Here's my big issue. See this big undercut circling the entire ventral saucer?
At that scale, that's pretty much most of a deck high. The MSD, incidentally, completely ignores this (and gets the central portion's curvature wrong):
That deck cannot, actually, run contiguously through from core to rim. This is a problem that goes all the way back. See the
Enterprise model versus Jefferies' cutaway:
Even as recently as Drexler's cutaway, it's still missed/ignored in official sources:
But all this means that -- at full
Excelsior scale, that outer portion of the saucer lower rim has to be an extension of whatever's on the deck above, including access to it. Whatever is out there is not tied into whatever's on that deck closer to the core, on the other side of the undercut.
But if the
Buckner is scaled to the
Reliant's bridge, not only is the shuttlebay less than head height, everything outboard of the ventral saucer undercut -- that we see clearly onscreen, that being the preferred angle to show ships from...
...is not going to be easy to access. That whole saucer rim deck is barely standard height at that scale. With the undercut interrupting that, about the only way to the rimward portion will be through meter-high Jefferies tubes, or down gangways from the deck above. So anything out there will likely be only stuff that needs to be accessed for maintenance, rather than quarters, lounges, or regular duty stations. That further limits the already limited space aboard. It's a grand total of five decks. One is the bridge. One is the narrow half-oval that runs aft to the impulse engines, one is the cramped deck below the level of the rim where the lower sensor array is... and two are between those, limited to the diameter of the central portion of the lower saucer before the undercut. That's markedly less space than aboard the
Defiant at its (bad) official size, even with one more deck. Once ships get down that small, there's less and less reason to make them saucer-like -- as the
Defiant shows. The only "saucerish" portions of that ship house the forward torpedo launchers. Most of the interior layout is rectilinear.
Just like how the interior and exterior of the
Millennium Falcon were shown onscreen, but the one
cannot in actuality fit within the other, just because something's shown onscreen doesn't mean it can work as depicted. I like Adam and the ships he designed. I have them in my personal class lists. But the size of the
Buckner/
Centaur is something I will fight him on. He may have created it, but he's wrong about how big it is.
Even at
Excelsior size, it's still a smallish ship that makes a good successor to the
Akyazi for border interdiction. I, further, use the
Enterprise-B saucer for my build, with those extra saucer pods solidly purposed as shuttlebays (and have toyed with redoing the one in front of the bridge as a deflector a la the
Voyager's, albeit an earlier model).
