Harrier Class Tactical Scout 3d Model

[Manticore]

For more information on this tiny ship, go here, where you'll get specs, orthos, etc, and stuff that I'm not interested in repeating. The basic gist of the ship is that she's a Starfleet Bird of Prey, for all intents and purposes. She's about half the length of a Nova (though ~1/5 the volume), and heavily armed. What's unique about her is the deflector pod on top of the ship, with an underslung weapons pod containing pulse phasers and torpedo launchers.

So, I've been trying to tickle my muse into giving me something practical to work on for a while (no, epic combat between an elf and an army of orcs is not practical...yet). Hearing my two friends talking about their ship that they've been collaborating on, my muse suddenly sat up and started whacking me on the head with a sledgehammer. Two advils later, I sat down and started modeling:





Work's been pretty hectic lately, so I only plan to work on her over the weekends (since I work overnight, I have a lot of time to myself ).

However, I have a lot planned on how to build her so that she's easy to animate; easily controlled pulse phaser and torpedo launchers that fire only when I have a checkbox checked, ways to easily control where on an array a phaser's coming from and of course the little beads of light that go around the array, and all sorts of other stuff. I'm still working on the shields, possibly going to be a sort of "boolean" system based on a particle spawn, but I'm pretty excited.

 

[The Badger]

That's a very interesting design, and the background details you link to are well thought out too.

 

[Manticore]

Ugh, the nacelles have been much rougher than I was expecting.

 

[Manticore]

*blows dust off of thread*

I've been hard at work at cleaning up the annoying PITA nacelles and building the really surprisingly annoying pylons, but at last, the major structures are complete:



The next order of business, that I'll be working on tomorrow night, is going to be cleaning up those odd humps down the centerline of the ship and radiating off to the sides. And fixing some of the creases that got uncreased for a variety of reasons too.

 

[Kaiser]

Looks great so far

 

[The Badger]

Hey, what's happened with this? I've just been to that link for all the spec's and stuff, and it's gone.

It's a pity as I like this design and concept.

 

[Manticore]

There's been hosting issues with that forum; it's supposed to be changing to a new host, but it's supposed to have been changing for the last 4 or so months.

As for the ship itself, I've taken a bit of a leave on it to regain some energy, and I hope to back to it soon.

 

[The Badger]

OK, hopefully it'll be sorted soon.

If you don't mind, I've had a couple of thoughts about the design. I realize that you are the artist and that the original concept was someone else's, but I thought I'd put them forward for consideration. Needless to say these should be disregarded totally if they don't fit the original concept.

First, two torpedo launchers seems a trifle excessive for such a small craft. The lack of interior space would limit the amount of space for torpedo storage. Leaving one launcher out would give a bit more room, as well as reducing the cost, mass, and possibly the construction time for the ship.

I'm also unsure about the use of two pulse phaser cannons of the same sort as used on the Defiant. I had the impression (mainly from the DS9 tech manual, admittedly a non canon source) that these are expensive components with a long construction time. Also, would the Harrier have the vast power requirements needed to fire them?
An alternative suggestion would be a smaller, cheaper, quicker built version based on lessons learnt in developing the Defiant. Whilst being significantly less powerful than it's larger version it could still give the Harrier considerably more punch than any other ship of it's type.

The docking port is well positioned for when the ship has landed, but unless there's some sort of extendible docking arm there could be difficulties for other purposes. I can't see it getting close to DS9's docking ring, for example, as the upper hull would get in the way. Perhaps a second port, positioned directly aft of the cargo bay, would be convenient.

Anyway I hope you don't mind my bringing these points up. I just find this design fascinating.

 

[BorgMan]

^ Well, a lot of ships use DS9's docking sails; even the Galaxy wouldn't be able to use the docking ring, though one could argue that the Harrier is a bit small to justify the use of a whole docking sail. Ship-to-ship docking is actually a bit oldskool anyway, so no problems there either