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

[Norgarth]

in the big pic with the numbered locations,  the list goes:

6 Engineering
7 Door to Ready Room
6 Science
9 Door to Officers Country

[robkelk]

...
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.

Everything else is retro, why not the holograms as well?

[classicdrogn]

in the big pic with the numbered locations,  the list goes:

6 Engineering
7 Door to Ready Room
6 Science
9 Door to Officers Country

Yes, despite my best attempts, the eights looking like sixes at small font size is a known problem with AgameAperture, but I haven't taken the time to fire it up and flip them to straighten that out.

Also, if I only derped once while making an infographic I'm doing pretty well... of course, I also derped and left the starboard bridge access door inside the wall where it's invisible without the door cut out, so that standard was already on the edge. D'oh. My A-game has a few holes in it, that is the joke.

So yes, you are correct. Sadly, since I also linked it on a couple of places t hat can't be edited after the fact and imgur always gives a different URL when you replace an image I can't go back and fix it.

Rob, I suppose from the perspective of four hundred years on, a mere seventy or so doesn't look all that significant, but with Trek Earth having gone through a nuclear war in the 1990s that was roughly the equal of the Fallout games' setting in terms of how destructive it was, it's unlikely Vocaloids existed in Trek as such.

...

You know, that would make for one awesome crossover fanfic or RPG campaign, where the viewpoint character or PCs start off thinking they're in a post-apocalypse survive-and-rebuild situation, and they're right except that the tech enclave they will eventually be able to interact with is Zephram Cochrane's group and if they can keep him supplied with salvage and keep raiders from pillaging too much in return, the Phoenix will reach a flyable state (presumably this would be a pre-Borg incusion timeline, so no future Geordi showing up to make the last push) and bring down the Vulcan disaster relief around the world.

[classicdrogn]

Most of what I spent time doing on the model today doesn't look any different from outside - fusing the Excelsior-style hull extensions into the hull objects and adjusting the frame to match the new shape. I did completely rebuild the new nose and deflector before adding it to the hull; unfortunately the changes to the overall shape while welding it in plaxe left a few bits of the frame poking out through the skin again. Also added top and bottom sensor domes and blocks for their Jeffries access spaces, and boolean objects to cut out some nice bay windows for the rooms on either side when I eventually finish messing with the hull geometry.





Visible here are the deflector gribblies, the Deflector Control room and Jeffries access (the red hatches open vertically due to limited space, and the second level is reached via the ladder steps built into the forward wall. There are also floor hatches for maintaining the ventral sensor dome in there) and on either side a mission-configurable room that can be any of several types of lab, VIP suites, a gym with treadmills and weight machines, a hydroponics bay, etc. The starboard (top right) side has direct turbolift access, while the port has to go through the corridor to the shuttle bay or starboard room. I really like how they turned out with the curved second level and bay windows; put a privacy wall around the aft end for a bedroom, some seating and a staircase by the windows for a living area, a replicator and dining table over the frame bits sticking out of the floor, and make the inboard corner a little closet-size sink-commode-and-shower bathroom with a short entryway going past outside of it from the door(s), and it would make a really nifty little apartment depending on what was actually outside the windows. That's probably the default VIP suite layout

At the lower right you can see bits of the shuttle bay with shuttle Nyan-Lol Fung and its many stacks and racks of cargo containers. (You can't see the shuttle bay floor because it's in wireframe mode, so there's a frame member and the inside of the hull underneath them and the floor marking floating in space.) The hallway access doors that you can just see the boolean object for peeking out in between are actually slightly off center on the forward wall to allow for the max-lading stacks on either side of it since the turbolift shaft is just a bit too wide for them to fit perfectly symmetrically.

[classicdrogn]

Oh my god, I go way too far for a joke. 20 hours left rendering a silly little ten second animation to show off some bloody doors... I need a computer that has more computer in it.

[robkelk]

Oh my god, I go way too far for a joke. 20 hours left rendering a silly little ten second animation to show off some bloody doors... I need a computer that has more computer in it.

This is where you power up all of your old computers and let them render one frame each...

[classicdrogn]

This is where you power up all of your old computers and let them render one frame each...

Theoretically, yes, but I've never figured out how to get Blender to work with a networked render farm. I only have my mother's old laptop and a Chromebook that's about ten years newer but no more powerful, anyway. Regardless of that, staring at the frames updating two swatches at a time of course made me notice all the things that were wrong with it and slowly go into a frenzy wanting to fix them, as usual, so I ended up aborting the render at around frame 150 and spending the rest of the time between then and now doing a scattershot of fixes and additions here and there, I think one of which would actually have been visible

No, wait, two, because I moved the turbolift shaft as well as the vertical door between the shuttle bay and the workshop/hangar, mainly because the turbolift was what was making that squish down way too close to the matching doors into Engineering. Which I also stretched two meters longer so things would have more room on that side of the saucer separation line, except that put the warp plasma conduits on the wrong side of the nacelle pylon frame so I had to reroute them, which freed up a straight shot from the corridor over the nacelle with the airlock to Engineering that would hold a regular ship's corridor rather than just a Jeffries tube, which was good, but moving the turbolift meant I had to shorten the deflector gribblies at the front and rearrange the Deflector Control room and connecting corridor as well, which was a pain, and rebuild the shuttle bay tractor control booth, which was annoying, and then I realized I needed to rescale all three hundred or so cargo containers and oh fuck that I'm deleting them all and restacking from scratch, and so on and so on. And I put the tail back on the nyancat shuttle and switched its nacelles to match the ship's new design as well, and finished closing up the hole in the "armpits" under the nacelles, and, and, and.

And I turned the goddamn Ambient Occlusion way down because it turns out that's what makes the renders so grainy all the time, but that meant I had to adjust all the lights as well, and, and, and...

So, a frustrating session this time. At least I did get the shuttlebay ceiling/workshop floor bits all kicked into shape, and the ramp to join the floor heights between the workshop and engineering, which is also the boarding ramp if you separate and land the saucer, and I could still tell the visual joke by rendering some stills like a storyboard or comic strip I suppose.

The dolly-in through the frame worked pretty well in the bit of animation that did finish, too, and I know how I did that for later, not that it's anything but the intended effect of my standard camera rig with a parent empty and a tracked "what you're looking at" empty. The first makes for easy fly-arounds or move-to/-away by putting it at the point you want to turn around or move toward/away from and rotating or scaling, the second makes sure you never have to piss around with pointing the camera at what you want, just slap the target empty down and you're done. Very obvious when you look at or just hear about it to the point it's probably just part of the general "yeah, this is how you set up a camera to not have to dick around, didn't you know that?" knowledge base, but I only came up with it a couple years ago myself.

Meh. Rambling. Time for bed.

edit: STAINED GLASS FIREPLACE
Two Forward. It must happen. Bed. Sleepy. More incoherent than Shatner.

[classicdrogn]

Finished the pod frame finally, also added (green) deuterium slush tanks and (purple) antihydrogen ice cryo-pods, which calculating from their size and a bit off for internal volume/equipment hold 5.5 metric tons of the stuff EACH. That's a total of 160 tons of antimatter, not even counting the smaller supplies under the shuttle bay floor and in the rollbar for fueling small craft and torpedoes. Yikes!

edit: Wait a minute, no, I forgot to divide the dimensions of the AM pods by half due to working at 1:2 scale in Blender. That's one eighth the volume, or "only" 20 tons of goddamn antimatter in the back of my boat. Aiyiyi...

Consider any question about why bother with saucer separation ability answered; if your ship is crashing you do NOT want that much concentrated hate coming down in the same area, preferably not on the same planet at all, better still you drop it on the far side of a large moon or set the computer to have it try to ram your enemies as a distraction while the saucer flies away.



I also added a small impulse engine back on either side of the engineering hull, to provide emergency power and more efficient sublight propulsion with the saucer separated since I guess there are some situations where flying the two around might be useful which don't involve engineering becoming a big cloud of uncontrolled, hard gamma-spewing annihilation reactions. There's a couple of little staircases visible in the nacelle gallery corridor area; the forward one leads to the sloped transverse corridor that cuts the deuce tanks in half, while the other leads to the a-mat farm and engineering impulse drive. Next on the list to model are the capacitor banks to let the torp launcher volley fire and m/am tanks in the rollbar, then the autoloader system in the pod and maybe a transporter pad as previously mentioned, then I must risk the distraction of messing around on another session of searching for reference material on the internet to verify the size of the docking rings rather than the "that looks about right" 2.5m of the current placeholder objects.

[hazard]

20 tons of antimatter?

That's a lot of boom if things go wrong. IIRC it's something like 15 MT of TNT equivalent per kilogram of mass. So that's about 600 000 MT of TNT equivalent, going off the top of my head, if they go off while filled to the brim.

[classicdrogn]

Well, it is supposed to be a five-year supply, since antimatter is a bit harder to replace in a field-expedient manner than deuterium, which if you really have to you can scoop out of gas giants by bouncing a graviton particle beam off the main deflector dish, making sucking *it up as you wish. Really though, it's just based on the size of the block on Voyager's MSD marked "antimatter storage" figured as a minimum (three years' supply with a similar warp core but more ship to run) and then fit into the space I have available. They have to have enough power per second to go changing the laws of physics to let them go thousands of times the speed of light at least 60% of the time, probably more like 90% or higher if the ship is in "get to known destination and do things" mode instead of "stop at every star along the way for planetary scans." Then there's the whole matter-to-energy-to-matter process for transporters and replicators, which is starting with physical sources, yes, but needs enough supplemental energy that efficiency limitations don't lead to arriving missing a tenth of your body mass or burning through your supplies from losses in recycling, and that at a very generous 90% efficient which very few real-world systems enjoy. plus gravity generation, inertial compensation, deflector screens, defensive shields, weapons fire, temperature control, atmospheric recycling, running the utterly massive computer core with its own mini warp field so the optical circuits can process data faster than light, (not large in absolute terms by Trek standards since even the secondary core on an Intrepid is still a third bigger in every direction, but definitely in ratio of volume allotted to total,) lights, sensors, science gear, SCIENCE! gear, and a hundred other things.

Still, it makes those pretty explosions Trek ships make in battle sequences look pretty paltry, doesn't it? Perhaps they're simply being shown at actual size for the distances involved, while the ships themselves are magnified relative to their real positions so everything will fit nicely into a screen at visible sizes, even if that makes them look like a child's bathtub flotilla floating around within a hand's breadth of each other in terms of real distances in space. (Yes, this is my head-canon for Trek and space opera visuals in general, because as a very wise ass man once said, "Space is big. Really, really big."

There's a reason I made it so the crew could get in there and manually check the integrity of the storage cells once or twice a shift, and it's not because I think having a pair of human pachinko machines aboard looks cool. (Though I do.) No, it's because antimatter is basically the very definition of "fail-deadly" and obsessively monitored quintuple redundancy is the only way I see even close to sane about treating it, and being able to evacuate to the saucer and leave it all behind in the secondary hull is the primary justification for going to the effort of designing the ship as able to separate into two functional parts, as I mentioned above. I really would have liked to make the pods independently ejectable, but the structure of the ship just doesn't line up to allow it. Honestly, despite how tiresome adjusting the frame is, I still might go back and rebuild that part of the pylons just so it does work.

Similarly, and just to put this out there so I don't forget, there are two commands for preparing photon torpedoes in a potentially hostile situation. "Ready torpedoes" puts one in the charging chamber where it can have its m/am tanks filled and be launched in about half a second, with a second waiting on the breech tray to be rammed in and fired by the time the full second ticks over. (Phum! Phum!) These can still be pulled out and put back in the racks if you turn out not to end up shooting at each other. "Load torpedoes" fills and pre-spots up to three in the pipe as well as the one in the charging chamber so they can all be fired in a volley as fast as the first single "ready" torpedo, (Phu-phu-phu-phum!) but once this is done they must be considered as expended because there's no way to get (and be be really, really sure you got) every last particle of antimatter out of the casing to safely return it to storage. If you turn out not to have needed "loaded" torpedoes, you still have to shoot them off at asteroids or remote-detonate them in open space, etc. as a training exercise or "celebratory display" or whatever.

[classicdrogn]

In my ongoing dissatisfaction with the amount of Deco displayed by the hull of the ship, I made yet another set of nacelle exteriors, a rounded off roll bar pod, and gave the ship a Devo hat. (Also, check out that deflector dish.) The stepped look on the upper hull is nifty and it adds a surprising amount of usable volume despite being exactly the same diameter as the original domed hull, but that's because of how thick and chunky it makes the rim of the saucer, so Not Sure If Want.


Probably the best angle while wearing the Devo hat, as it shows off the added lines while minimizing the chunkiness of the saucer rim. The Excelsior style "buffet table" top island is definitely a keeper, it adds just enough space to allow Jeffries access for the main impulse drives to some poor shmuck doesn't have to go EVA and pull off the hull plating or have a workbee dangle him by his underoos in the top of the hangar/workshop while working on them overhead.

I very much want some second opinions about these mods, so sing out, eh?