Clippers!

[aridas sofia]

It's been awhile since I've posted any new designs here. Sorry about that. I posted this poster-like image at my website earlier in the year and intended to also post it here but other things intervened... you know the drill.

Anyhow, for those of you familiar with books from the 80s like "Ships of the Star Fleet" and the "Federation Reference Series", some of these boats might ring a bell. On my 1987 poster titled "Federation Starship Recognition Chart" there were two clippers portrayed, wildly different in configuration; Ariadne (an older design still in service) and Frobisher. The purpose of this little exercise was to show how clippers evolved into the ringship Ariadne in 2190 and got from there to the sleek Frobisher a century later:

Click on the jpeg to go to my iDisk page and download the PDF:

 

[Kaiser]

awesome and yes i know of your work and some of it is in my personal library of Starship design in my Apt.

I actually just ordered that poster from Starland.com

any chance of a Updated poster in the Future?

maybe using side view schematics or 3D renders?

 

[JES]

I love starship evolutions. The clipper sure takes a major change in 2245. I love how she becomes basically a flying wing. Maybe you should continue into the lost-era and beyond.

It looks like you really must have liked the Ariadne, because she has some of the most detail.

 

[aridas sofia]

awesome and yes i know of your work and some of it is in my personal library of Starship design in my Apt.

I actually just ordered that poster from Starland.com

any chance of a Updated poster in the Future?

maybe using side view schematics or 3D renders?

Any eventual updates to that poster will be uploaded along with a big jpg of the original to the Federation Reference website. So, check back occasionally and eventually you'll be pleasantly surprised.

 

[aridas sofia]

I love starship evolutions. The clipper sure takes a major change in 2245. I love how she becomes basically a flying wing.

All my books and posters were published before TNG and the later movies. The only "official" (read:Matt Jefferies drawn) clue I had to how starships might have evolved was the DY-100, the Leif Ericsson model, and the XCV-330. In other words, "submarine" spaceships evolve big rings that somehow become nacelles. All my thinking was based on the hypothesis that rings were the warp generators (what later came to be called "coils") inside nacelles. At first, sublight ships didn't have them. The first warp ships had great big single coils. As technology improved, coils got smaller and more in number. Eventually one row of coils became two, and you had nacelles.

The clippers followed a slightly different path. They led to the stealthy, fast perimeter action ships. Those small ringships were "quiet" (didn't have much of a warp signature or displacement) and yet fast for their size, so they hung around longer than other ringships. But eventually there was a need for an all out, "balls to the walls", speed demon clipper-- the proto perimeter action ship Chasseur, in 2245. That's why you see the sudden jump from a three ring clipper to a two nacelle clipper.

And even so, the big ringed Ariadne continued to be used until the 2290s along with PAs as ultra-stealthy (but much less capable) support.

Maybe you should continue into the lost-era and beyond.

Because my stuff came pre-TNG and "ended" around 2300, and my imagination would have led to a very different tech from what Probert pioneered, I'll leave that realm to you guys to imsgine and play with.

It looks like you really must have liked the Ariadne, because she has some of the most detail.

Ariadne was on the poster. I'd done color "sketches" of her so I had a lot of "rough" detail to work from when doing a digital draft. The other early clippers existed only as rough pencil sketches plotting out an evolution. So when they were digitally drawn I thought I'd leave them pretty simple and see how others would detail them.

 

[Kaiser]

awesome and yes i know of your work and some of it is in my personal library of Starship design in my Apt.

I actually just ordered that poster from Starland.com

any chance of a Updated poster in the Future?

maybe using side view schematics or 3D renders?

Any eventual updates to that poster will be uploaded along with a big jpg of the original to the Federation Reference website. So, check back occasionally and eventually you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Will do

 

[JES]

I love starship evolutions. The clipper sure takes a major change in 2245. I love how she becomes basically a flying wing.

All my books and posters were published before TNG and the later movies. The only "official" (read:Matt Jefferies drawn) clue I had to how starships might have evolved was the DY-100, the Leif Ericsson model, and the XCV-330. In other words, "submarine" spaceships evolve big rings that somehow become nacelles. All my thinking was based on the hypothesis that rings were the warp generators (what later came to be called "coils") inside nacelles. At first, sublight ships didn't have them. The first warp ships had great big single coils. As technology improved, coils got smaller and more in number. Eventually one row of coils became two, and you had nacelles.

The clippers followed a slightly different path. They led to the stealthy, fast perimeter action ships. Those small ringships were "quiet" (didn't have much of a warp signature or displacement) and yet fast for their size, so they hung around longer than other ringships. But eventually there was a need for an all out, "balls to the walls", speed demon clipper-- the proto perimeter action ship Chasseur, in 2245. That's why you see the sudden jump from a three ring clipper to a two nacelle clipper.

And even so, the big ringed Ariadne continued to be used until the 2290s along with PAs as ultra-stealthy (but much less capable) support.

Maybe you should continue into the lost-era and beyond.

Because my stuff came pre-TNG and "ended" around 2300, and my imagination would have led to a very different tech from what Probert pioneered, I'll leave that realm to you guys to imsgine and play with.

It looks like you really must have liked the Ariadne, because she has some of the most detail.

Ariadne was on the poster. I'd done color "sketches" of her so I had a lot of "rough" detail to work from when doing a digital draft. The other early clippers existed only as rough pencil sketches plotting out an evolution. So when they were digitally drawn I thought I'd leave them pretty simple and see how others would detail them.

It is pretty interesting that all of these designs are from before TNG aired, which was about 20 years ago, so they have an origin pretty far back.

I was thinking I might want to try evolving the next couple of generation of Clippers myself when I get the next urge to doodle, but I also thought that seeing as how you are the pioneer for the entire lineage as we know it, I should also see if you were going to evolve it any further.

Seeing as how you apparently aren't, I see something nice to play with, as well as something to fill in a lot of vacant navigational contract codes registries.

 

[Timo]

A quick question, if you may. The designs appear to be to mutual scale, right? What scale might that be? The ring drive vessels have obvious windshields, and the Chasseur even has an aft hatch, but those seem to suggest ships much smaller than the Ariadne and Frobisher we see in the comparison chart...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[aridas sofia]

^There's a scale bar in the lower left corner. I tried to stay as true as possible to the sizes depicted on the silhouette chart. The "windshields" are full deck , wraparound observation areas combining the feel of cockpit and bridge. In the later ships the feature disappears just as the forward ports on Galileo disappear on the TMP shuttle.

 

[Timo]

Ah, I see - thanks, and sorry for being so blind! The Chasseur is no shuttle-on-steroids, then, but rather an early perimeter ship by another name... Much like the name might suggest.

The idea of tall windows is quite appealing...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[aridas sofia]

...but rather an early perimeter ship by another name... Much like the name might suggest.

Absolutely. Chasseur is the clipper that leads to Kiaga and Agilis.