Motherships are gigantic scouting ships that are carried by the Harvester Mothership. They are controlled by Supreme Commanders that take their orders directly from Harvester Queens.
Performance Characteristics
Deployment and Combat Capabilities
Design
Outward Appearance
A Colony ship's approximate size (based on the 25km size of the City destroyers under it).
A mothership is of considerable size: it is almost 600 kilometers long across its longest axis (length) and five hundred and fifty kilometers along its shortest (height). It is made up of two visible portions: an irregular dome on top, and two flipper-like appendages that hang beneath.
The outside looks like overlapping fields of stilled lava, with a thin blue shield around it. It maintained 83 City Destroyers and probably millions of Harvesters.
Inner Structure
There are many tunnels that led to the inside of the ship, of which at least one had a triangle-shaped form. Through this one Steven and David were led to the center of the mothership. The deeper into the ship, the more intense the blue mist became. There are many different kinds of ships flying through the tunnels and a few are seen by Steve and David.
The center of the ship lies in a thick blue mist. The first part are the multiple towers that surround the centre. The second part is a plateau of eighty kilometers long on which armies of thousands of aliens were prepared for the invasion of Earth. Above this plateau there is a long structure which is the main transportation center of the ship. This is the place where Steven and David were led to. This structure has thousands of openings, and out of each openings comes a strong light. These are control rooms in which the aliens control the arrival and departure of the thousands of star fighters. Through long structures they connect the fighters with the Colony ship. At the core of this structure was the main control and command center where hundreds of alien technicians monitored the ship's various functions along with their invasion.
History
War of 1996
In 1996, a Harvester Queen sent a mothership to Earth, and causing the events of the War of 1996. Throughout the duration of the conflict, the mothership hid behind the Moon, making it almost impossible for humanity to observe it. However, Steven Hiller and David Levinson infiltrated the vessel with a captured alien spacecraft and disabled the force-fields of the City Destroyers. Thereafter, the infiltrators detonated a nuclear missile on the ship which completely destroyed it. Burning pieces come crashing down to Earth, creating multiple falling stars, for those on the planet looking up.
War of 2016
The remains of the ship that weren't claimed by Earth and the Moon's gravity were left in an enormous debris field.[1] They were eventually pushed away by the Harvester Mothership's deflector shield.
Gallery
Concept Art
Arrival to Earth
Inside the Mothership
Destruction
Independence Day: Resurgence
Video game
The final level of the game takes place inside a mothership. The ship's main energy core must be destroyed to complete the mission. Destroying the energy core causes the entire ship to be destroyed.
Behind the Scenes
- The exterior of the mothership model, with its slanted dome body and underslung fang-like projections, was twelve feet long. It had no interior lighting, since any-sized light would have ruined the supposed 500-mile long scale.
- The interior mothership entry corridor was a twenty-four-foot long V-shaped miniature shot on a smoked stage. A very wide 15mm lens on the camera made lighting the model extremely difficult. As a result, holes were punched into the walls of the miniature to admit shafts of light, which had to be so bright to get the proper exposure that portions of the model tended to melt.
- The semi-organic columns inside the mothership were built and lit with miles of tiny fiber-optic strands, and were then shot in smoke with a motion control camera to create the impression that they were hundreds of miles high.
- To convey the mothership's massive interior, the filmmakers chose to keep the interiors relatively dark and mysterious due to the lack of recognizable features that could be used in the alien design.
- The explosion of the mothership was done entirely on computer using particle systems and a digital wall of debris.
External links
References
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