A >small< ship, but still no stars to steer her by

[classicdrogn]

Edit: Here is an Imgur album where I'll be adding (nearly) all of the images posted in the thread:
https://imgur.com/a/2M9A6

- - -

To keep the 3D modeling thread as a repository of useful tools and freebies, I'm starting a new one to post imaes and blather about my pygmy Trek-style ship. Coming back to it tofay since my hands stopped giving me trouble, I did a bunch of work on the saucer frame after slimming down the engineering section one to about 75%, basically line at a time due to the complex shape. It's still kinda chunky compared to the frame parts visible in the damaged ship images and cutaways I dug up in the meantime, but keeping the relative scale in mind not outlandishly so.

On the subject of relative scale, you know that saying about how if it's stupid but it worked it was still stupid and you were lucky? How about obvious bad ideas that make you laugh so much you want to use them anyway? It seems Geordi was on the design team for this one, as well as one or more Caitians...



Mounting the warp core horizontally let me use one about the same as Voyager's so I tried adding a phaser strip about the same size (1m elements, 3m total width, or about half the size of a Galaxy or Sovereign's strips.) I don't know, do you think it's a bit much?

As the bad ideas keep on coming, you can see that I also made another shuttle, this one based on the even-rounder original concept sketch for the type-7. Him name is Hopkin. Hopkin Green Shuttle. Don't take my shuttle. I'll find my shuttle.

The two super-low-poly type-15s have been there in every render all along, stashed on a shelf among the cargo boxes. They displace six of the 1x2x1m boxes each, but they're not any bigger than a dune buggy and much more capable, so I've kept them anyway. I gained that back after stretching the shuttle bay another 7m aft to make room for a second medium-large shuttle anyway, without even having designated the space for a saucer cargo bay or two yet. I also decided on a target for nominal full crew, three bridge stations plus three engineering stations times four watches is 24, plus a doctor and five mission-configured holographic crew for a nice round thirty, though a single person with engineering and navigation cross-training and the five holograms can probably operate her decently enough. Considerig even the ship Seven of Nine/Annika Hansen's parents operated alone on their cultural expedition to study the Borg ('E's a fascinating critter, dangerous as all heck. Let's poke 'im with a stick!) was still about twice as large, I fully expect to need to scale back from that a bit, or else pack 'em in like the Defiant in triple bunks or something. At least the Sea Angel does have holodeck for rec time, though it's also earmarked for Stellar Cartography and/or use as part of the engineering workshop, which it directly abuts and has a wide bay door to. Between an integrated industrial replicator (not standard in holodecks as far as I know, though they do create small physical props and costumes) and the ability to simulate various machine tools and do rapid visualization and prototyping it fits like hand and glove, even if the shows rarely used them that way. (Only Voyager as far as I recall, and possibly only in the silly "break Warp 10, become a hyperevolved swamp lizard" episode at that.)

Fitting in the rest of the functional rooms I want in the saucer mainly amounts to bridge, sickbay, mess hall/lounge, transporter room, and some quarters, so available volume is still looking pretty decent, though I'm not sure how much is going to be left for boxed and liquid cargo storage. I still haven't built the photorp racks and autoloader either, but that's a lesser concern since the only other thing in the rollbar pod is a couple consoles and the hardware cabinet for the sensor dish and gribblies I stuck on the front so it wouldn't just be the torpedo tube on one side and the rest dull and blank.

So this isn't JUST me blathering on at the wind, can anyone think of a shipboard location that should be added other than the ones I listed above, engineering, the shuttle bay, and the computer room? A briefing room, I guess - scenes in the Captain's Ready Room are common enough. Maybe some Jeffries tubes? The ship is tiny, though, there's not really anywhere you need to crawl through to get to stuff besides the pod and maybe a service corridor around the perimeter of the saucer to poke at the environmental equipment.

And apparently I forgot to post this yesterday, after falling and landing awkwardly in a sudden, unexpected game of Twister over a pile of chainsaws. (Yes, literally. No, they weren't running, but they made the ground so uneven I couldn't move to get up, and by the time someone got a couple out from under me I'd been in a stress position so long I still couldn't get up until I laid there for a few more minutes and had something to climb on.) Marvypoo, and here hoping for a suggestion or at least a couple laughs was one of the things I used for incentive to actually get up despite being sore from pulled muscles basically all over.

[robkelk]

...
So this isn't JUST me blathering on at the wind, can anyone think of a shipboard location that should be added other than the ones I listed above, engineering, the shuttle bay, and the computer room? A briefing room, I guess - scenes in the Captain's Ready Room are common enough. ...

On a ship this small, you'd be looking at multifunction rooms. A briefing room can be used as a recreation room when briefings aren't being held (you don't need a holodeck to play chess, just a chess set and a place to play), so, yeah, I'd include one.

If you're including a medic in the crew, you might want a sickbay - or at least a dispensary. (Use that briefing/rec room as a makeshift sick ward if necessary.)

[classicdrogn]

Yeah, definitely a sickbay. Probably Voyager-sized, with one or two normal beds and another with iso-ward cabablitity plus and offica and mini-lab. If I didn't mention it I meant to. I'd have been annoyed if I left it out though, so thanks! The multi-function spaces is a good point, though the Ready Room specifically is effectively the Captain's office and will probably attach to their quarters on the other side. Picking out how to fit everything in with the split-level deck layout is inducing a bit of analysis paralysis, since stretching things in one place here means there's only a half-height deck there, and while still useful space (enviro machinery or consumables tanks don't mind low headroom a bit) that still presents challenges.

[robkelk]

You can put bunks into half-height deck space - look at the capsule hotels in Japan for inspiration here.

[Black Aeronaut]

Kinda reminds me of the smaller Klingon Bird of Prey ships, what with the scale and all.

[classicdrogn]

Well, practically speaking, with decks at 3.5m not including the interfloor frame/equipment spaces, a half-height deck is still tall enough for most people to stand up straight in. That's not the Starfleet way, though, except on runabouts and Defiants. Since the point is to duplicate the big-ship experience in a miniature hull, I'll be working as hard as I can to put everyone in, at worst, quarters with two little bedrooms on either side of a shared toilet/sonic shower bathroom. 1.5x3m is enough floor space for a single bed with a chest of drawers and room to dress at the foot, and roughly the same space can fit a bathroom with an upright shower and a closet or entryway, as I well know since those were the rough measurements of the apartment I had a while back. Slap another bedroom on the opposite side and put the shared living area/lounge nearby, maybe have a fold-out desk/wall monitor that can be used siting on the side or foot of the bed, and it's a little tight but better than a hammock in the rollbar Jeffries tubes. Though the dudeslab I have stuffed up there to get at the aft RCS thruster actually looks kinda comfy, if he had a couple of cushion pads for where he's leaned back against the inside of the hull.

I didn't make a render today, but the RCS cluster is right at the part of the rollbar where it bends from the uprights to the top, and the servicing position is leaned back at 50 degrees or so in a corner and reaching overhead to the actual mechanics. There is actually enough space in the horizontal section of the access way for a hammock or two as well, though none of that is going to be fun for a claustrophobe... I haven't decided yet whether to put in a window or two up there, though a wall monitor with general computer access would probably be just as effective if you set it to an exterior view or a landscape. The long horizontal part of the warp pylons actually ended up being surprisingly spacious, and the nacelles even have room for an internal inspection corridor now that I un-shrunk them again. (The render above is as they currently are, the older ones in the 3D thread show them reduced to 75% horizontally and vertically.) I'm going to line the walkway with tanks for compressed atmosphere and stick one of those airlocks with the 2.5m docking ring as seen on the refit TOS ships on either side, since there's an internal airlock to get to the actual warp nacelles anyway since they're open to space along the sides and trusting a force field to keep your atmo in all the time is foolish.

[Rajvik]

no offense intended, but is it known as the SS Nyaow

seriously, it looks like something that if it showed up in fenspace, it would belong with the Catgirls amongst the trekies

[classicdrogn]

I don't have a firm decision on the name, but I lean toward Sea Swallow due to the blue stripe, ability to lay the hurt on far beyond what its size would suggest, and general tiny cuteness. The "ears" are not really part of the design, but they are vaguely plausible as auxilliary sensor arrays and amuse me so I've mostly left them in place for renders up to now. I am definitely using the visually-oversized phaser strip because it drives home the scale in a way that just seeing a figure (or worse, a dudeslab sized to represent a figure but a featureless box to the eye) standing on top of the hull does not. For reference, the entire ship's top-down view is about the size of the bridge island on the original Enterprise, and at 48m the saucer is just about exactly the same diameter as the deflector dish on an Ambassador class like the Enterprise-C. Overall length is 75m, and I'm not sure of the height since I just got done making the pod and nacelles a little beefier, but I know it's still under 25m from the bottom of the nacelles. Figures for the Defiant tend to vary and it's #3 on my "ugly main Trek ships" list (after "Everything From Discovery" at #1 and the Galaxy second, still ahead of "JJ plz go & stay gone") so I don't make a habit of memorizing trivia about it, but the most plausible is 120m long, for what that's worth.


image source
They eat Portugese Man'o'War jellyfish, and collect the sting cells and poison in their own body to use against predators and grabby tourists!

[Inquisitive Raven]

no offense intended, but is it known as the SS Nyaow

seriously, it looks like something that if it showed up in fenspace, it would belong with the Catgirls amongst the trekies

You were saying?

It seems Geordi was on the design team for this one, as well as one or more Caitians...

[classicdrogn]

I'll write about these later, I'm way too tired right now. Suffice it to say that I tried a different impulse engine arrangement, which led to a different sort of starship cosplay than the kitty ears.





edit: fixed first image

[classicdrogn]

So now that I'm not about to collapse drooling into the keyboard while the weight of my head digs waffle marks into my face, some details. First of course is the ship's frame being nearly complete, just the torpedo pod left to go and I finally got the size of the frame members down to where they feel strong enough to do the jab without being colossally overbuilt, as I have a tendency to do.* Well, besides having a warp core that matches the Intrepid class that's several times her length and width feeding a set of quad-coil engines (despite being housed in two nacelles) which are also large far out of proportion to the rest of the ship... Squishy and lacking depth of reserves she may be due to the sheer tininess of her structure and number of crew, but if there's a ship with the legs to make a good attempt at two or three nines past the decimal point in TNG warp factors it's her.

This thought was floating vaguely around the back of my mind looking for something to connect to when it occurred to me that raising the saucer section's impulse engines out of their position inside the hull where they take up already scant space but would seldom if ever be used and couldn't even provide auxilliary power due to burning a hole into Engineering and filling it with radioactive exhaust if they tried would let them be the ship's primary sublight drive, freeing up not only that space but also allowing the pylon engines to be removed and more than doubling the cubage for antimatter and deuterium tankage in there. I tried shifting them up and back a bit and tossed an appropriately scaled cube on to approximate the hull...

"Huh, looks like the Excelsior's impulse section," I thought. Connection. "Oh Enterprise speed records? Doogie Howser's dad says he's going to break you..."

I actually like the Excelsior's design quite a bit and already based elements of the saucer on her, so that engine chane is almost certainly in at this point, contingent on looking at it for a few days from different angles and deciding it doesn't suck. The hemispherical "foam rubber chin" with Excelsior-style deflector and trim stripe... well, it does just continue with the trend of making parts of the ship into thinly disguised sex symbols, but I like the Excelsior, I like Art Deco (the first rather goes with that really,) I like having a nice chunk of internal volume added instead of filled, and I'm not too ashamed to play to the sexy side in ways that don't get anyone hurt, so it's on the table more so than the kitty ears ever were, and especially now that I've seen how she looks with a "belly band" added to use a bunch of 1m sensor pallets like the Galaxy and Intrepid, one of the only things I like about the Galaxy design in fact, though according to some dude on the internet the Excelsior did that first too, placing them in the gaps between fins of the "turtleneck" trim area.

As shown above they're fitted with Borg-derived designs brought back by Voyager, in three banks of nineteen at the front and sides (though I could probably fit twenty each if not for leaving a gap between each one, maybe twenty one) two little strips of five facing diagonally aft, and two sets of three directly aft on the back of the nacelle pylons since the saucer is blocked by the rollbar at that angle. Filling the openings where the original impulse engines were with still more is a possibility if I stick with the "An Excelsior's love child with a Miranda, raised by an Intrepid after The Battle of Sector One" style. Between these and the "sniper scope" deep scanning forward sensors on the pod, the kitty ears units are pretty redundant, however cute, and don't match the style of the Excelsior bow and deflector.

The dudeslabs have also proliferated like crazy as I use them to check headroom on arches, EPS conduits, access corridors and Jeffries tubes etc., which is basically "functioning as in tended" even if what I really intended was to make a quick puppet that was recognizably humanoid instead of a simple box. Eh, haven't got around to it yet and they work so far.

Also visible over the saucer is a turbolift car, which has six dudeslabs riding inside in typical "one handspan and nobody fart" elevator packing, along with the torp and probe that were there all along and a boolean object for cutting 90cm doors with curved upper corners. Two more boolean cutters are visible on the side of the nacelle pylon and back of the torpedo pod, the first because there's an internal airlock there anyway before the access ladder to the nacelle itself and the other because reloading torpedoes through the Jeffrie tube would suck big time, even if they do fit easily enough and an antigravity cargo-lift to do the heavy work would make it possible. Depending on how the autoloader and torp racks work out I may add a two-place transporter pad up there as well for when someone needs quick access without climbing around on ladders or going EVA, and unofficially for those times when the proper weapons are down but so are the enemy's shields, so a quickly beamed IED (or torpedo) is just the thing, or if the ship is boarded and the defenders are driven out of Engineering thorugh the Jeffries tubes so the pod is not the dead end it looks like.

Thinking about it, holding the torpedo room against invaders (unless they are cpaable of beaming into it of course) would be fairly easy as long as you have at least one armed person per side, since it's not like there's much room to dodge a phaser (or a pocking big wrench t' the head) when crawling out of the tube on arms and legs.

At the front of the bare frame image is a bright green hexagon, this is roughly the volume allocated for the bridge at the moment, a bit small by Starfleet standards at "only" 10m diameter but SF standards are a bit mad to begin with - that's still bigger than the entire house I used to live in. Sickbay will probably be under the rear 2/3 of it with the low-headroom space at the front 1/3 being the kitchen or storage area for the mess hall/lounge at the front of the saucer. One of the smaller nooks between the frame members to one side will be the ready room, with the captain's quarters directly connected on the other, going the other way will be a corridor and a head. Haven't really decided on other internals aside from the ones mentioned and placed before (the workshop/hangar between the holodeck, Engineering, and above the shuttle bay, the main computer core (which was switched port to starboard with the holodeck for better turbolift and workshop access) and the "auxillary cargo bays" p/s in the small frame sections to either side, one of which houses the Cherry Bomb shuttle (renamed from Bear Trap) that informally takes the place of the conformally-carried captain's yachts on the Galaxy/Intrepid/Nova/Sovereign/Akira/etc., just visible under the near end of the phaser strip on the nuddy pic.

The rest of the saucer is a tangle of colored wireframes that's a bit confusing even for me, but here goes. From the outside of the saucer in, the first section is in glowing red wires, and represents the outer ring service corridor as well as the lower level of the mess hall/lounge that is certainly NOT going to be called Two Forward... officially. This only leaves room for the hull itself beyond the floor and (relatively low) ceiling, so enviro equipment and as much of the gravity generation gear as can be physically located to one side must be. Inside of and overlapping that by a couple of meters is the mid-deck proper, with Starfleet-standard 50cm equipment space in the floor and 3-3.5m ceilings dependent on the height of the saucer. This is a half-height off from the nominal two center decks in gold (above) and purple (below), though most of these are taken up by the workshop, holodeck, and computer, since those are kind of cramped even at double height. There are a couple of meters worth of space outboard of the holodeck and computer, though, at least enough space for the holodeck support equipment and some replicator supplies storage.

I can only guess that Voyager was barely carrying any stores when she got tossed to the Delta Quadrant (and that the stuff that kept breaking down and needing repair or replacement was due to the heavy damage sustained and only shipboard resources to repair it with - not ragging on V. even slightly here, her bare cupboards and engine room held together by spit, duct tape, and baling wire aside she got her crew home as safe and mostly intact as any Enterprise we've seen despite everything the Kazon, Borg, Neelix's cooking, or Brannon and Braga could throw at her) because on paper an Intrepid is supped to have a three year cruise duration without resupply, and I want to at least semi-plausibly duplicate that for a crew of 6-10 if not the nominal maximum of thirty.

I think this is the first time I've posted something with a good view of the big double-door over the warp core ejection port as well. They're held shut by explosive bolts normally and propelled open by a charge when needed, then the warp core goes shooting out powered by magnetic linear accelerators in the rails that support it. Doing this out the aft end of the ship rather than sideways to the direction of travel has always made more sense to me, as it means you're moving as fast as possible away from the immanent explosion, get a little boost from tossing it in fact, and it's not subjected to shearing stress on the way out to make it get jammed or worse, break up against the hull.

"Mou, don't stare at my aft sempai! It's embarrassing!"

But it's such a beautiful, shapely aft! Who with a soul could look away!?



* See also the "footbridge" I built IRL ca. 2004 that was fine having a pickup driven over it and was the only span still in place after a flood rolled through town in 2006, no fucks given about having been submerged in the direct path of the river and having boulders and cars etc. washed past and over it for a couple of days after one bank eroded out from under it - the other end was still in exactly the same place aside form having tipped town into the riverbed like a hinge. After being cut in half and hauled out, it was later made into a deck and the foundation/floor of a shed for storing lawn tractors and groundskeeping equipment.

[classicdrogn]

I spent most of the day looking at Art Deco stuff, then made new nacelle housings (the internals are still the same.) They don't glow as much or from as many angles, but they're better at looking Deco so that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. Also, they have a Starfleet swooshy logo! Yay? I threw some fake windows on basically at random as well, since I made a boolean opbject for TNG-style 18 x 72 inch tall ones, plus a double-width ersion for the mess hall windows, and something TOS like for the pylons and rollbar since a tall window would get in the way of the equipment in the walls, and round shapes are also Deco so it's fine. I'll probably add some on the saucer as well later to mix it up a bit.

The two windows on the rollbar are there for the benefit of brew who have to climb up in there to do stuff, such as maintain the aft RCS cluster or work at the console in the access corridor for some reason, so they don't get all claustrophobic. Or just to get some privacy and be able to play music no one else likes I guess, since it is a tiny little ship and habitable space is limited.

[ECSNorway]

Looking good!

A question, are all those details actually molded in, or are they just textures applied to the existing faces?

Like, if we were to feed this to a 3-d printer, would the windows show up as actual depressions or the like?

[classicdrogn]

Thanks! Right now, the windows would show up as extrusions - they're just the objects I made to use as a boolean cutter, not actually done because I'm still messing with the hull geometry in more or less subtle ways. There are no textures applied, mainly because I'm a dilettante dabbler who fails at anything without immediately visible results, like spending an hour going back and forth between Blender and GIMP tweaking an image map just so after spending another hour already on getting a UV unwrap that's vaguely close to sane, and often run out of enthusiasm for a project before it gets close enough to final to start bothering with that to begin with. Somehow manually tweaking the model one vertex at a time like it was still 1991 doesn't bother me, though, like the four or five days I've spent adding, reshaping, and repeatedly shrinking each shaft of the frame instead of doing something sane like making it as a wire frame effect on a single large object. Mind you, I just kicked myself for not thinking of that before now, but until five seconds ago it didn't even occur to me to complain about the effort sunk into it. Eh, what can I say?

The sensor pallets would really be better using image maps for their low-relief details I'm sure, but instead I hauled out a copy of Blender 2.49b from ten years ago to use the long-vanished Discombobulate script (which had to be run in WINE since I don't have a functional 'Doze machine any more and the Linux version didn't want to run for reasons I'm not guru enough to gain enlightenment about, meaning that it takes about half a second of holding the cursor absolutely still after a click before it actually registers, as a click on whatever the mouse is over THEN) to make a bunch of modeled greebles on one face each of 64 cubes, then "gently caressed" for an interminable period cutting them all apart afterward.

Probably I should just get over it and spend five seconds to at least whip up an aztec pattern (what goes by that name in the fandom, anyway, which does not involve anything historically aztec as far as I can tell) bump/specular map to give it the classic Trek hull plating look, but eh. Later. I'll probably end up physically modeling the huge stained glass ceiling I saved several inspirational photos for during my deco image hunt too, and the geometric patterns for the bridge carpet and various doorways. Long-scout crews get a little stir crazy after a while, you know, and as long as it's still functional Starfleet is effectively post-scarcity so doing home improvements to the ship's interior is hardly the worst collective hobby they could develop. On our side of the screen, well, at least I'm not hanging around on the front step with my pants on sale (Now 40% off! Act now on this limited time offer before being arrested for public indecency!) looking sullen, right?

This may end up being the most deco starship anyone's ever seen, even if it's not all that Starfleet-y. Picking out the images below was certainly fun, though.


Current top candidate for the captain's chair and anywhere else I can get away with using it on the Sea Swallow, just make the blue lighter to match her trim stripes and either extend the armrests so they can house an LCARS display on either side or (preffered) add some kind of swing arm arrangement that doubles as roller-coaster style restraints to keep the crew in their seats when the ship gets knocked around, like on the Excelsior.


and non-armchair seating, modified with a curved and finned support like the armchair but turned 90 degrees (from the front-ish under the seat down and up to the back)


and the bridge carpet


and the bridge dome, design doubled rather than centered against a wall
(may also include a chandelier of some sort or another.


and the main viewscreen

https://i.imgur.com/Oo5v5fG.jpg - large console inspiration, to be modified into the traditional two-place flight control/tactical station
Wood colors should probably be more this darker style if not replaced outright with metal and plastic in the later Deco/Art Moderne style. I dunno, light and medium toned wood does look pretty.

https://i.imgur.com/8Ap24ZB.jpg - One of many patterns for double doors, such as the bridge turbolift access. Mirror this with the circle centered for the other panel. Probably painted on the doors rather than actual stained glass.

https://i.imgur.com/NN2KTjb.jpg - pattern for small free-standing consoles, again with the armchair-style finned support. Integrated display optional and/or fold-away.

https://i.imgur.com/4jFOgvL.jpg - general shape for the wall consoles, plus screen and fold-out control console. The console surface would fold down rather than up, since it is essentially just another display screen.
https://i.imgur.com/nDu7zlq.jpg or https://i.imgur.com/sUSywbv.jpg - wall/console screen frames

https://i.imgur.com/nAKyeN2.png - Stools for wall/free standing consoles, also the bar in Too Forward

https://i.imgur.com/jJQFGTP.jpg - Too Forward kitchen
https://i.imgur.com/hNkzgFA.jpg - and non-bar seating
https://i.imgur.com/907n3eY.jpg - and couch, if it will fit
https://i.imgur.com/A7VPOKF.jpg - small table(s)
https://i.imgur.com/1wGuVAa.jpg - large(er) table(s)
https://i.imgur.com/KBUZP3v.jpg - double top table
Both square tables should have finned supports as well

https://i.imgur.com/UNutZZE.jpg - Captain's desk, almost
https://i.imgur.com/cwTvlME.jpg - front has a scallop pattern like this
https://i.imgur.com/Q9UAPgZ.jpg - top surface has a panel centered to hide a display instead of four equal segments
https://i.imgur.com/e68CeGA.jpg - it's like the window here, and a (lit?) wall feature like that is to be included behind the ready room desk, facing outward toward the actual windows and the guest seating, probably the armchair pattern again with the added LCARS. Maybe cabinet doors or lit alcoves for books/mementos/ship models/kitch?

https://i.imgur.com/towAn8z.jpg - CMO's office (but not this color)
https://i.imgur.com/duUjitt.jpg - Bio-bed

https://i.imgur.com/MIXwfsc.jpg - replacement Main Engineering "pool table" console, again with finned supports
https://i.imgur.com/qJqYgJs.jpg - a second option for that,; it would need a thicker, opaque top to hold the displays etc.

https://i.imgur.com/j7IMvtb.jpg - one possibility for a bed with integrated light and personal storage space, though this looks like at lest a double, so it might need to be narrower like I mentioned in a previous post. Add latching cabinet doors to keep everything secured when the ship gets tossed around.
https://i.imgur.com/YxNdG7q.jpg - add clothes drawers or a wardrobe and this could be the dressing area at the foot of the bed. Empty corners where circular furnishings meet square rooms could be filled with floor lamps or plants, be they real or fake, etc.

I also collected too many bedroom, wall paper/art, and bathroom type images to even link, most of which would need more significant modification than these to fit anyway.

edit: so after linking all this stuff manually, I went and made it into an Imgur album.
https://imgur.com/a/2M9A6
Meh. I'm going to keep linking things manually as well as adding them to the album because they don't work with scripts blocked, as is my default browsing practice.

[classicdrogn]

Shameless dobule post for funnies: the ghost monsters on this stained glass piece almost look like starships already.... I may just include some here and there!


Source

[ECSNorway]

I love the art deco look for this. Great choices of images.

[classicdrogn]

Since the momentum is in that direction I'm currently working on the bridge, having fiddled with the carpet pictue and cloned some areas to make it square with the focal point (well, the round part of the musical note, but it's the obvious place for the captain's chair) closer to the center and imported it on a plane since Blender has a no-massing-around import addon for that, and now I've given it a big old sun-hat of a domed ceiling which I'm about to start cutting up and recoloring into the sunburst pattern. To that end, I found a couple better images of the Buffalo NY council chamber roof, in these blog posts:

http://ithacan-alwaysintrepid.blogspot.c...azier.html
https://jazzerstenhdr.wordpress.com/tag/stained-glass/

They've got different sky light conditions that bring out diferent details in each image, and there's lots of other pretty snapshots on each post so I'll just leave the links here.

I'll see about rendering it when I finish or get tired and stop for the night, though the foward end looks a little tight around the viewscreen at the moment since I haven't cut up the floor plane to lower it from the highest, aft platform level. The dome fits into the space much better than I feared it might and looks good even bare, so plenty of cheer around here.

edit: A third source has one that's even better for my purposes, but not quite as pretty overall: http://bluedharma-blog.tumblr.com/image/48668976263

[classicdrogn]

HOLY CRAP JUST LOOK AT THIS THING!



Modeled the stained glass bridge dome and surrounding ceiling... which doubles the poly count of the entire model, at 200k for it alone. It also really needs a texture map for red/yellow streaky glass instead of solid orange, but I hate doing texturing so maybe later. I kind of want to use it for the deflector dish just so it can be on camera more...
Also, the dish of the Connie-refit flying around the front corner mmmight be the top emitter of a transporter pad. Maybe. Not totally sold on having one right on the bridge, really.

[robkelk]

...
Also, the dish of the Connie-refit flying around the front corner mmmight be the top emitter of a transporter pad. Maybe. Not totally sold on having one right on the bridge, really.

It's a small ship - where else are you going to put it?

[classicdrogn]

In a proper six-place transporter room, of course. The whole point is that it doesn't take much hull to hold all the standard hero-ship sets and regular cast, with a set of variable holocrew to be in the background of shots or redshirts. Just having the nod to the most iconic ship is enough reason to include the geometry of course, it's only whether to give it an actual function that's in question.

[robkelk]

it's only whether to give it an actual function that's in question.

Hmmmmm... The Animated Series showed a phaser defense array on the ceiling of the bridge, as an anti-intruder measure. Just saying.

[classicdrogn]

Heh, there'd certainly be worse things to have at your back than a friendly Constitution class. It could also be a holocummunicator as seen on the DS9 Defiant and an Excelsior refit to that era's technology. I'm still unsure; it is conveniently adjacent to the possibly-Operations-possibly-Tactical side of the big dual console and also to a side-console location not yet further defined that could be the other of either of those or Engineering or Science, any of which would be logically suitaed to running a transporter. I got distracted into a wiki-walk on Memory Alpha cataloguing the various canon bridge consoles and shipboard rooms but did plan the bridge floor layout before that even if actually getting the boolean tool to work to cut out the layers was being tetchy for some reason. It's not quite the standard redressed-redressed-redressed-redressed-TOS bridge set, obviously, and the layout is moderately asymmetrical due to following the carpet patterns - the captain's chair is on a small dias on the highest, rear platform level with a curved railing in front of it to keep people from falling off into the two-steps down area with the double console; this is for the captain to lean on dramatically after standing from their chair to react about a situation or talk with someone on the main viewscreen etc. There may or may not be a standing console or two on the railing as well. The double as mentioned is in a section that's two steps down from that, and also offset slightly to port (left when facing forward) to match the circle defined by the arc in the tail of the musical note of the original rug image.

Eh, I should just get it modeled and show a picture rather than try to describe it.

On a different note, among the information I've soaked up while messing around on the internet researching visuals is that the Excelsior is in fact not Deco style, but the successor Streamline (or Art) Moderne, which my original idea of what to rip off for interiors (falke2009's Nova Class Refit series of images, such as the bridge) also fits decently well. The difference in shapes is mainly that Streamline emphasizes the horizontal rather than the vertical and uses many more curves rather than Deco's cubism-derived angularity, and less fiddly details in general. Aside from feeling justified about adjusting the materials from woodgrain to solid colors and metals I'm not going to change course again, though, and Streamline Moderne is usually rolled into Deco now anyway though at the time the split between the designers involved was apparently quite vehement. Sadly, changing the interior styling so much in that respect means I pretty much have to go with the horrifically poor LCARS interface design in order to maintain some visual continuity, though I can at least probably get away with replacing the font.

Here's a blog post with a couple of images that summarize the characteristic traits of the two architectural styles, though they tend more to the differences than the commonalities:
http://www.dieselpunks.org/profiles/blog...hic-primer
Not mentioned in the Streamline Moderne image is that it pioneered the wide adoption of big walls of glass blocks rather than more traditional windows.

Also, mushroom leather is due to arrive on the market soon. Just thought that was interesting.

edit: SHould I make a joke with a bonsai tree in the Ready Room that ahs a little sign reading "Arboretum" or make an honest attempt at fitting in a small hydroponics bay? There's definitely no room for the big spaces seen in thre or four eps total of TOS and TNG combined, but "Airponics" (so called despite clearly having the plants in soil on the lower level shelves and it being among the requested supplies when Kes was setting it up) was farily prom,inent in Voyager, and I do still have the tentatively-labeled Aux Cargo 2 or some of the reduced-headroom/sloped floor spaces left by the shaper of the saucer... or on either side of the Excelsior-style deflector dish for that matter.

[classicdrogn]

Well, I've got the bridge and ready room roughed out, though the only thing that's even close to a final version is the bridge floor. Want to hear something mad? I actually had to shrink the bridge because I had more consoles than I could find a use for installed... and even now, you'd only see the bridge fully staffed on a red alert, I expect. Unfortunately, that means my awesome stained glass cieling is now too big to fit, and due to the done-inside-a-platter shape it can't just be scaled down either. For now, it's back to the plain beige (or glowing gold in the wireframe view) for that, because I don't have the will to recreate it yet. Anyway, piccies!




Even with just the rough blocks and dudeslabs and the unusual layout, it still recognizably looks like a bridge. And that's awesome.


Ahead warp factor eight, Mr. Slab!

[robkelk]

Those bridge consoles looked to me at first glance like EMC disk arrays... but only at first glance.

[classicdrogn]

They're all the same, the sideboard cabinet I picked out as a pattern for the forward double console after being modified a bit to get rid of the big drawer, move the trim around, and be generally wider and on a narrower base, then scaled to fit the other positions. They are remarkably not-console-y at any more than the briefest passing glance, but I wanted to block things out before putting in a lot of effort on them. Considering how much time I put into that ceiling that is now unusable, it seemed like the thing to do.

edit: I only just realized that the paired doors look like cubist Hatsune Miku. Huh. Eh, I have so many stained glass door panel images I may well be able to use a unique pattern for every set of them on the ship; one vocaloid ref isn't going to breach my warp core.