SPACE.com: The main designer of the latest Enterprise used to do things like put his father's police badge number on some of the escape pods. Are there little things like that that we could look forward to?

JF: Those are things that you have to earn on a show like this. Right now we have the ship built and we're trying to create a look and a feel for the show and then as we start to get feedback from the fans and the audience, we'll personalize it and make it our own, but at this point, we're still building it so we haven't really sort of put our hands in the cement or signed the ship yet.

We're just trying to get to that point. Which I'm sure we will cause it's a very exciting, very unique look to the show.