Thanks for posting! (Although it wasn't actually laziness that prevented me from clicking through... ) I generally love the covers Cross Cult comes up with, but I gotta say, their version of the refit Voyager (which I had actually seen before as a stand-alone image... I'm guessing on The Trek Collective?) just doesn't do it for me. It just makes the ship look ungainly and unbalanced. I'll wait for Rademaker's version.
For those who are interested in Mark Rademaker's Voyager Refit, he posted this in the Voyager section of the forum.... http://www.trekbbs.com/showpost.php?p=9764413&postcount=17
I'm reminded of the Excelsior- and Ambassador-class, with that deep drop at the rear, and the "tail". My starship-description terminology sucks, I know.
That doesn't look like it's a quick upgrade at a space dock that could last a few weeks, it's looks like a refit in the same sense as the Refit Connie and would take Voyager out of commission for months, if not a year or so.
One bit of a question, what does the Vanguard Ops look like? It's the only thing in the book that I've had a lot of trouble visualizing because the writing was a bit vague on the matter.
Considering the damage that was done to Voyager, a huge refit was needed. It wasn't completely clear how long it took in the novels, but consedering Chakotay went on his little voyage of discovery, Kim was out of commision in a hospital for months I believe, it's sort of possible. My biggest issue is still, where did Starfleet get all the resources to launch a fleet like Full Circle so short after the Borg Invasion, especially the slipstream-drives fitted to these ships. Considering Voyager came home late 2377, I find it odd to believe that within a little over 4 years, Starfleet has outfitted atleast 10 ships with this drive, including the prototype USS Vesta. We are ment to believe that appereantly you need a speficic profile to maintian a slipstream corridor, and conviently, Starfleet had 5 classes of ships available already? The Vesta class, the Merian class, the Galen class, the Mulciber class and the Theophrastus class. Considering the timeframe needed for Starfleet to figure out that slipstream needs a specific profile, then designing, developing, building and testing 5 new classes specificly for that purprose AND refitting Voyager to do the same in such a short timeframe, seems unlikely. I love Beyer's Voyager novels to death, they are fantastic. But that little tidbit is a bit hard for me to swallow.
^"Specific profile" is overstating it a bit. It's basically just that narrow ships work better than wide ships. So something lean and sleek like the Intrepid class is intrinsically better suited than something broad like a Galaxy or Nebula. Anyway, the important thing to remember is that the Federation is huge. It has the resources of hundreds of star systems at its disposal. So even after suffering huge losses in the Borg Invasion, the resources it had available in the surviving, ohh, 80 percent or so of the Federation would still be thousands of times more abundant than anything in present-day human experience. Now, when you've got billions of people to relocate and build new homes for and dozens of planetwide ecosystems to repair, even those immense resources could get stretched pretty thin; but a measly nine starships would not be a prohibitive investment on that scale.
Yesterday Cross Cult has posted a cover draft for their translation of New Frontier: Gods Above, depicting their (IMO) somewhat ridiculous M'Ress and what I guess is supposed to be Lieutenant Gleau:
I envisioned it that way: the same layout as the DS9 (I) ops, but with 23rd century Starfleet aesthetic. Plus, the central table is a big conference one, and on a raised dais.
I quite like Gleau (that's not at all how I picture him, but it's fine for a cover like this), but, yes, I agree that M'Ress looks silly. Caitians are not kitty cats. I mean, yes, they're anthropomorphised cats, but that doesn't mean you simply take a pet cat, stand it upright and plonk hair on it.
There where about 4 months to make the changes, not nearly enough to do a refit (that had to include saucer separation) in a traditional way indeed. I have a lot of bits and pieces of information that I really need to stitch together and post here. I cleared any other project and will dedicate the next 8 months to Voyager. (Unless a paid gig comes up, because I need those too.) The IXS Enterprise sure has kept me busy, but I learned so much, the Voyager refit will benefit from it.
Earlier this week Cross Cult posted a pic of Kallinda from New Frontier, to be used on the spine of one of the upcoming German translations of New Frontier books. Source
This isn't "picturing" exactly, but Star Trek Online has just introduced Season 9.5, including Xindi content. They've named the Xindi-Reptilian starship as the Contortrix class escort and the Xindi-Aquatic starship as the Narcine class dreadnought carrier. So now we've got names for those ENT ships.
Plus the Mobulai-class frigates for the smaller Aquatic vessels. Two Contortrix-class (a tongue-breaker, btw) appear alongside the Columbia-class Enterprise in SOTL 2015. Also, USS Titan approaches a Watchtower-class starbase in one of the images. Talk about picturing the novelverse! Maybe it's the starbase from Fallen Gods?