Alland wrote:
I'm surprised that no one's mentioned another one of the major faults in the Thunder Child scene: NO HUMAN CREWMEMBERS! One of the ship's rearward guns is only protected by a simple gun shield and not a turret, and the gun is shown in profile anyway, so there's no way anyone could miss seeing gunners manning it. We see no men at all around the piece, and yet we see it firing. Also, in spite of the fact that this Thunder Child sinks slowly by the bow instead of simply blowing up, we don't see any crewmen abandoning ship.
Absolutely, although I'm sure I must have mentioned it elsewhere (possibly not, though - due to the overall ghastliness of the film, and the TC sequence in particular, I may have negelcted it).
But you're spot on - look at the (*duh duh DUH - SCREENGRAB below!) and you'll see two things (apart from the general shoddiness): first, the lack of crew members, as you pointed out, especially notable as the guns (all of them) are open shield jobs - that forward gun is a 12pdr, it's probably around 6 feet high at the top of the shield, to give an idea of scale - where are the gunners?; second, given the scale of the vessel and the gun mounting, that makes the 'hood' of the Martian machine, clearly visible in front of the gun, around 10 or 12 feet in length, which is far too tiny! Near the end, in Dead London (or, rather, Dead Field Outside Seattle), there is a crashed tripod draped over a building with a Martian hanging out of a smashed 'windscreen' of the hood, and it looks tiny in relation. Scale it to the hood size in the still below and that Martian must have been the size of a hedgehog! Utter bobbins.