Tallguy,
Well, right now I've been using a combination of the help documentation and some tutorials put up by
FourMadMen. And the thing that peeked my interest enough to start modeling again was getting some very cool plans of a ship from
Thomas Sasser (I learn better when I have an inspirational project to apply what I'm learning to).
Right now I'm using Blender on my PowerMac G4, but I got an SGI Indigo 2 IMPACT a little over a year ago and have been looking for something that I could do on that system to learn more about it. My SGI Indy's hardware is geared towards video editing tasks, but the processor is too slow for any 3D work beyond the simple math stuff I do. So while I do have Blender on my Indy, the Indigo 2 is about four times as fast with a much better video card (and is compatible with newer versions of Blender).
But if you know of a good source for documentation... specially printed (or printable) documentation, that would be great!
Yeah, I tend to use projects to learn things I've always wanted to learn... and this one is no exception. I quickly realized that there is a ton of information which is best provided in a written form along with illustrations, so I'll most likely be using this project (the deck plans) to teach myself FrameMaker (which I'll be able to add to PageMaker, QuarkXPress, InDesign and Create as another page layout app I'll be proficient at). I find it interesting to see how different applications approach similar tasks.
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USS Jack Riley,
Well, I think that the idea of over redundancies can actually be more harm than good. Abandoning ship when your ship is your life is really a foolish act when you can go months without anyone noticing you are gone and decades before someone takes the time to send help.
Short of setting the ship to self-destruct, the primary hull
is the life boat. The primary hull is made up of about 24 pressure compartments, the odds of all of them being violated is pretty remote. And anything that could come close to doing that would wipe out life boats even faster.
My feeling is that life boats on starship serve one purpose and only one purpose... adding surface clutter to starships.
The only ships that I feel can justify life boats are those really lacking in redundancy... those that are basically a single hull. But in the case of the original Enterprise, it is it's own life boat.
On a similar note, I think that the redesign of the secondary hull in TMP was ill conceived in that it effectively reduced it's ability to serve as an alternate life boat (though I have heard the argument that because it wasn't often used as such, Star Fleet felt that hollowing it out made better use of that space).
But then again, when all is said and done, I hope that you guys try it out another way. If I seem slavish to certain things while skirting past others, that is just because I'm putting forward my vision of things... which isn't to say that that is the
right vision by any stretch. I would be very disappointed if my version of things is being argued against
Joseph's version or
Drexler's version (or even versions by
April or
aridas sofia) some years from now. I mainly want people to try to think of how they, themselves would do this rather than deciding that someone less was more correct than anyone before or after.
And going back over the images I've posted in this thread (which can all be found
here), there should be a more than enough raw information on this subject for anyone to start playing around with ideas that might be different than my own. Most of the set plans I have are seen scaled relative to other set plans and the ship itself in these images, I'm still in the process of sketching out plans for seen sets that I want to include, but even without them you guys should really be able to start attacking this subject in your own ways.
To be perfectly clear (because I don't see a way of saying it without sounding harsh), when I say
do it yourselves, remember that
that really is the point of this project. If you guys like my ideas... great! And if you don't, that is fine too.
I had been hoping to see more derivative work by now, but I can understand people waiting for better (cleaned up) versions of all the set plans and the like.
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DS9Sega,
Actually that is very helpful... Thanks!
I've decided to avoid the corridor issue altogether. Basically, once they exit a room into a corridor, I assume that is where the useful information from the show ends. You basically have a semi-long section of curved corridor and a couple short examples of straight corridor, and that was pretty much it on the show. So the curvature of the corridor had to be the same no matter where it was used (including out side of engineering). So given that, I'm working from the assumption that a door leading to a corridor actually leads to whatever geometry of corridor that works for that area of the ship without a loss of generality in the overall plans themselves.
