Let’s talk about the
USS Horizon –
The
USS Horizon NCC-3176 is a late 23rd century
Oldfield Class Starship built at the newly formed Utopia Planitia Shipyards, Mars. She’s 507 meters long, with 24 decks, and has a crew of 750. The ship is fully multifunctional, and can run various different mission types, from boarder patrol to long range exploration, and diplomatic missions. The class is designated as a “Heavy Explorer.”
In terms of the design history – the spaceframe is based on the failed
USS Excelsior prototype. With Transwarp not possible the ship was built to fill the gap that
Excelsiors would have held in the fleet. By default, the
Oldfield Class sports the UTI (Unified Trans-Intermix) 51 nacelles which allow for a sustained warp speed of 12 (on the old scale). The nacelle length accommodates extra sustainer coils to allow the ship to maintain this higher speed.
The real-world design history is that I wanted a ship to replace the lost
Ingram/Odysseus Class starships. Having lost the physical and digital plans of the
Ingram I worked from memory to create something that pays homage to the design ethos I learned from both Todd and David. I built a more practical design that incorporated a hanger bay into the hull, rather than it being an add on structure and used a few design ques from the
Ingram. Having seen Andrew Probert’s realised
Ambassador Class, I reshaped the “neck” (dorsal interconnector) so as to indicate that this ship would lead into that beautiful design.
Phase1 – design and build a replacement for the lost
Ingram/Odysseus Class starships. (complete)
Phase2 – design and build a replacement shuttle to go with the new ship. (complete)
Phase3 – Fix mesh errors on ship, change nacelles, add arboretum, retexture. (complete)
Phase4 – Add hanger bay and rec decks. (pending)
Comments welcome, more soon :-)
connection between worlds of 3D modeling and CG for me.
When life gets out of your way you’ll give us more goodies. 
