3D interiors in Blender

The view out of those windows must be very interesting.

 

@Nays: I have yet to decide what graphic to use on the pool table, so I might do that lol.

@The Primeval: Oh, not at all, I'm flattered to see it used.

@cardinal biggles and @uniderth: Yeah, I assume the original semicircular structure to be the Excelsior's arboretum as well, those windows are way too large to be a standard room or even shuttle control, plus they were lit a light blue as the TMP Enterprise's arboretum. As far as I can tell we only saw them from afar in ST:III and in early TNG (as the little refit was retconned in 1991 for TUC, halfway though TNG's run).

I'm assuming the Potemkin's exterior to be identical to the retconned NCC Excelsior look, with the trapezoidal shape instead of the arboretum. Indeed all the LCARS and the MSD I did for its bridge has this shape.

I thought about expanding shuttle control all the way to the aforementioned trapezoidal outer walls, and having those external windows as part of the model, but they don't align with the decks at all. Assuming Kuhn's model is accurate (which from what I've researched, it is in this particular area), each window row is approximately 2 meters apart from each other, and thus the 3 window rows are located in a space that only fits two decks. Because of this, I chose to leave shuttle control as an internal room, and leave the issue of those misaligned windows for another time. I've been reading up on @Praetor and @yotsuya's work regarding the Excelsior and its layout, to try and be as accurate to their well researched findings as I could, and their findings likewise support the idea of having only two decks there, at least if we go by the canon size for the ship.

Here you can see how the shuttlebay fits into Kuhn's model. On the side view you can clearly see what I meant regarding the window misalignment.




Some more progress done on the shuttlebay itself. The ceiling received a lot of attention, with the support ribs now extending all the way to the central structure, and light sources further detailed all along. I've also added in the rail for the two tractor beam emitters. The logic being that one would move to the central position when a shuttle is about to land, to help with the final approach. Then once the shuttle is ready to be moved to its storage position, the emitter would accompany it along the opposite rail in order to always have a clear line of sight over the shuttle.

Shuttle control also got an overhaul, with a new window in place, more in line with the Enterprise-D's shuttlebays, among several other smaller changes.

Finally, I've started adding back the textures to the shuttles themselves. The Type-15s are still blank, but the Type-7s got new markings with the Potemkin name and registry, plus new names. Shuttlecraft 01 got named Sorensen after Jeff_the_Sloth (aka @Nays); former Stage 9 dev who as mentioned before helped me recover some of the assets used here; and Shuttlecraft 02 got named Kuhn in recognition of Chris Kuhn's amazing model which was instrumental in starting this whole project.

 

One thing that I feel like is missing is some way to get shuttles in and out of the bay other than the doors. It looks like the space below might be too thin for a Type 7, but Type 15s or older shuttles might fit. From a 'real world' cost perspective an elevator or door might not be too hard to fake.

 

Excelsior class starship was in the game Star Trek Elite Force II. You watched those location?

 

@The Librarian: Yeah, as mentioned in post #1633 there unfortunately just no space below or behind the shuttlebay for that. As @cardinal biggles's point out the space just ends up being unusable for that purpose once you factor in the outer hull thickness and the space between decks.



The Type-15 shuttlepod does enter but there's less than a meter left of clearance, and no shuttlecraft would fit in there, not even the older TMP era ones; those are just as tall as the Type-7. Only the Defiant's Type-10 and Type-18 would fit.

My alternative for shuttle maintenance is that that's located at the very bottom of the ship, inside the empty area behind the deflector dish. The area is kept at 0g and shuttles are taken there externally; if they can via their own power, if not using the ship's tractor beams to move them from the shuttlebay to shuttle maintenance. This would somewhat explain the lack of doors there, it's not meant to be continually used, just to repair massive damage to shuttlecrafts. Day to day maintenance is done on the main shuttlebay deck.

@The Primeval: Yeah, but as much nostalgia as I have for the USS Dallas, its levels were designed with 0 considerations as to the internal layout of the Excelsior. The shuttlebay there is a simple boxed room with a vertical door, and two identical rooms at each side for shuttle storage. Similarly, deck 1, which should only feature the bridge and perhaps a few rooms, has an entire corridor system, crew quarters with huge windows, and even a transporter room.

I've finished the front wall of the shuttlebay, adding in panels and recessing the access doors somewhat, all similar to details from TNG. I moved the central line with the "VARIABLE GRAVITY AREA" text upwards a bit, to make the panels above and below it the same height. This meant that the extruded line on the sides of the shuttlebay was removed. I'm unsure at this stage if I'll redo that detail or do something completely different for those walls.

I added a 5th shuttlepod, as it easily fitted between the central two; and rotated the outermost Type-15s 90ª so that they're facing away from the side walls now. This gives them a bit more clearance to get in and out with the tractor beam.

I've also started working on the floor. Still more lines and text to add there (not to mention texture), but it's taking shape. The red markings indicate where a shuttle's access is, so Type-15s have them at the sides, while Type-7s have them at the front. Shuttles ready to launch are taxied to the central yellow area via tractor beam; while the reverse happens for arriving shuttles.

Finally, as you can see I've added the textures back to the Type-15s. I decided to name them all after Argentine space scientists, so excuse me while I list them all, I bet you never heard of them.

Shuttlepod 01 is named after Jorge Sahade (1915-2012), an astronomer who specialized in binary star systems and lay much of the groundwork for their modern understanding. He also served as president of the International Astronomical Union.

Shuttlepod 02 is named after Pedro Zadunaisky (1917-2009), an astronomer and mathematician who was a pioneer in celestial mechanics. While working at NASA's Goddard Space Center he was responsible for calculating the orbit of Explorer 1 and other early US satellites. He was also the first to calculate the orbit of Saturn's moon Phoebe, and of Halley's Comet, among many other bodies.

Shuttlepod 03 is named after Adela Ringuelet (1930), an astrophysicist who specializes in stellar spectroscopy. She founded the Argentinian Astronomical Association, and is a member of the IAU's 'Stars and Stellar Physics' division. She's also the widow of Jorge Sahade.

Shuttlepod 04 is named after Carlos Varsavsky (1933-1983), an astrophysicist who founded the Argentine Institute of Radio Astronomy, and oversaw the construction of the Southern Hemisphere's largest radio telescope.

Shuttlepod 05 is named after Gloria Dubner (1950), an astrophysicist who specialized in supernovas. A leading member of the IAU, in 2015 she lead a collaboration between 5 observatories (from NASA, the ESA and the NRAO) to better image the Crab Nebula supernova remnant.

 

I mean I always thought of the large area behind the navigational deflector as an area for smaller ships to dock, that would normally not fit in a standard shuttle bay.

If the ship answered a distress call from a light freighter, or civilian transport, they could more easily assist with repairs if the ship docked in the large bay. Or brought the damaged sections into the large bay.

 

Well.. I've been missing things..
Looks quite excellent!
as a person who has built a number of shuttle bays.. and trying to fit a square peg into a round hole...
Saying that.. Seemed like it was bigger in there.. huh.. interesting.
Have you done any measurements for that secondary bay thats behind the deflector? Can you acctually Fit anything in there?? ( I don't have an excellsior mesh currently available to check)
Doing great!

 

One thing to keep in mind with the Excelsior is that it was designed to be an experimental ship at first. You could rationalize the open secondary hull as an unfinished area that would have been closed up on any final production version. Of course, TNG's SFX crew only changed the labels before throwing it into the show and didn't address any of that...

Though this talk of the NX Excelsior makes me wonder what this bay would have looked like in the 2280s on the prototype. Maybe not too much different, just angle the graphic design towards the Enterprise-A instead of the Enterprise-D...

 

i may have missed this but, why specifically can't you put the repair facility in the trapezoidal section in from of the shuttle bay? Just slap a large door on there so the shuttles can go through.

 

@cardinal biggles: Yes, I wholeheartedly agree. The Grissom was designed with the same "be different and pretty" mentality. Still, they're some of my favorite ship designs of all time, even with all their in-universe issues, so I guess they accomplished the mission they set out to do.

@batboy853: That's a good idea, particularly considering the lack of docking ports on the outside of the Excelsior model. It
would be compatible with my previous thought of having it be a repair bay for damaged shuttles.

@valkyrie013: Indeed, quite a lot fits in there actually! It's not very deep, but the opening is very large, so quite a big number of shuttles could be there at once. A Danube-class would definitely be too big, but if my mental calculations are correct Spock's warp shuttle from TMP would fit in there quite nicely (without the nacelles attached, of course).




@Norsehound: That is true, and we have no idea what it was originally supposed to be. In fact there's no explanation ever given for it in canon. Drexler's Enterprise-B MSD has that area unnamed, it's only an inaccurate reproduction that lists it as the shuttlebay.

As to how the shuttlebay would look like on the NX version... Well if we assume the arboretum to be a perfect semicircle, I think the bay would have to be somewhat smaller due to said arboretum eating up the space currently used by the control room and by the corridor leading up to the shuttlebay. Hence the bay proper would have to be recessed at least a few meters to account for that.

Other than that, yeah, I'd imagine it to be fairly similar, just with the floor markings inspired by the TMP era shuttlebays, and perhaps even a central turntable as on TOS and the Ent-A.

@uniderth: There's just not enough room in there. A shuttle does fit, but assuming a minimum of 1.5 meters of clearance on each side, there's no space left for any other room, and there should be other rooms for those external windows to look into. If I were to add a repair facility back there, it would have to occupy the entirety of that trapezoidal section, and that just wouldn't make sense given those windows.



More work on the floor markings, I think they're finished now. I added a second, smaller yellow rectangle closer to the shuttlepods, which is where they would be placed before launch. Hence the bigger rectangle would only be used for the larger shuttlecrafts. Because of this, I connected them with the white lines only to the parking space of the crafts that are supposed to use them. I think this works.

Also, the space doors are now finally in place. They are flat with one another, just as on the filming miniature, even if this means they wouldn't really work as they're supposed to.

The ceiling now is pretty much done as well, with more lights added near the doors. I've also added a light strip on the floor, similar to that on the Enterprise-A shuttlebay. The logic is that it would light up in the direction needed when a shuttle is leaving or arriving (again, just as on the Ent-A).




Here are some quick and dirty renders of the shuttlebay as it currently stands placed inside the exterior model. Please ignore the gap between meshes, again this was just quickly put together to see how it would look.

Notice on the last image that given the weird shape of the doors you can see the shuttlebay open from an angle that doesn't let you see what's going on inside. Hence the light strip on the floor also serves as a visual guide to see current bay operations, which could be really useful in a busy drydock.

 

A small update today, as I'm taking some time to work on commissions, which I'll be showing soon.

Added back the LCARS for the control room, I'm still unsure what graphic to do for the pool table. One idea is to have a map of the shuttlebay, but it's a bit pointless considering how (unlike on the Ent-D) the entire bay is visible from the window a few steps away...

Also, I modified the existing cargo containers to create another variant from TNG.

 

Mmh, A layout of the bay could still be useful. It can easily show traffic on the bay when launching/landing shuttles, moving cargo about, cargo locations, and showing statuses of the craft docked on the bay. Id' think of it as a central operations console for all things dealing with the Shuttle bay and shuttles specifically.

It could be a kind of MSD for the bay and shuttles. It's also a counterpart to the display on the back wall showing shuttle movements outside the ship. The pool table would show all shuttle activities inside the bay.

Additionally while you do have a good view of the bay, you can't see around the parked shuttlecraft. An omniscient MSD would be able to display if crew or cargo is parked out of sight.

 

@Norsehound: Mmm, yeah, that does make a lot of sense. I'll probably end up going with a bay layout as you suggest.

Been quite busy with commissions, I have 4 small ones currently in various stages of completion, plus a few larger ones that I still haven't progressed enough to warrant showing. Still, I want to try and complete the shuttlebay, given how few pieces remain to be done.

I've added some more detailing to the side walls of the bay, inspired by similar designs from Defiant's engineering. Not entirely sold on it, but it's what I've got so far. As you can see at the left on the render, I've also modeled those octagonal containers so often seen in TNG. I was gonna model some more containers, but I think there are more than enough, I have nowhere else to place any without getting in the way of the shuttles.

 

Hot damn, @Rekkert! I've been AWOL for a minute, and I come back to see ABSOLUTE GORGEOUSNESS! Well done!

 

I have to ask, as it's been niggling at the back of my mind; is this the first example of a canon Starfleet vessel with multiple shuttlebays?

 

Miranda has two (the Soyuz variant has three). Non-canonically, some have speculated they're all connected in one big bay inside the hull.

The Stargazer seems to have a couple of suttlebay-looking-things around the perimeter of the primary hull, as does the Oberth (albeit the latter's are quite small).

 

@Donny: Only keeping the chair warm while you were AWOL.

@FormerLurker: As @137th Gebirg mentioned the Miranda had multiple before, however I don't really think the Excelsior has more than one shuttlebay. As stated in my previous comments I tend to believe that the aft doors are the only shuttlebay on the Excelsior. The weird area behind the deflector is mostly a construction/repair bay in my head canon.

Of note is that I've been reading up on my copy of the USS Enterprise's Owner Manual, and the section on the Enterprise-B states that the ship has only one shuttlebay, while the weird blue area behind the deflector is stated as being a "probe launch bay".

Been working on several commissions as stated before; I've finished the one that's been consuming the most of my time for the past week, but I still can't share it, as I'm giving my client dibs on announcing it and sharing it online first. I'll be posting it here later in the week (probably tomorrow), but its a long term project which I'm super exited for being a part of.

Besides that, I've finished another, far smaller commission: the bridge of the Ambassador-Class USS Dreadnought. This one was done for @Rusty0918. The Dreadnought was an early Ambassador (registry NCC-10593), and this is how it looks after a refit in the 2350's.

As you can see it's similar to the USS Omaha I did last month, but without the front station, and with details from the Enterprise-C brought in. Most notable are the new greebles on the aft tactical station, and the early TNG style conn/ops chairs, which I've refurbished and now look a bit more comfortable than they did before.