https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/USS_Gremlin (Keep in mind that this is probably not what the U.S.S. Gremlin NCC-72927 looked like. Images like the Lotus Flower were just randomly inserted in these displays.) https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Trek_Spaceflight_Chronology Here's a link to the Memory Alpha page on the Spaceflight Chronology with a pic of the Provider class (actually two Providers stuck to each other.) It would have been really awesome if they'd used more FASA designs for these blink-and-you'll-miss-it displays. Maybe someone with a VCR and lots of patience could have found the ships on screen, but it's not like there was a usable internet in 1988 where people could blab about them and get Roddenberry all pissed off.
Well... I paint them after they're printed. The reason none of these renders have colors beyond the one hull color is because it's easier that way than trying to texture them when I don't need to. On that note, even though I rendered the romulans here in green I'm pretty determined for them to not be green, as Klingon vessels (following the TMP K't'inga scheme) are that green-brown. Not every enemy of the Federation (except the Cardassians) needs to be green.
Thanks for that information, I didn't know about either. The Spaceflight Chronology is one of my favorites! In fact, I'm working on a 1:1000 scale model of the U.N.S.S. Lewis and Clark from that book right now! (I'd post a picture, but I'm not sure what the best free image hosting site is these days...) --Alex
Sweet! If you have a DeviantArt account, you can post your art there. I'd love to see pics as I had my Spaceflight Chronology up to a few years ago. Loved that book and would love to get another copy of it. Loved those full page spreads of ships...the original Enterprise was, as always, my favorite painting in the book.
I'm taking in progress photos. Once the whole thing is finished, I'll start a thread and figure out how to post them all. Besides, I don't want to hijack this thread. --Alex
All right, in the middle of making myself more work for that proto I finished up the Wanderer. Hopefully it's scaled right, in FASA two of them came per blister, making it look a bit smaller than expected. Still, here it is. My take: Through the 2260s, the pirate Cartels out of Orion operated a motley assortment of ships. Many of these were custom builds star vehicles that could be hijacked or made to disappear from old national defense fleets of constituent Federation members. Though Orion "Rockets" began appearing at the dawn of the 2270s, it wasn't until four years later that the Orions, likely through Rigel or other deep-space hideouts, began constructing new starships of their own. This problem of anonymous pirate construction within Federation space would continue until the crackdown in the 2310s following the Khitomer treaty. The Wanderer was the most notorious of these Orion one-offs. While they weren't as successful as the later Vandal-series of starships, Wanderers in pirate hands were effective at appearing out of virtually nowhere, striking and hijacking starships with frightening success. They were the first independent starship rated at cruiser-levels of effectiveness. Starfleet first managed to get intelligence on these ships when the Orions began offering them up on the free market. In the cold-war conditions of the 2280s and 90s, a few Federation members took up the Orion offer and purchased some Wanderers for their own defense fleets. Remarkably, the QInnach of house Kor picked up many of these to support their wanderlust when the Klingon Empire cut off their supply of vessels. Remarkably the Wanderer-type would outlast the Vandals that replaced them in the 2290s. Simple enough to construct, many Wanderers could be found in Federation space on patrol duties, convoy protection, or any task that would require a cruiser-sized and cruiser-powered starship not operated by Starfleet. Though their capabilities were limited by interstellar flight regulations, they still remained a formidable ship in spite of their illicit origins.
I think I may have exhausted a lot of the ships to render for this game (And there are A. Lot. Of. Them. Hardly any stats made for them!) so I wanted to take a moment and render a family photo. I suppose there are a bunch of comic weird ships left to do if I choose. Right now I'm trying to get the game into something playable to show off.
Many of them are, I just need to sit down and paint a bunch of them (I have some Homeworld models that also need painting). I do need the break because I've been at the computer a lot, but I'm trying to finish work on the computer!
Ok! Got another abstract oddball ship that I managed to model partway. Finished it just now! There are two craft we see over the comics that, since they look so similar, I'm going to say they're a related class. Moreover the arranegement looks similar enough to the Shelly/Curry class that I'll say it's a predecessor to that class. The first space we spot them in is a pair of them in spacedock in DC issue 16, after Kirk brings back the Excelsior from successfully fending off a mirror universe invasion at the end of Star Trek 3. The second is the U.S.S. Weinstein, serving as a medical transport to deliver a serum supply to the Enterprise to further take to Chapin I to fight a plague there. My Take: Joining the Federation in the same year they attained faster than light capability (2259), the Deltans did not have much experience in developing spacecraft beyond their initial warp prototypes. It would be a decade of observing and interacting with Federation technologies before the first Deltan engineers began creating vessels of their own. The Koaya class was named after the first maritime pioneer of note on Delta IV who, coincidentally, built his first sailing rig as an experiment also. Considered a light cruiser by starfleet, the Koaya's design was emphasized more like an orbital base than a starship, with a large hangar complex laid out on the top of the saucer section and the secondary hull given over predominantly to cargo storage. Often these ships functioned best when given long-term assignments over planets, making them excellent administration and hospital vessels. The Koayas functioned well, but their facilities and capabilities were limited. After the break in hostilities and leaning into the 2300s, Starfleet planners looked at the Koaya and felt it was worthy of modernization and expansion. While the Koayas were not refitted, the class was reborn in Starfleet's Shelly-class starships, which were designed using the Excelsior as a basis.
Trying to have an unplugged day of being off the computer, so I'm catching up on painting the ships I've printed. I've got a poll over on Twitter to ask what group I should focus on. Does anyone have any requests of the models I've printed to see some focus? Quite a few have been painted already.
I did get somewhere yesterday. While I waited for anyone to entertain the polls I finished up, mostly, the TOS ships: The quality is questionable on all of these, but I did the best I could with the 3D printer I have. In a perfect world I would have gone to shapeways, but without much to lose I just decided to print them. NCC-1537 Venture (Cruiser): While the registry belongs to a "New Commando Transport" from SFB, the Venture herself is from the newspaper comics and represents one of the few visual instances of a pre-refit and post-refit Constitution side-by side. The crew is just as famous as the Enterprise crew is, given how they were regarded by their Enterprise counterparts. The Venture also has a different mission badge than the Enterprise crew, signalling that the starfleet arrowhead wasn't as universal when the comics were penned? NCC-2120 Entente (Dreadnought): Called out by name by Epsilon IX. Dreadnoughts in the game are kind of like larger cruisers... they'd use the Excelsior's large ship rule (meaning a max of 8 hit points over the Enterprise's 6) but they aren't much better than the Constitution. They also use the pre-canister FP-4 Photons, meaning you don't get an automatic success in combat and you need to pass a weapons check if a mission instructs you to fire photons. In any case, though they're a wartime class, they've degrated enough in combat power to be considered simply larger cruisers. NCC-540 Lysander (Destroyer): I don't know why I picked this one. Pompey, the usual destroyer name I choose, was given over to the Akula-class. NCC-2933 Masada (Tug): I'll let you in on a little personal history- Star Trek the 25th anniversary is what motivated me to start reading. My parents, tired of translating everything for me, told me to do it, so I did. That game has a special place in my heart (If it wasn't evidenced by going out of my way to model the Elasi cruiser). So naturally I had to do the ill-fated Masada... one of the few instances of the FJ vessels crossing the medium and jumping into another product. The Masada's "Official" Registry is NCC-293391, but of course I decided to shorten it so it doesn't extend too far beyond the Exclesior's. Orion Frigate: These adorable little frigates were a near-constant menace in Starfleet command. Projected for a pirate career expansion, a player starts with this vicious little attack frigate before progressing upward in their careers. When the time comes, I may make a mechanic for option mounts given the various configurations these ships come in. Elasi Pirate Ship: Given above, of course I had to do this. I tried to match the color as much as I could to the combat screencaps I got out of the game. The primary armament of these pirate ships is a single torpedo launcher, and they're made from scrapped Klingon vessels.
Spied a ship on Pinterest, decided to model it on a whim. The USS Arwen is the creation of SciFi4Real! I'm reaching out to him to see if he's cool for me to host this model up on Thingiverse. He's got a Facebook page with some really neat entries (though for all I know he's a regular here!) My Take: While Warp Drive is the standard accepted FTL mechanism utilized by starfleet and the major races (contrast to the Vulcan gravity curtain, the Arkenite Hyperdrive, and others), still many races had different approaches to warp power. The Vulcan ringships certainly captured the human imagination at the dawn of human interstellar space flight, and as other drive mechanisms faded into niche interest areas, Ring ships continued to feature in experimental platforms. The Arwen was one of these, built as a test program in the early 2270s with modernized starfleet technology into the Vulcan Ring warp drive. Ultimately components common to starfleet vessels were difficult to interface with the vulcan-designed ring application (due in part to vulcan stubbornness to smooth over the integration). The Arwen was taken out of service for a breif time to re-equip it with Vulcan-designed components, and the one-off went on to serve in Starfleet on specialist Vulcan missions. In spite of the one-off, two other ships were made in the Arwen's image- one produced afterward on Earth in 2284 (The USS Akron), and the other produced at Vulcan in 2285 (The USS Kroy'tich). The three ships ultimately did not present many more benefits than the rest of the fleet, but the Ring Warp system was able to bypass certain problems evident in early LN warp drives (such as occasional Wormhole formation due to engine imbalance issues). The program was cancelled in the tensions of the later 2290s, and all three ships were retired by 2320.
Honestly I don't know. I didn't look into the Gold Key comics or the TNG DC comics, even though they... may? have TMP era ships, or vessels that could fit in the TMP Era? I had the impression the gold key ones were based only on the TOS era and featured a lot of pop-culture gadgetry of the 60s. So the Enterprise would be next to a flash gordon rocket ship, for example.
I noticed that the Federation Class looks to be undersized next to the other TOS ships. Its too bad that a correctly size model couldn't be found
Well, paged through all the Gold Key, Peter Pan, and Marvel comics. Not much in the way of new craft, sadly... the Gold Key comics depict the Enterprise with rocket trails out of the nacelles. So *shrug*. I can't remember how I constructed the Dreadnought, whether I used references or not. It does re-use the same nacelles though. In all other respect its pretty on-target.