Mech's Assorted Trek Stuff (mostly 3d models, some art)
- Thread starter Mechworks
- Start date
Sprouting Escape Pods like mushrooms ha
As part of the blockout I am making sure that the ship actually has not only enough escape pods for all the crew, but also that said pods are reasonably accessible from the main inhabited areas of the ship. So some poor redshirt isn't stuck having to run halfway across the ship and up three decks to reach the nearest bank of the things. (each of those pods is a Survival Box rated for four people and up to 5 months on standard ration bars. Granted, that's mostly Starfleet being understandably generous with the time margin; it's unlikely you'd have to wait more than a couple weeks at most for rescue. Certainly being stuck it what is essentially a small bedroom with three other people, no privacy whatsoever, and nothing but emergency ration bars to eat is not an experience any spacer wants to endure very long... but it sure beats sucking vacuum!)
Got a good bit of the flag deck done ha.
and some other things...
like turbolifts, the shuttlebay, cargo bays, machine shops, main engineering, the aft torpedo room...
Obviously, the big pink cylinder in main engineering is the warp core. her antimatter pods will be just forward of that, hydrogen storage will likely be forward of her aft torpedo magazines as part of her impulse complex. (a lot of the saucer is given over to big cavernous spaces like her all-hands briefing room, the pool, and so on. (yes it has a swimming pool. Because Starfleet.)
As part of the blockout I am making sure that the ship actually has not only enough escape pods for all the crew, but also that said pods are reasonably accessible from the main inhabited areas of the ship. So some poor redshirt isn't stuck having to run halfway across the ship and up three decks to reach the nearest bank of the things. (each of those pods is a Survival Box rated for four people and up to 5 months on standard ration bars. Granted, that's mostly Starfleet being understandably generous with the time margin; it's unlikely you'd have to wait more than a couple weeks at most for rescue. Certainly being stuck it what is essentially a small bedroom with three other people, no privacy whatsoever, and nothing but emergency ration bars to eat is not an experience any spacer wants to endure very long... but it sure beats sucking vacuum!)
Got a good bit of the flag deck done ha.
and some other things...
like turbolifts, the shuttlebay, cargo bays, machine shops, main engineering, the aft torpedo room...
Obviously, the big pink cylinder in main engineering is the warp core. her antimatter pods will be just forward of that, hydrogen storage will likely be forward of her aft torpedo magazines as part of her impulse complex. (a lot of the saucer is given over to big cavernous spaces like her all-hands briefing room, the pool, and so on. (yes it has a swimming pool. Because Starfleet.)
it's also really useful for inducing design constraints; I've already had to redesign the main saucer escape pod banks three times since the basic ones were mocked up early and subsequent design decisions have made it impossible to fit them in that specific location, and such. and as noted, escape pods are doing some serious work on filling "empty" real estate with greebling, just from the decision to have enough for the crew---because that means having MANY.
just her standard officer corps is 75 bodies, between senior staff and the junior officers. Then the flag deck alone is another good sixtysome personnel if it's in full operation, on average...
and yeah, I'm a hella pendant, but dangit, I wish more people did the Firefly thing and actually mapped out a ship's internals in relation to its exterior.
some paint, and she's got Impulse now. (incidentally, that little metal bit coming out the bridge isn't just a random greeble---it's a turbolift shaft! specifically, the one that goes over the shuttlebay.)
Also the questers elected to develop better Phase and Plasma cannons instead of going for classic Phasers, so they have unironically managed to inject some Kelvin Timeline Energy into this AU ha.
(yes I actually think about the sound effects. those are very important
)She's starting to look like a Starship, ha!
(granted she's still missing her torpedo launchers and in need of much greebling yet, but we're getting there!)
Yet More Escape Pods TeeEmm, plus the main airlocks for underweigh use.
also...
she's starting to fill up, all right.
(yes that is an entire regulation size Olympic pool, and those are movie theaters. These things are downright luxurious in terms of amenities.)
Also fun facts, it carries eight torpedo launchers (2 aft & 6 fore), 12 plasma cannon batteries, and 16 phase cannon batteries. So, it's doing the usual Starfleet thing of being a luxury cruise liner clipped into a battleship and somehow doing both actually well rather than badly the way basically everything from the Ambassador on is, only way, way sooner, which I find completely hilarious.
(granted she's still missing her torpedo launchers and in need of much greebling yet, but we're getting there!)
Yet More Escape Pods TeeEmm, plus the main airlocks for underweigh use.
also...
she's starting to fill up, all right.
(yes that is an entire regulation size Olympic pool, and those are movie theaters. These things are downright luxurious in terms of amenities.)
Also fun facts, it carries eight torpedo launchers (2 aft & 6 fore), 12 plasma cannon batteries, and 16 phase cannon batteries. So, it's doing the usual Starfleet thing of being a luxury cruise liner clipped into a battleship and somehow doing both actually well rather than badly the way basically everything from the Ambassador on is, only way, way sooner, which I find completely hilarious.
Deck 7: So, many, crew, cabins:
Incidentally, the big green domed bits are Arboriums, while the massive module in the foreground is the ship's aquaponics bay. Underway sustainment good! Also helps the life support and water filtration, too.
Escape pods, doing some serious work on filling space. and she's got her torpedoes now.
Incidentally, the big green domed bits are Arboriums, while the massive module in the foreground is the ship's aquaponics bay. Underway sustainment good! Also helps the life support and water filtration, too.
Escape pods, doing some serious work on filling space. and she's got her torpedoes now.
getting closer... probably about 2/3rds filled in at this point.
("wait," you say, "only two-thirds?"
well yes, Deck 6 is basically untouched at this point, the saucer substructure and engineering hull are also in need of filling, lots of Deck 5 and a significant portion of Deck 4 still need to be filled in, and of course there's still a number of fiddly details here and there that need filling in (for example, presently the aft dorsal phase cannon rooms are inaccessible, since I haven't put the corridors in yet to reach them.
Definitely starting to look a proper Starship now, heh.
Admiral Archer said:
She looks pretty good, now that thy pylons are properly shaped and she's got her stripes on.
But wait, there's more!
Full deck plans! for only half the decks, granted. (admittedly Deck 8 is basically just some stairwells, and Deck 12 exists pretty much entirely to serve the ventral plasma cannons in her engineering hull and for that section's Heads, and Deck 7 is the last of the gigantic saucer decks. But still.)
Full of Stuff, she is. (you can assume "empty" spaces have big chunks of machinery, like her lateral sensor arrays, that aren't accessible from the pressure hull.)
Just a little guy:
The Space Minivan to the Type One's Space C-130. Needed to build this guy because the next ship on the docket probably isn't going to have the volume for real shuttlecraft, and we needed to again make sure physical dimensions make sense.
(it's still big enough you can cram like 10-15 people in it (if not especially comfortably), or a couple of Starfleet Standard 1.25m shipping pallets, but it's definitely not big enough for any kind of real independent operation for more than maybe a couple of days while landed somewhere with breathable atmosphere. Certainly they're a couple of generations from the Class F and its independent warp capability!)
The Space Minivan to the Type One's Space C-130. Needed to build this guy because the next ship on the docket probably isn't going to have the volume for real shuttlecraft, and we needed to again make sure physical dimensions make sense.
(it's still big enough you can cram like 10-15 people in it (if not especially comfortably), or a couple of Starfleet Standard 1.25m shipping pallets, but it's definitely not big enough for any kind of real independent operation for more than maybe a couple of days while landed somewhere with breathable atmosphere. Certainly they're a couple of generations from the Class F and its independent warp capability!)
Oh, and in case you're wondering, I envision the Shuttlepod with 2-in-front, 1-in-back three-point landing gear, with the back end being a big square dealy that is behind the two middle panels, and the front ones being your classic space lander round foot that unfolds from the angled section in the front. I may model the landing gear down (if probably not all the paneling and internal spaces) at some point, too.
But yeah, I was again going for at least a moderately sensible design, which means trying to at least have somewhat better aerodynamics than "slightly beveled brick."
(Ironically it ended up with a fair bit of Kodiak DNA, despite that design also committing the sin of being essentially a slightly beveled brick in terms of aerodynamics. The Class D at least manages to graduate to "slightly rounded brick," ha.)
But yeah, I was again going for at least a moderately sensible design, which means trying to at least have somewhat better aerodynamics than "slightly beveled brick."
(Ironically it ended up with a fair bit of Kodiak DNA, despite that design also committing the sin of being essentially a slightly beveled brick in terms of aerodynamics. The Class D at least manages to graduate to "slightly rounded brick," ha.)
The level of detail is excellent.
Don't be too impressed, the texturing is doing a LOT of heavy lifting on the actual meshes, and those are pretty much either the default textures available in the program, some very basic emissives made with the built in texture tool, or free stuff downloaded off various resource sites with, at most, some color editing. (Granted, even that did require some degree of swearing and hacky workarounds, because this is a free tool and its texture tools are extremely primitive, and actual texture handling isn't much better--a lot of the saucer upper and lower surface has to have each poly as a completely separate object just so it will stop flipping the damn shadows every other polygon and thus being terrible-looking.)
Unless you mean my insistence on making everything physically to scale and ensuring that things actually have enough room to physically fit all the systems in the hull, which, yes, I'll take that complement because that is born of way too many times I have looked at the list of systems on a scifi ship, looked at its listed hull dimensions, and just gone:
"There is no way all that is gonna fit in there, not even with Q's own shoehorn."
This is what I mean. Having done enough RPG maps and ship designs the ignoring of space is quite pervasive in fan designs
Anyway, here she is, with a few fun statistics:
(you can probably guess why that date for when they retired the last one, since a few would have been at a certain bloodbath of a battle. and definitely would have been one of the things getting its entire saucer vaporized in one shot/torn in half by cutting beams in the background.)
(you can probably guess why that date for when they retired the last one, since a few would have been at a certain bloodbath of a battle. and definitely would have been one of the things getting its entire saucer vaporized in one shot/torn in half by cutting beams in the background.)
A classic in progress:
Still needs VERY MUCH detailing, windows, et cetera; but the stately old marms of Starfleet deserve some screen time too!
The Oldest and the Newest:
Archer: Hey Trip, remember when Vulcan cruisers felt intimidatingly large?
also, slight poll, do you think I should make the armor panel bits a slightly more orangey red so the pop more? I kinda want to make them more visible.
Still needs VERY MUCH detailing, windows, et cetera; but the stately old marms of Starfleet deserve some screen time too!
The Oldest and the Newest:
Archer: Hey Trip, remember when Vulcan cruisers felt intimidatingly large?
also, slight poll, do you think I should make the armor panel bits a slightly more orangey red so the pop more? I kinda want to make them more visible.