Ah, thanks... I missed that. Clearly you've thought it through pretty well, yeah. That's always apparent in the designs I actually like, personally. They look good, but they also make sense (albeit with a healthy dollop of "magic" added in, since it IS Star Trek!)
Very nice... I'd seen several of those, but somehow overlooked the MSD.
The bridge is... fascinating. Clearly, the idea is that it's sort of a cross between "Stellar Cartography" and a conventional bridge, right? It can have as many "virtual displays" as you want to project into the holographic wrap-around, in whatever configuration you want... or it can "feel like a window" if you like... or it can be totally stealthed, and give you much more of a submarine feel.
It's a unique approach. Totally impractical from a filmmaking standpoint, naturally... but really extremely fun from a "Treknology" standpoint. I like it. And in a VIDEO GAME, I see no major problem with that... though the game staff might resent having to invent a whole new set of code just for your bridge!
The red-purple-blue does turn some people off.
The way I figure it the warp field grille (blue) and the bussard collector cowling (red) are both particle apertures. The blue lets certain particles out, and the red lets certain particles in. So what you are seeing is a single particle aperture with one end polarized.
I see... but it just feels "unnatural" to me.
It's the same way that I respond to the traditional "pure LED red" impulse engines. Trek hasn't always taken primary-color-LED-lighting as its basis. Look, for example, at the deflector dish on the TMP Enterprise... from unlit gray (with a slight bronze tint) to dull reddish-orange to vivid blue, depending on the energy output. And by the way, on the TMP Enterprise, the inside grills were actually PURPLE, not blue... the coloration came from machinists dye, which is purple.
So, if you have a bit of purple in there, you'll actually be far more faithful to the original TMP design, but also have the "primary color" elements of the TNG-era designs as well.
Yeah, most of my design choices are aesthetic, and I try to cover my ass with such Technobabble explanations
And as long as your choices do both... look good AND make sense... this works.
I'm often told that the shapes must be separated, but are you suggesting that the transition be more gradual? More purple?
Yes... again, comic books can be pure-primary-colors, but reality tends to be much more subtle and gradual. The more "primary-color-ish" it is, the less real it seems to be, as a general rule.
For the "cut in areas" I worked from the underside of the E:
http://www.crymod.com/uploads/mediapool/news/crysis/startrek/enterprise-e.jpg
(which is actually a raised torus)
and Spacedock:
http://www.shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=11187&start=0
(rather mushroom-like)
-but in retrospect, it's kind of a "harsh/angry" shape, which is okay, but I'd should have shot for "elegant"
Well, I get the purpose... to give you windows that can have vertical walls. It just seems inefficient from a design standpoint, that's all. Most of the time you're in space, you don't really NEED windows... you can't see anything but pitch black outside. And in THESE windows, you really only see the opposing windows on the other side of the gap, with a pitch black abyss below you. (Yes, you'll see stars... but only when the inside lights are off.)
I'm not faulting you... just explaining why I, personally, don't care for that sort of detail. That said, there will be occasions (typically when in orbit over a planet) when these are useful. I certainly put a lot of windows into my "Titan Contest" submission. But the TOS and TMP Enterprises had very few windows, overall... and this is just more practical.
I really like the ship in your avatar, but I don't recognize it
That's the USS Achernar, Vega Class. This was ORIGINALLY intended to be the USS Titan, Luna Class... but Sean's (aka Titan Designer) ship was chosen, and I have no problem with his design (albeit, just like with yours, I had a quibble... in his case, with the impulse engine placement, a problem YOUR ship doesn't seem to have!)
Since my design didn't win the contest, I decided to make it something else. The idea was always to take elements of the Constitution, but made up from Sovereign-era technology. As it grew, I ended up using a few ideas I'd culled from my study of the Excelsior (trying to figure out the purpose of the knobby bits on the back) and from the underside sensor array on the TMP Enterprise's primary hull (which you've also clearly considered). The big "nose" element is actually a massive version of the forward facing bit on the underside of the TMP Enterprise's hull... a massive phased-array scanner.
I won't hijack the thread... but if you're really interested, I'll give you a couple of links to some of my renders.
http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/3016/merge4.tif
http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/5645/merge5.tif
http://img3.imageshack.us/img3/6935/merge6.tif
And to show the basic (albeit at this time incomplete) "internal thinking through"...
http://img341.imageshack.us/img341/833/animation4nu8.gif
http://img176.imageshack.us/img176/1909/animation5ch0.gif
I've also done some other stuff... a version of the TAS Bonaventure (
http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=53039), a version of the "Ring ship Enterprise,"(
http://img443.imageshack.us/img443/9091/ringshipjan01image2ai1.jpg) and most recently, a version of the TOS ship (
http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=89810), all in the same basic style. I used to post my work here... but eventually lost my taste for the site's politics, so while I'll browse here occasionally, I no longer post my work here and believe this might be the first time in 18 months or so that I've posted to the site at all. Then again, "real life" has taken priority for me as well... marriage and all that... so I've barely missed it.
