Parliament class starship (ST Lower Decks ep5's USS Vancouver)

[classicdrogn]

So in LD e5 we see the Vancouver, and as with most Miranda-style designs she is a very pretty ship. I took some screen shots of the MSD and stitched them together to have a complete frame, with only the spot where I had to edit out fake-Burnham using the poorer-contrast and blurrier version:



Unfortunately, this doesn't include some of the traditional major elements like the warp core, main plasma conduits to the nacelles, or Astrometrics hemisphere, though it does show that the bridge appears to be on Deck 2 with a pair of conference rooms on Deck 1. Unfortunately, it also seems to be siting the shuttle bays inside the impulse engines as well - compare the MSD above to this aft image:



the shuttle bay the characters are shown disembarking in doesn't match up very well either, unless perhaps they're way in at the forward end, where the MSD has three little white features at different heights in the floor-level deck.



I didn't take a screen shot of the view looking backward out the bay door, but it didn't look like it stretched quite that far, past rows of a dozen shuttles. Then again, having the shuttle bay size and location line up poorly with the outside of the ship is hardly unique in Trek.

I'd be inclined to move the impulse engines to the center of the rear of the saucer and keep the shuttle bays in the two tail extensions to preserve the bay size shown, but the reverse could also work. What do folks think here?

(Let's just leave the issue of general show quality aside, I'm only interested in the ship for the nonce.)

[robkelk]

Unfortunately, it also seems to be siting the shuttle bays inside the impulse engines as well

That's the problem with getting only a side-view cutaway - there's no way to tell whether the hangar is inside or between the impulse engines. (It would be nice for the Trek folks to provide a top-view cutaway of each deck as well... but that costs money with little-to-no return, so I understand why they don't.)

I think there's sufficient wiggle room to say it's between the engines.

[classicdrogn]

Eh, don't really think so, Rob - the outline is pretty clearly too long and the tip too thick at the back for it to be a section taken through the centerline, especially if you compare it to the top view that is included and the aft exterior shot. I definitely do agree that it would have been really grand if there was some kind of systems overlay on the top view too, as is often seen in similar genuine-Okuda Okudagrams, though in this case I suspect it would just contradict itself and support both of us .

[Black Aeronaut]

Just call it what it is: a goof up on the artists' part. I've done this sort of goof myself when I've plotted out internals for my own made-up star ships.

[classicdrogn]

Well, yeah. The MSD is missing the cutout on the underside of the nose where the Death Star laser comes from too.

Continuing to think it over, I think the thing to do is to just shorten the bay and put it between the impulse engines, if only because they're very noticeably located in the aft extensions while the saucer rim at the back is dark, whci could jkust be a closed bay door. They were also on screen from multiple angles for several seconds while the MSD is barely shown long enough to register details, in the background as characters are talking. I probably will also thicken that rim so as to get a decent height fro the bay, but that's a minor consideration. Pretty definitely going to give making a model a shot, the more I look at the ship the more I love it, and just doing the outside and a shuttle bay cavity is simple enough I should actually be able to finish the thing for once, rather than getting caught up in details until a new shiny object catches my attention. She needs some phaser strips too, though there is are least convenient gaps in the bands of windows to add those, and torpedo tubes can go in the front cutout beside the moon-destroying doom laser and the back end of the deflector dish dongle.

Now I just have to hope Blender's interface hasn't been changed again, because it's gone up another point-release since I did anything with it... I really hate the switch from Layers to visibility groups, basically it means I have to keep another tool tray open to eat more screen space and click multiple things to switch them around when for decades it's just been a matter of hitting a number key or shift and one or more number keys, and using them heavily is ingrained in my workflow. At the same time, a lot of the actual features introduced in 2.8+ are really attractive, so I don't want to just freeze on 2.79b.

[classicdrogn]

Something I just noticed - on the MSD image, blurry as it is, it looks like the entire forward half of decks 7 & 8 are nothing but a big pack of R2 droids. I know there's a long history of including one as a joke in them since the original TNG display if not earlier, but wow. I guess the Vancouver really is specialized for engineering missions! That or they needed to call in some help with experience in

Is it really a spoiler if it's in the pre-credits narration?

the care and feeding of the doom beam and/or turning a small moon into an asteroid field.