Not too long ago, Truespace dropped its price tag and became completely free for some reason... Well, it's not my very first model. I've got a bunch of others, but all but the most recent ones are very basic, and the older ones are pretty flawed. http://3d.merknet.com/startrek.php
Yeah, I think I mis-used the word "fantail". I just meant a more convex shaped rear, but what you've done looks great.
[LEFT]Two variations here... One with the two hulls separate and connected by a neck, and one with the two hulls connected, but with a clear break between them. Any comments? Preferences? [/LEFT]
I like the first one, but I'd thicken it up a bit. the Daedalus was a small ship, only 10 decks, and eyeballing it, it looks like one would have to crawl through.
I would have to say the second. The cantilever of the sphere in the first appears quite fragile. Later vessels could compensate for this fragility with advanced materials, structural integrity fields, and the like, but as this is an earlier vessel, you would want to look at it along the lines of the hull bearing the structural loads more directly.
I like both, but probably the first image more (but with a beefed up neck to prevent it from accidental - re: Klingon intervention - separation from the rest of the ship). The only thing that jumped out at me was the placement of the deflector dish. You may want to raise it a smidge. At its current placement, it will tear the bridge and parts of B and C decks off when activated. Just a thought. Great work on this.
I was just scrolling to the bottom to make a similar comment... It's just not very effective at it's present location. A beef I have with a lot of deflector locations on professional and fan designs.
i prefer the second, probably as mentioned earlier because of the look of frailty. a beefed up neck might look better if you went with the first look
I'm loving this new direction! Reminds me of Klaus's old steampunk rustbucket ships, those were so cool!
Looks like something crashed into a couple of other things, then flew off together. With the right texturing and detail this could be really interesting looking, very different to the usual stuff we see.
Perhaps the first one with a fatter cylindrical piece going straight from the back of the sphere to the front of the secondary hull.
Here's what I got done today... First off, I decided to stick with the no-neck design. It seemed the most Miranda-ish. I did add a new hull component to the back section to make it wider, a little like O'Krismas' idea. That pushed the engine struts further apart and angled them more. Originally they were straight up and down. I think it looks better now. I also pushed up the nav deflector. Wouldn't want to slice off the top 3 decks every time they turned it on. I replaced those Flash Gordon impulse engines on the rollbar with plain tube thingies, and put the impulse engines on the back of the new wide hull part. Minimal greebles added. I tried modeling a hatch on the side. It looks ok from this distance, but close up it got all twisted and tweaked for some reason when I imported it into Carrara. I'll try again tomorrow.
All good stuff, cant argue with the changes at all. My only niggle is that the deflector now looks like a loud-hailer from this angle.