Design the Next Enterprise

[Tiberion1701]

So, steering this back around a little bit...

Adam: Looking forward to the interview on that podcast Sunday. I wouldn't worry too much about being the most hated guy in the Trek community, for 2 reasons;

1: Everyone knows its Rick Berman (I kid I kid)

and

2: When you combine MMO players with 'hardcore' Trek fans you can sometimes get something quite toxic.They literally would have had this reaction to virtually any winner save their personal favorite (probably their own design) and aren't worth taking to heart. The first time they see an ingame preview, they'll flock back and praise it just as fervently.

Besides, this hasn't been anywhere near as vitriolic as they "Name the ship" contest from the early days, when 'Dervish' won and a lot of the people basically set the forums on fire for a few days about both the name and the design (which a lot of people still don't care for, but no longer causes frothing anger)

Despite that, STO has a pretty nice community, and I for one will gladly welcome you when you join us. I'm sure you'll have plenty of people around to get you going, but if you do find yourself lost, feel free to bug me via ingame mail (to @Tiberion1701 - you don't need a character name there) - it hooks up to forum PMs, and both send email notices.

Does anyone over here who can't post at STO have any questions you might like asked on the podcast (obviously Adam already answers questions here, but it could be good to offset some of the "Why do suck?" questions they'll have to filter out)

If so, post em up and I'll transfer em over (with your forum handle )

Edit: Reference Link 1 and Link 2

 

[sojourner]

I have a question. How can a game that's less than 2 years old have "early days"?

 

[C.E. Evans]

These days, a game over a year old is considered to have been around for awhile.

 

[Tiberion1701]

Yeah and its sometimes easy to forget that STO was in "development" forever by Perpetual, from 2004 to 2008 and there are a few that were around for most of that 7 years.

The contest to name the ship class was in like November or December of 2009 though, so perhaps only moderately early days.

 

[StarTreklover]

Be advised: while you may have been inspired and influenced by previous designs (like we all are), this one is exclusively yours. And while this accomplishment is yours to keep, the world of day-to-day business, these days, means your design may very well be modified by Cryptic, an unfortunately inevitable possibility when putting your design into the hands of someone who must, for some unimaginably silly reason, put their 'stamp' on it. But, then again, maybe they're better than that. Maybe they will indeed infuse your winning design into their universe 'as designed'. Then that 3D model you'll be getting really would mean something.

"We did spend some time thickening up the necks on the side. So make it so that its not just a sheet of metal holding up the Enterprise, its two necks. And its going to be big; bigger than the sovereign. Its going to be a massive ship. So its more like theres going to be a redundancy of two stanchions, two necks"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8K2KMOJvSpc#t=27m49s

 

[sojourner]

^They're gonna ruin it.

 

[Ihlecreations]

Hey all, I have added some new images to my website, and yes some of my trek stuff is on there now. Also some links to some videos and such of things I have worked on. The links are in the image captions. Did this for those who said I didn't update in a while.

 

[StarTreklover]

I didnt really notice until someone pointed this out on the STO forums, but its interesting that Mr. Probert called the winning design a part of the Federation "(STO version)". I guess he doesnt consider this a part of the "real"(canon) Federation, just that in STO.

 

[Herkimer Jitty]

Well, it isn't. It's a parallel timeline to TrekLit, which itself isn't strictly canon per se.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

I didnt really notice until someone pointed this out on the STO forums, but its interesting that Mr. Probert called the winning design a part of the Federation "(STO version)". I guess he doesnt consider this a part of the "real"(canon) Federation, just that in STO.

I certainly don't consider the various ships seen in that game to be "canon."

Maybe a better way to think of it is that this game is "based upon" some "real" Star Trek universe. I'm quite sure that there are a million elements of the "game world" which are utterly incompatible with anything remotely real, after all... while the "real" fictional universe should, for the most part, try to seem to be something that we can suspend our disbelief over.

So... the historical background, and most of the "facts" in the STO "game-i-verse" may be similar to the things that happen in the "lit-i-verse" or the "canon-i-verse" but it's a safe bet that the same mission isn't undertaken, over and over, repeatedly, by thousands of "captains" (most of whom only "joined starfleet" a few weeks or months ago). Right?

Oh, and as far as I'm concerned, I will no more accept that all of the ships in this game are real than I would accept that all of the ships in the FASA game were real. A few, sure... Loknar, Larson, and Chandley, in particular... I really like, but most are... myeh...

Same applies here.

 

[Probert]

^They're gonna ruin it.

Sounds like it. They're talking about having like half a saucer or some other odd shape as the new Primary Section... I don't know. I'll bet there are more Star Warriors working there than Star Trekkers.

 

[Probert]

Hey all, I have added some new images to my website, and yes some of my trek stuff is on there now. Also some links to some videos and such of things I have worked on. The links are in the image captions. Did this for those who said I didn't update in a while.

Maybe it would be good to add a new category (Starships or Space Hardware) to your menu 'cause some of us may not be able to find the new stuff.

Meanwhile, have you had the opportunity to send your amended warp ring idea to Cryptic?

 

[Cary L. Brown]

^They're gonna ruin it.

Sounds like it. They're talking about having like half a saucer or some other odd shape as the new Primary Section... I don't know. I'll bet there are more Star Warriors working there than Star Trekkers.

Andrew, have you seen "Fuzzy Modem's" ship design? If not, you should...

It's not lost on me that his design actually did exactly what was described in that video clip.

If you missed it somehow... here's my recommended "starting point."

http://www.trekbbs.com/showpost.php?p=4861427&postcount=822

The separation system can most easily be seen in this one:

http://crossovercomic.com/media/extras/Unrelated/startrek_contest/bonus/big/ent-f_lcars.jpg

 

[sojourner]

Hmmm, STO may not live much longer from the looks of things:
http://www.trektoday.com/content/2011/05/atari-to-sell-cryptic-studios/

 

[Tiberion1701]

Nah, its more than likely fine. There's a 125 page thread Over Here if you really want to know every detail, but the gist of it is:

Atari is getting out of the mainstream PC game publishing business and entering the Casual (IE Facebook) gaming market, where they plan to publish but not develop casual games.

As such, they are getting rid of their PC assets (IE Cryptic) to focus their business.

All previous financial statements showed Cryptic as the primary income of Atari as a whole (by quite a bit) and thus it was their best asset.

It what has become a pretty standard practice, they transferred some debt around to make parent Atari look better. This was mainly done by shifting the income from the Micro-transaction stores to show as Atari income rather than Cryptic (this was done retroactively to 2009, sort of like submitting an amended tax return)

It is highly likely that there is already a buyer in place (probably an investor group led by Cryptic front man Jack Emmert, who owned the company before being acquired by Atari a couple of years ago) and that they approved of the "creative" book-keeping as part of the deal, in short buying a bit of Atari's debt along with the company

The reasons this seems likely are two-fold:

Cryptic is in the middle of hiring people to ramp up development of their games, and both released games seem to be healthy. Despite their less-than-stellar welcomes at launch, the games are cheap to maintain (as Cryptic doesn't maintain a lot of servers or a large dev team, its an "indie" company") and has a good amount of cash flow coming in via the C-Store. In addition, they have 2 games in development (Neverwinter and an unannounced game)

Of course its all conjecture because none of this info is public besides the investor reports. Its POSSIBLE that Cryptic really is "on the market" and that the games could be closed at any moment.. but all anecdotal evidence seems to point in the other direction.

 

[sojourner]

^Ah, that's too bad. I was hoping they might go under and all of there properties would open up for re-development by someone else. Making sure that Jack Emmert is no where in the loop.

 

[bobafett]

Hi All
New member here but it seems my drawings have been talked about prior to my arrival.
I did design the third place Ent F contest entry and a big congratulations to all who entered...very impressed with the quality of work.
The entry I did submit I was not happy with so I scrapped it completely and started fresh (just for myself)...which ended up with the design Jes talked about. Im not very good at 3d modelling so drawing my design out was the next best thing. The only problem being mostly curves its hard to show those angles in the drawn format.

Its interesting to see how critical people can be of other peoples designs but I can see the potential and all the thought they put into their work ....and for that they all have done amazing job.
Its great that we all had the opportunity to come up with our own version on the Enterprise Icon ...thanks for all your comments.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

Hi All
New member here but it seems my drawings have been talked about prior to my arrival.
I did design the third place Ent F contest entry and a big congratulations to all who entered...very impressed with the quality of work.
The entry I did submit I was not happy with so I scrapped it completely and started fresh (just for myself)...which ended up with the design Jes talked about. Im not very good at 3d modelling so drawing my design out was the next best thing. The only problem being mostly curves its hard to show those angles in the drawn format.

Its interesting to see how critical people can be of other peoples designs but I can see the potential and all the thought they put into their work ....and for that they all have done amazing job.
Its great that we all had the opportunity to come up with our own version on the Enterprise Icon ...thanks for all your comments.

Mind posting your art (or if you can't, at least a link address where we can find it)? I have no idea what design yours was.

 

[Dac]

If I'm not mistaken, bobafett's design is this one:

Forgive the bad joke, but I think bobafett could take a lesson from his name sake and add some verticality to his spaceship. At the moment its flatter than The E-J imo.

 

[Tiberion1701]

Here's the winners page: http://www.startrekonline.com/node/2415


I would say its intentionally flattened like the J, and the saucer details are J-ish too. It looks quite like an amalgamation of E and J elements, which somewhat made sense given the contest, and a lot of those that placed were nods to the J, much to my chagrin.

I think my main complaint about it would be the pointy tail.. it seems a bit vestigial if its that shape, which is fine if it looks good, but it doesn't as far as my personal taste go.

But overall a success in looking like a possible future Starfleet ship, and you placed, so good work