I figure on doing some related research over at the Cartographers' Guild forums. Anyway: which discussion threads in this forum would each of you recommend for study re: advice on how to build deck plans? Whether for starships, SHIELD helicarriers, more traditional water-bound boats, etc.?
There are a lot of good threads on doing deck plans, but the best place to start are with actual plans. I've collected a ton of plans of different naval vessels to help me get a feel for how to approach this type of project. And don't discount the classic Booklet of General Plans of the Enterprise, Franz Joseph's work built on naval standards. This can be seen in a comparison of the Booklet of General Plans of the USS Saratoga (CV-60) with Joseph's drawings... Click to enlarge (JPEG, 2.8 MB) I would suggest (at some future date) getting out to see some of these large naval vessels in person, specially the ones which are now museum ships, to get a feel for how big is big. I grew up in Coronado were large carriers were omnipresent (namely the Constellation and Kitty Hawk), and it gave me a good point of reference. Lastly, cross sections are very misleading. I've seen people scale up the size of their ships based on a cross section and not realized that they had provided the equivalent of a four bedroom apartment's amount of space for each crew person. Hopefully something here is helpful.
I have copies of the USS Forrestal (CV-59) deck plans but I didn't know that Saratoga (CV-60) plans were also in the public realm at this point. Also, the Franz Joseph Enterprise plans. Reading the Forrestal plans gave me a sense - for the purposes of my "Pericles Project" hosted on my Flickr account - of what the old Kirby-style Helicarriers had to be capable of hauling around on board. Especially given their visual appearance and the requirement for the flight deck to somewhat mimic a regular, water-bound CV(whether it was also "N" or not). Still. Thank you for showing me this. I would love to visit some of the surviving Big Ships of the 20th Century, but that's not going to happen. I'm not leaving Canada for any kind of tourism ever again, for reasons irrelevant to this corner of TrekBBS.
If going isn't an option, there are some virtual tours which give you at least some idea. While the Stage 9 project was shut down, there's some videos out there to give you a bit of a sense of scale. Combine that with one of the Strategic Designs plans and I think you're off to a good start.
This was written for the Star Fleet Battles universe, but most of it applies to general Trek deck plans. http://www.starfleetgames.com/documents/deckplan/How_to_Draw_Starship_deck_p.pdf
Thanks, @Sgt_G ! (Sidebar: Looking at the Starship Name Registry at the SFB website you referred me to, I got a bit of a surprise: a ship named after Pierre Trudeau [NCC-1416, among the heavy fighter carriers].)
Remember the rule of small: "An aircraft carrier is as small as it can be and still be an aircraft carrier." If it could be half the size and still do what was required of it, it would be.
My advice is to work from the outside in. So, figure out where the big external features would be on the decks, and then work from the top and bottom toward the bigger decks. (And also, on the thin-necked ships, from there to the main sections.) Those smallest decks have the most limits on where you can fit in the lift shafts or stairwells, and will dictate how they go on immediate surrounding decks. On a Trek ship, make sure you can get around decks without being blocked by horizontal lift runs, and try to keep those to a minimum. What program are you using?
Right now, Illustrator CS4. And for the project I've got in front of me, horizontal lift runs aren't going to be an issue. This particular ship design won't have such things because SHIELD Helicarrier, not generic Starfleet ship bigger than two decks. I ask about the warped-shape vs. brush thing in anticipation of other projects.
In Inkscape, I default to using the 'draw curves and straight lines' tool, except for circular decks. I set the width to match the desired corridor size at the scale I'm working on. I try to keep them in that format until I'm sure of where the positions are, then convert the line strokes to their own objects and merge things as needed. I'm not sure what the Illustrator equivalent is.