I REALLY love this ship you've got... I love the NASA-like colors in terms of whites you're using! IDK about the "flexi-pipes" on the warp nacelles, but that aside, this is a frakkin' awesome ship.
Dude, looks frickin' AWESOME. I liked the design, and as said, wasnt what trek fans were used to. I remember looking in books of the design, and the painting of it approaching the asteroid starbase as a kid. This is sweet as though.
You've done some really nice work here. I like how you've stayed away from a lot of the Trek starship elements that we've seen a million times before. This is very much a unique take on the Trek motif. My compliments.
You also had smaller versions of the TOS enterprise with similar nacelles in your earlier posts on scifimeshes...any thought to revisiting that?
Thanks for the comments, as far as the tubes on the warp engines go, de tubes are de tubes. Maybe a refit version won't... no I can't even say that with a straight face. @publiusr - I know the model you're talking about, I looked for it but I think that was lost with a bad hard drive. I was able to find some of the models I had lost on a couple of CD-ROMs but sorry to say, not that one. Anyway, my education on the joys and perils of texturing continues. As with the wings, the secondary hull has been rebuilt due to errors that were otherwise invisible until texturing. I guess that's what I get for being lazy. But, as a result of the rebuild I think the botanical garden and the exterior of the hangar have been improved. Also the cargo bay doors and the repair bay door have been redesigned. Here's some new pics.
Wow. You've taken a design that I've always found to be rather hideous and made it beautiful. Well done!
Could you post some of the models you had lost but recovered here, so as to show a progression, as in separate ship classes? Some of the others had even more of a refit inspired look. Others looked JJ, and this actually looks TNG from underneath. Stange how timeless this design is. It could be lost years, alternate timeline, Ent -F, etc.
For publiusr... I apologize for the craptasticness that was the MK-I version (craptasticness is a perfectly cromulent word).
You know, the nacelles on the third version look pretty cool. Might be worth reusing on some other design.
This MK1 looks very awesome to me the second and third version have a awesome looking Nav Deflector Dish shape and the final version looks very 2300 to 2320 like to me and maybe possibly a test bed design made during the Galaxy Class development
Indeed, she does look like a plausible ancestor of the Galaxy class. But I think that she looks distant from maybe 50 years, judging by the lack of phaser strips, which I believe was introduced on the Ambassador class. I'm loving the delta wing body for an engineering section design. Knowing me, I'll probably end up trying to use a similar design element in a few of my sketches one of these days.
I like the MK I Tony. Maybe You could work with SMC and flesh out what a 1976 1977 Titans Enterprise would have looked like on screen. SMC has the saucer as per Ken Adam: http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=135745 But Ralph's painting has a different saucer. Flatter, rounder at the edge, with the bridge dome farther forward. Many thought this was untrek like, yet the Moonraker station reminded me of Regula I. This might be where galactica level detail makes up for lack of fluidity. I really want to see those painings brought to life. The only thing to do is to make the long narrow boxy spine taper a bit to form the narrow deflector anti-proton beam thingy to make Ralphs two paintings gel together. The Mk I is actually almost there.
Small update, just a little more texture added to the photon torpedo bay. And some work on the bridge, I'm still deciding on the bridge area though.