Been quietly working on this again recently, had stuff going on in my life that slowed things down, but I finally think I can call the shaping of the ship done, ow need to do a second pass to refine and add more detail s(already begun in the area behind the deflector but there are several little bits I want to improve) decide hwo I'm going to do the windows, and then port it over to blender for actual texturing. Slapped on a suuuper basic modification of a free one I'm not happy with, although the general vibe definitely works. Also just spent the last hour retweaking scle when I was putting on a couple of exterior hatches and realised they, the docking ports, and the shuttle were all wildly out of scale with each other and thats before I get to putting in windows. Bridge was a bit small too.
Deflector area is WAY mroe detailed with greeblies and pipework, plus extra grooves and layers to the main housing which better integrates everything.
The neck details were a pain in the....neck. The geometry I had did not lend itself at all to applying hul lines on the lower half of it, ended up needing to add the 'clamp' section in but I think it makes the shapes flow better even if its a bit bu;kier.
I have always liked the idea of 'landing pads' outside the shuttlebay, eiother acting as staging grounds, zero g cargo stuff, or actively lowering ships down for extra shuttle storage. At the back is a pad for slightly larger ships docking, things that are still small and might want to limpet on, maybe see small civilian ships or ambassadorial small craft - things too big for the shuttle bay but they can land there, mag clamp on, and be carried by the bigger ship's warp field - and transporters mean there's no real need to have to get an air seal.
Underneath we've got the cargo bay doors, in the scoop just like the connie, and what I imagine might be an extra set of cargo bay doors on the underside, or possibly for slotting modular sections in and out.
The same circlular patch as on the TOS connie, I'm specifically envisioning it as letting you slot the warp core (and basically an entire engineering module) out, I made sure it lines up with the impulse crystal on top.
While the ship's volume is probably actually rpetty comparable to a refit connie, the warp core is likely half the height thanks to the more compact nature.
Some textyure concept testing, not at all the quality I would want for the final look but I am not exactly practiced.
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