Because of the ship's size and how it acted, a put round entrances on the side to slightly resemble those on the Millennium Falcon.
You might get a kick out of this, then. I was having trouble with finding lighting and a camera angle that worked for me so I moved on from the render, but I wanted to show the scale of the ship with a little customs inspection. (Falcon by Andy Crook and Sean Kennedy)
By the way, do you have any opinions on the skiff/escape pod? I was imagining something like a cross between this
early, nacelle-less drawing of the TOS shuttle, and
the concept art for the TMP travel pod, but I was having trouble finding a shape I liked that would fit into such a constrained space and would also be big enough for people to sit in it. My first try ended up looking like a boxy version of
the Galaxy Quest shuttle, so I put it aside and just left it in a place that would be easy to revisit.
Though it did make it easier when I read "Long Shot" and a character explicitly said the escape pod would only fit six or seven people. I'd been thinking about stuff like fold-out chairs on the ceiling and having people sit upside-down so I could squeeze the whole crew into it in an emergency.
Yeah, given the ship's size it would be more logical to think of that hatch as being the warp core ejection hatch. Now Mr. Mack, Mr. Ward & Mr. Dilmore just need to write a scene where the Sagittarius needs to dump its core to make that wish into something semi-canon. XD
Which reminds me of a fun little tidbit. When I was roughing out the interior, I put a wall between engineering and the the torpedo/probe launch bay, and had the transporter on that forward bulkhead. The
internal diagram made it look to me like the torpedo bay was a separate, vertical compartment running through the center of the ship. Maybe a day later, I was reading "Long Shot," and during an action scene, David Mack had a character knocked back from the warp engine, flying from the aft end of engineering all the way into the torpedo racks. I gave it some thought, and lengthened the space and
moved the transporter closer to the middle part of the compartment, near the ladder to the main deck. It helped that when I checked my scaling, I found the engineering section was bigger than I'd thought, and a Defiant/NX-01-sized pad wouldn't take up very much room.
You can also see (sort of) in my screen-grab that I put a TOS-style pipe-cathedral at the rear of engineering, rather than a more modern ejectable warp-core that would fit through the hatch. I figured it was more maintenance access than for removing the entire reactor as a single unit.
I had a bit of interior burn-out
from my last project, so I decided to leave the rooms as featureless gray boxes for the time being. I'm thinking that sometime next year, I might do a re-read of Vanguard and Seekers, taking notes on the descriptions of the
Sagittarius so I can do a more detailed version of the interior (and I may as well do the whole thing, since the only spaces that don't have a window or door leading outside are the bridge, corridor, and bathroom). As far as I know, there's only been one other person to model an interior for this ship, but they nearly doubled the size of it for their model, so their version isn't much help to me.
(I looked for some pictures of that version, but I couldn't find them. I did find
Masao's DeviantArt page for the first time, which had clean copies of some drawings I only had smaller, lower-quality versions of when I was working.
C'est la vie.)
