Just as long as the ship and shuttle don't wind up being about the same size like in the original canon episode, you can do whatever you want.
If it were me and I were going to go with a figure that wasn't of my own determination, I'd go with Shaw's 1067'. Why? Because he has posted a great deal of that analysis here in this forum so I am (somewhat) privy to the processes of how that figure came about.
That's what I was thinking. 1080' is only a 14% increase over 947', but oh what a difference those fourteen points make for notoriously tight spots. I'm not a 36 degree absolutist, but there are many other locations on the Enterprise where 1080' makes more sense, like the shuttle hangar and fitting two reasonably-spaced decks into the saucer rim.
Agreed; for the shuttle bay especially, but also if it will help the rim of the primary hull make a little more sense, as Prof. M. suggests.
I'm off work starting Thursday of this week and I hope to take advantage of the downtime to try re-scaling this baby, probably to the 1080' measurement. I'll see how that works with the hangar deck interior and the saucer rim and proceed from there. I also hope to make some progress on the Grandeur, which is LOOOOONG overdue for an update. Maybe by next week I'll have something new to show for both.
I have silly question to throw in here... If you decide to make the TOS-era Starship Enterprise a full 1,080 feet in length, (or whatever measurement you decide to settle on) does that decision also say something about the dimensions of the TMP-refit Starship Enterprise as well? Would she also be the same length, or would she be proportionally different? Or would you not want to touch that issue?
I'd think that the TMP-refit would be mostly irrelevant, since the idea here is to only rationalize the TOS-era ship somewhat (which I'm totally behind!). I'd leave the other issues to whomever wants to make a refit of Vektor's Enterprise .
you could try making the diameter of the original saucer section the same as the refit, and see how much that scales up the entire ship. It would make the actual refit in universe make more sense as well.
Well, the Holiday vacation was a bit busier than I expected and I din't get as muh done n my varios 3D projects as I had hoped, but I did manage to make the followig bit of progress: Obviously, this is one of the bussard collectors, or nacelle domes, or whatever the heck you want to call them. Personally, I'm not that fond of the whole bussard concept as it pertains to Trek ships but I guess we're stuck with it at this point. I have to admit there's some influlence here from the new movie Enterprise, especially an unused concept shown in the Art of the Film book that was published late last year wherein the dome itself is actually a forcefield rather than a physical object. The idea made a lot of sense to me so I decided to steal it. In my opinion, those domes have always presented a problem as they tend to detract from the ship's sense of scale. I think the eye intuitively rejects the idea that something so large could be made of a single piece, as if it popped out of some gicantic mold, and still be structurally sound. This seems to be something the designers of the new Enterprise struggled with as well and I find it interesting that the final version is more like a lattice-work with faceted panes. However, I disagree with their decision to all but eliminate the internal lighting effects and change them from reddish-orange to a faint flicker of blue. I will say that the forcefield dome idea is not completely set in stone. It's almost more of a semantic distinction as the physical dome really doesn't look all that different aside from the glow around the edges. The rotating blades and other mechanics behind the domes help to bolster the sense of scale regardless of what the domes themselves look like. One advantage to the forcefield concept, though, is that you do get a clearer view of the internals when the engines are powered down, which I think looks pretty cool. Opinions?
Very sweet! I'd love to see an animation of the domes flickering into existence and solidifying as the internals spin up. And I like the idea of them as fields rather than solid castings, although I've never really felt they 'de-scaled' the ship - I just figure in 200 years, we'll have the technology to make such a casting with none of today's practical limitations. But I agree that the concept of them as 'collectors,' and yet seeming to be solid, never really scored for me, either.
I'm actually planning to do something like that, though I'll need to set aside a significant chunk of render time for it. That final image with the forcefield activated took almost five minutes to render with its diffusion effect. At that rate, a ten second animation would require nearly a full day. I really need to see it in motion, though, to decide if I'm completely satisfied with the effect. Fair enough, but for me the visual realism is not really helped by such rationalizations. I look at the solid domes and I still see something that looks more like a part on a scale model than a full-size starship. By the way, as an interesting aside, it's amazing what uses you can find for seemingly mundane texture maps. The patterned texture behind the rotating blades that lights up pinkish-orange is actually... a tire tread bump map.
I love the idea of the dome being a forcefield... besides being a really cool idea conceptually, it also neatly solves the "how can it be that big?!" problem. Even though I agree that someday we'll have the tech to fabricate large-scale components like this (hell, we already can to some extent -- look at the fuselage of a Boeing 787!), it just doesn't look "right" to our early 21st century monkey eyes. You can't leave us hanging Vektor--we've gotta see that animated startup sequence!
That looks fantastic! I'm not fond of the third image with the forcefield, though. I like the second image where there is clearly an energy field active behind the mechanics in the dome. The forcefield simply occludes the cool mechanics you've designed. The second image presents a true alternative to the blurry, swirly bussard collectors we're used to.
I showed these to a co-worker of mine and he made much the same comment, that it was a shame to obscure all those cool looking details with a blurry forcefield. However, without the dome, it looks too much like something isn't there that should be, and it's a more radical departure from the original design than I want to make. I might try decreasing the diffusion effect so the internals are more visible, but being able to see all those parts and pieces and glowy bits was never really the intent. I only went to that amount of effort because the concept of the dome as a forcefield that isn't always on required there be something behind it worth looking at, however infrequently.
By the way, is anyone still thinking the spikes on the nacelle domes look "hokey?" Personally, I can't hardly imagine this ship without them anymore.