You might want to add bubbles inside the blue glass to give it that NX era feel, like this closeup from Doug shows pretty well. For your bussard collector, you might want to nest a dome inside of the current one and apply some Smooth love to it. I take it that the grey band is what will be the magnetic coils (yellow in later generations of Trek)? By making an outline (\_/\_/\_/), selecting all lines around the bussard and then select that outlined face with the Follow Me tool, it will move all around and give you a nice coil thingy!
Ok changed the nacelles. Definite improvement. More similar to the NX era. The impulse looks more like the pre NX era ships, including the one in the opening credits. But I prefer that look.
Looking at your engine struts, here is a tutorial you may find useful: https://help.sketchup.com/en/sketchup/softening-smoothing-and-hiding-geometry
You may want to keep in mind that aerodynamics only matter in environmental applications. A cube is as "aerodynamic" in space as a cylinder is. Force and momentum become the driving design factors in space travel. If you put a drive unit in the center of a barbell weight design, the two weighted ends will be under force to join together behind the drive. The only restraint to prevent that would be the engineering of the bar. If you offset the drive to the mass, the entire system will be under constant force to spin in circles unless you angle the drive or add in thrusters to counter it and that's just plain inefficient. A cargo ship built in the late 2300's would be an un-attractive, center line mass, center drive system with the tail section as the drive and the forward section engineered as a rectangular or cylindrical (depending on the material being moved, efficiency packing considerations) cargo container. The crews quarters would be tacked onto the outside, like warts an a cigar box. If your design doesn't need H/L pressure lift factored in (air over and under the wings) you don't need a full skin cover either. Just an engineered framework. If the ship has total, vertical lift capability (gravity cancellation) then the ship can be a cube or a sphere or any combination of primitive shapes combined. The Millennium Falcon is a good example of this. You only need aerodynamics when you have to factor in lift. If you use multiple drives, keeping them as tight to the center mass as possible is a better engineered vessel as far as thrust momentum is concerned. Look at your (imagined) science and physics developments for the era of the vessel and that will help a lot in building it.
Thank you! Definitely need that. Holy shit making those was hard. Took a long time and I dont like the resulting lines. Something to work on.
Most of the over 100 ships Ive made arent much like this one. This was driven first by previous critiques of the blockish, simple geometric shapes of most of my designs and the accompanying lack of sleekness that helps in achieving a hero-ship coolness factor that imposes itself without regard for real engineering considerations. Second was to fit the ship into a lineage with the Phoenix, Conestoga, the warpship seen in the opening of ENT and later vessels as well, like the Raven, the TOS J-Class and others. The outboard nacelle is a common feature, and the slender main body with tapered lines is for a sleeker look. The reason I am not too concerned with practical matters is that we are already accepting artificial gravity, heat dissipation without radiators, structural integrity "fields", hull polarization, far stronger building materials, and inertial dampers. The stronger building materials certainly follows from developments in material science, but some of the rest is a little tougher. Not to get into a Trek Tech conversation but I am willing to not worry too much about stresses on the nacelle and struts when under impulse.
Glad to be of help. Those look like straight-forward shapes to make so let me ask a question: Are you modeling in perspective or parallel projection mode (On Windows, under Camera on the toolbar IIRC)? I find it is easier to model things in the latter. Also, as long as I am offering unsolicited advice, make sure you have all* the toolbars turned on (View>Toolbars). I've unchecked Getting Started and Large Tool Set and I've checked everything starting with Camera and ending with Views except Google. Then I arranged the toolbars with tools down the left side ala Photoshop and views/environmentals on the top. Then View>Toolbars>Save Toolbar Position. And since I work on a large monitor, I have several of the windows (like Entity Info, Layers, Components, and Outliner) docked on the right, again mimicking photo-editing software I've used and am used to. *(well, almost all)
I find it helpfull to even move toolbars to a different screen if you have one. That way, everything is a mouseclick away while still leaving a large viewport. That being said, I model in perspective. I find it easier because I get a better grasp of scale that way.
@BorgMan Everyone is going to have their preferred workflow. I like PP because top, right, left, front, back, and bottom are orthographic views; makes working from an imported reference image a breeze. It's easy enough to switch between the two cameras to check "the look". As for a second monitor, that's where any reference materials go that are not imported. I'm also big on using layers. I will put sub-assemblies on their own layers so that I can toggle the visibility of the ones I'm not working on. I will even put guides (like deck heights) on their own layer if I intend to use them throughout the project. But to each their own. My comments are not intended to be declarations of "This Is The Right Way To Do It."
It certainly seemed straightforward. But making swept forward and up turned out to be more difficult than I expected. I drew a rectangle on the main body and a matching one on the nacelle, and just tried to connect the two. Simple. But for some reason it wasnt. Id connect the two boxes with lines, but a closed structure wouldnt form. Usually that means something isnt even. But every time I measured, it's even. Anyhow, a pain in the ass. Modeling in perspective. I'll try some of that out. Thanks!
Did not mean to sound condescending. Hmm, I think see where that went off the rails. The rectangle that attaches the wing to the hull looks like it has top and bottom sides parallel to the green axis, as seen in this post: But, based on the image below, your nacelle connection looks like it shares an edge with the tapered hexagonal front, which would not be parallel with the green axis (in the horizontal direction.) So you've introduce a bit of twist in the wing. Me, as I've said, tend to work in sub assemblies, and would have built the wing separate and slid it into place when I was satisfied with it.
Can you throw me your emailadres in a PM? I'm going to send you something that might help you out. In the mean time, if you go to the 3DWarehouse, look up some of my models. After you've downloaded, for example, the Gladius, look at the pylons and how it's all connected. I stopped doing carefully connected objects long ago when I realised the only reason to do so is when you're into 3D printing. Instead, I make an object and then make a Component out of it. This component, as mentioned before, will not interact with the rest of your model. So when you make a pylon and Component it, you can move, turn and twist it without anything else being affected. If you'd move the nacelle in your ship right now, wacky stuff will happen to your pylon. It will try hold a shape as good as possible and as a result, lines will appear everywhere. We call that messed-up geometry, and it should be dealt with swiftly. If not, you're in for a nasty surprise when you realise some parts of your model are rendering incorrectly. With seperate components, you need not worry about that!