Klaus- your 'New Beginning' challenge gave me the idea of sprucing up the Enterprise C concept I first posted a couple years ago, basically manipulations of Mike Swantak's Ent-C drawing and some model photos. Then I saw your Enterprise C entry (great minds thinking alike?)... superior work as always... but I decided to finish this anyway and see what people thought of it.
The idea here was to provide a link between Probert's USS Ambassador, the onscreen Ent-C, and B/C hybrids such as Dan Uyeno's USS Balmung. The storyline is that when the highly-experimental Ambassador NX-10521 was being developed, it was experiencing so many design changes and delays, and the need for a new front-line ship was so critical, that Admiral Sternbach decided to have the next few Ambassador hulls already under construction altered to a simpler form (Mk II) with a conventional propulsion system, based on the rapidly-developed Balmung design. One of these hulls was christened Enterprise C, in part to counter the stigma of this class being an 'interim' design, since the plan was to eventually refit each with the advanced warp engines being pioneered by NX-10521.
So Captain Garrett's shakedown cruise could be the Enterprise C's first voyage after the big refit, while this illustrates the earlier configuration. Hope you all enjoy it (and it'd be great if anyone wants to try modeling it):
The idea here was to provide a link between Probert's USS Ambassador, the onscreen Ent-C, and B/C hybrids such as Dan Uyeno's USS Balmung. The storyline is that when the highly-experimental Ambassador NX-10521 was being developed, it was experiencing so many design changes and delays, and the need for a new front-line ship was so critical, that Admiral Sternbach decided to have the next few Ambassador hulls already under construction altered to a simpler form (Mk II) with a conventional propulsion system, based on the rapidly-developed Balmung design. One of these hulls was christened Enterprise C, in part to counter the stigma of this class being an 'interim' design, since the plan was to eventually refit each with the advanced warp engines being pioneered by NX-10521.
So Captain Garrett's shakedown cruise could be the Enterprise C's first voyage after the big refit, while this illustrates the earlier configuration. Hope you all enjoy it (and it'd be great if anyone wants to try modeling it):
