Jayru (JSnaith's) 3D Trek
- Thread starter JSnaith
- Start date
The taper... They never told me about the taper! 
Very true, lol... I've built them before. I didn't think I did more than refine them, but that damn taper...The taper... They never told me about the taper!
Very.TOS nacelles are also cool
More later
Good news, bad news time:
Good news, I'm back at my PC for a limited time.
Bad news, a limited time, he he he...
And...
It gets worse, (that's it follow me down this rabbit hole...)
My health - physical and mental - has taken yet another knock. The vasculitis that started at the beginning of May is going to leave scars all over my body. Fortunately, it only reached my nose on my face, and I can hide that behind my glasses. I'm being encouraged to ignore it, and learn to live with it, blah blah, blah. But it has got me a bit blue. (A bit, he says, follow further down the rabbit hole...)
Major depression? Maybe... a little. I'm working on it, with help. But, that and the house have proved to be major distractions and so (brace yourselves) I am not working on either Constitution builds at the moment. And I am not sure when I will get back to them.
My partner, who can be cleverly devious, engaged me in a thought experiment last night, about the Oberth Class. He feels the official length is correct, and my working out on my rationalised build is just hokum. I argued my point. I used pictures and a laser pointer, charts, the deck layouts I did... and He pissed me off to the extent I thought about going out for a drive in the car (reality check; I am not allowed to drive, and more important, I do I know how to drive). He even dared to suggest that the actual outline of the ship actually works.
*shudder*
But he succeeded in getting a note of distraction in my head, one that actually kept me up last night. I wrote a damn argument to support my position (yes, I am that sort of nerd and was that angry). And this morning? He chucked it over his shoulder and asked how I was feeling.
Damn him.
Better, distracted, energised. And not thinking about scars. And so deep into this rabbit hole idea that I don't want to climb out.
So, a 200-meter-long Oberth, with a canon outline and shape, with decks that fit the window layouts. That's the challenge. You know who to blame.
I will prove him wrong.
ps
He doesn't care if he's wrong or right, just that I'm doing something and not wallowing in self-pity.
Good news, I'm back at my PC for a limited time.
Bad news, a limited time, he he he...
And...
It gets worse, (that's it follow me down this rabbit hole...)
My health - physical and mental - has taken yet another knock. The vasculitis that started at the beginning of May is going to leave scars all over my body. Fortunately, it only reached my nose on my face, and I can hide that behind my glasses. I'm being encouraged to ignore it, and learn to live with it, blah blah, blah. But it has got me a bit blue. (A bit, he says, follow further down the rabbit hole...)
Major depression? Maybe... a little. I'm working on it, with help. But, that and the house have proved to be major distractions and so (brace yourselves) I am not working on either Constitution builds at the moment. And I am not sure when I will get back to them.
My partner, who can be cleverly devious, engaged me in a thought experiment last night, about the Oberth Class. He feels the official length is correct, and my working out on my rationalised build is just hokum. I argued my point. I used pictures and a laser pointer, charts, the deck layouts I did... and He pissed me off to the extent I thought about going out for a drive in the car (reality check; I am not allowed to drive, and more important, I do I know how to drive). He even dared to suggest that the actual outline of the ship actually works.
*shudder*
But he succeeded in getting a note of distraction in my head, one that actually kept me up last night. I wrote a damn argument to support my position (yes, I am that sort of nerd and was that angry). And this morning? He chucked it over his shoulder and asked how I was feeling.
Damn him.
Better, distracted, energised. And not thinking about scars. And so deep into this rabbit hole idea that I don't want to climb out.
So, a 200-meter-long Oberth, with a canon outline and shape, with decks that fit the window layouts. That's the challenge. You know who to blame.
I will prove him wrong.
ps
He doesn't care if he's wrong or right, just that I'm doing something and not wallowing in self-pity.
Yes, he is. 25 years together... That blows my mind sometimes. Almost half my life. Don't fear, I take care of him, it is a partnership, But at the moment... Yeah.
Back to the coal face:
Let’s start with the obvious: the Oberth is a bad design. Like all the new ships, station and aux craft created for TSFS, it’s a bad design. It’s look over function, with no thought given to form and how it should all work. It’s typical ILM through and through, and why I am not a big fan of them. They are more concerned with something that “looks cool” – an ethos that carries through to this day. But I’m not going to wax lyrically about ILM and there shortcomings; they have their fans of the style they produce. I just don’t think they’ve ever really understood the ethos behind Star Trek.
Getting back to the Oberth: whilst elegant and beautiful – that cannot be denied, ultimately it doesn’t work as is. Paramount’s decree that the class is 120 meters long makes no sense, and was arbitrarily decided based on the assumption that science ships have to be small.
Why?
The USS Grissom is stated clearly to be a science ship – not a scout. It carries a science team and was tasked with exploring the newly born Gensis Planet. This is no tiny scout with minimal abilities, this is a mobile science community in space designed to do a job and do it well.
So… Let’s cut the bull about science ships being tiny and minimal. We can do better than that, and we should be thinking better than that, because we know more and know better.
Let’s start with the ridiculously low registration number:
Clearly the Oberth is not older than the Constitution. It’s not an old ship that’s been refitted to carry on in service, it’s something new, something that Starfleet has built to do a specific job (probably as a result of all those five year missions that happened). So does that mean NCC-6XX is the Oberth range? Umm, no.
TMP mentions two scout ships – the USS Columbia NCC-621 and the USS Revere NCC-595. According to background info both of these ships are Hermes Class. But… What if the Columbia is indeed one of these new Oberth Class ships? That could work. Starfleet was doing a lot of ship building at the time. It could also be that the Columbia was being used for “scouting” purposes, rather than a dedicated science mission (this works nicely with Starfleet’s multi-mission mandate).
I’ve long argued that ship reg numbers mean little. Just the order ships were built in. But… The Oberth, and specifically the USS Grissom, disprove this point. But then, what about the way reg numbers are used in DSC and SNW? *grumble, grumble, grumble*
There is no real rhyme or reason to how it works. But for the sake of argument, let’s say that NCC-6XX is for the Oberth Class.
Ok, so we are starting to cook here. The Oberth Class was probably designed as a result of the various five year mission results and implemented as part of a wider ship building project in the 2270s to occupy the role of a mobile science facility along side the refitted heavy cruisers (Constitution) and cruisers (Miranda, Soyuz) and the upcoming Constellation and Excelsior Classes (who would have been designed and in the early building phases by the time of TMP).
*side note, I’m sticking to known as seen on screen ship classes of the era.
So the Oberth would need a few things to act as a mobile science station – various labs, extra sensors, the ability to launch probes, a crew and all the facilities that come with one. A small ship makes no sense, but one about two thirds the mass of a Heavy Cruiser? That could work. Using the window layout that currently exists and messing with the scale until it starts to sit right, I get a length of 200 meters (166% bigger than canon) and around 17 habitable decks (if we include the pylons – and boy do we have questions there). A ship that size could – in theory – have a way to get a turbo lift down to the lower hull and back again. It wouldn’t be a pretty solution, but it could work. Why such an inelegant design with the split hulls? It has to be to do with the sensor arrays, which possibly make up the bulk of the front of the lower hull. If we can get down there, then maybe Engineering is located in that section too, and so are the fuel storage tanks.
As I said, we’re starting to cook.
But what about the upper hull? It has to hold the crew quarters, science labs, bridge, etc. For that top dome to work (damn you ILM what happened to bridge modules in this film?) the bridge would have to be buried in the centre of it, with a mezzanine level to allow for the windows. The three cargo/shuttle/whatever bays are… WTF, just crazy. Two are blocked by nacelles, and frankly only workbees could probably use them. The front one? Maybe that is an actual shuttle-bay. But I’m going to live dangerously and find out later if a shuttle will fit, lol. The lower dome is probably an observation area. I make it that the ship has two oversized decks, which allows for a few things.
So, it’s beginning to take shape as a possible working design.
However…
The window layout as shown will not work, no matter how we scale the ship. The ones above the cargo/shuttle/whatever bays can’t be made to work no matter what. Not unless you scale the ship up by a factor of 10 – and we know it’s not that big! So some changes are going to have to be made. But, it may well be possible to build a frame using the outline that works.
Now, in terms of actual scale references next to other ships/stations – we have very little. Brief glimpses in the movies, the end of STG, various shots from TNG and a few from DS9. Ironically, the ship the Oberth is most seen against is the Galaxy Class, you can call it creative imagining, but she doesn’t look like she’s a fifth of the Enterprise-D’s length. If a length is stated on screen, please let me know – because as far as I can remember it’s never been stated.
So, we’re left with guessing. And to paraphrase Dr McCoy “may all our guesses be right.” So let’s give it our best guess. With me?
No apologies for the long post and lack of pretty pictures. Need to sometimes type things out to work them out in my head. Plus, someone keeps swapping my tea out for coffee. Also, this is a dialogue with you guys; some of you know things I don’t, and some of you have ideas that may be worth sharing. So have at it!
More soon.
So - away from the Big Rig this morning, so laptop stuff only (and I can't use 3D software on the laptop) - yeah, I know. More to read, where are the pretty pictures? They're coming, they're coming.
Playing with scale again, I have several possible lengths I can work from;
My issue with the larger sizes is simple: they don't fit the aesthetic of Starfleet. In fact the class stands out as a sore thumb. But, not if we consider the following; Starfleet, and the Federation by extension, are not human-centric organisations. Vulcans, Andorians. Terralites, Deltans and many other races make up the bulk of the UFP. And that would include Starfleet as well. What if the Oberth was designed by one of the other member races? What if it was their take and logic on what a starship should look like and be? A move away from the Jeffries deign lineage and something new?
You see, I could see that happening in a real UFP and Starfleet. It wouldn't be so human-centric and human-designed. Engineers from different cultures, races, with different ideas of concepts and design logic... If it worked, it would be... Awesome. So the Oberth, we could argue, was maybe a Deltan design, or Vulcan or some other race. Just not human. And possibly built by them as well and delivered to Starfleet (and private civilian groups, as we see in TNG).
On that basis, a 250-meter ship works in my mind and will be my jumping off point. Now, I know I'm building the ship, but I would be interested in people's thoughts on this. Hopefully, I won't be putting up so many text-based posts in future, and will keep it simple and more image-oriented.
Anyway, your thoughts, share them with me. Consider this a weird Vulcan mind-meld through the screen!
Playing with scale again, I have several possible lengths I can work from;
- 200 meters, more akin to the scale of the so-called "small science ship" - workable, but things don't line up nicely.
- At 220 meters, things start to line up better, and it becomes easier to align them with the decks. Not perfect, but better.
- 250 meters - this is where things start to come together and fall into place. Much larger design, but... More in keeping with the thoughts that science ships don't have to be small.
- 300 meters - no renders of this, but interestingly, the decks line up with the windows perfectly. Blew my mind when I scaled up to this length. This is the length I think the artists had in mind when designing this ship, hence the window layout.
My issue with the larger sizes is simple: they don't fit the aesthetic of Starfleet. In fact the class stands out as a sore thumb. But, not if we consider the following; Starfleet, and the Federation by extension, are not human-centric organisations. Vulcans, Andorians. Terralites, Deltans and many other races make up the bulk of the UFP. And that would include Starfleet as well. What if the Oberth was designed by one of the other member races? What if it was their take and logic on what a starship should look like and be? A move away from the Jeffries deign lineage and something new?
You see, I could see that happening in a real UFP and Starfleet. It wouldn't be so human-centric and human-designed. Engineers from different cultures, races, with different ideas of concepts and design logic... If it worked, it would be... Awesome. So the Oberth, we could argue, was maybe a Deltan design, or Vulcan or some other race. Just not human. And possibly built by them as well and delivered to Starfleet (and private civilian groups, as we see in TNG).
On that basis, a 250-meter ship works in my mind and will be my jumping off point. Now, I know I'm building the ship, but I would be interested in people's thoughts on this. Hopefully, I won't be putting up so many text-based posts in future, and will keep it simple and more image-oriented.
Anyway, your thoughts, share them with me. Consider this a weird Vulcan mind-meld through the screen!
Two hundred and fifty meters is a good place to look. But as has been pointed out on this forum (twenty years ago?), the most likely thing about the lower hull, isn't. I agree with that long ago poster, that decided that the lower pod, was a warp drive - my take on the original post, so long ago is that it is a production prototype Transwarp, which is why the smaller upper warp drives are there.
X classification is experimental.
Y classification is production prototype.
I just can't see the Excelsior being the only ship to have Transwarp.
X classification is experimental.
Y classification is production prototype.
I just can't see the Excelsior being the only ship to have Transwarp.
I know who that OP is (hi aridas!), and I think yes - on a smaller ship that was a good idea. In fact earlier in this thread when I did my work on the revised version of the Oberth I built the pod to be unmanned, with the crew using only the upper hull.
But with a larger ship, we have more room to play, and if I can work out how a turbo lift gets down to it then it's game on!
I have a lot of thoughts on the Transwarp Drive. The last 25 years or so I've shared most of them, mostly when I was working on the now lost Ingram Project. In a nutshell, I think the "transwarp drive" was a success, but caused the warp scale to be revised, which is why it's different in TNG. Ships still travel at warp, but true Transwarp has not been achieved (yet).
The other class to consider with a new propulsion system is the four-nacelled Constellation Class. The lead ship of that (NCC-1974) was launched before the Excelsior. I would think it's safe to say that Starfleet were experimenting at the time. But on all of its new ship classes? That is an issue. The fleet is still going to need ships to do the work, if we tag them all with experimental drives... who's out on five-year missions? The Enterprise had effectively been retired before the events of TWOK and was being used for training purposes only. She was 40+ years old when Starfleet decided to decommission her (TSFS - yes, I know Marrow says 20 years, but I think that's a reference to the refit). The Enterprise was over a decade old when Kirk took command. She wasn't a young ship when we first saw her. Hell, we never saw the ship with her original Captain in the centre seat (Bob April).
You have to have ships of the line out in the field doing things, reliable ships - ships that aren't necessarily cutting edge, you need workhorses. I see the Oberth in that category. If the USS Columbia from TMP is an Oberth, that would indicate that Starfleet was messing around with a new propulsion system over a decade before the Excelsior and that Transwarp was a success because so many Oberths were built... It's just, we never hear anymore about the project after TSFS, and background info states it failed.
What about the other idea - the lower pod is mission-specific and can be swapped out. That is a nice idea. Unsupported though. All Oberth have the same pod.
If I can get a turbolift connection to work between the two hulls (and a bigger scaled ship kind of allows for it), it will change how we look at the lower hull. It may seem illogical to do things that way, but sticking with the idea that the class was alien-designed, we can state it was logical to them. And was a success given how many ships were in service by TNG/DS9.
Food for thought.
Last 2D image before I start blocking things out and we go 3D:
Settled on 250 meters, and we shall see what comes of it. If need be I can scale up/down as required - but the purpose will be to have a canon outline that can fit all the things we know this ship is supposed to have.
Still open to suggestions and ideas, I may use them, I may not. Don't be offended - be inspired, learn Blender and have a go! I swear it's fun. (Ok, I'm not using Blender, that's a suggestion because it's free.)
More later.
Settled on 250 meters, and we shall see what comes of it. If need be I can scale up/down as required - but the purpose will be to have a canon outline that can fit all the things we know this ship is supposed to have.
Still open to suggestions and ideas, I may use them, I may not. Don't be offended - be inspired, learn Blender and have a go! I swear it's fun. (Ok, I'm not using Blender, that's a suggestion because it's free.)
More later.
If you can show me where they are, I will happily use them - just don't cheat and use the TNG painted version where they were added as an afterthought on the lower hull. Strictly looking at this from the Movie era.
More soon
The original filming miniature didn't have them. The ones shown on the CG-generated profile are conjectural. We don't even know if the lower section is habitable or just a massive automated sensor package. The Oberth class has always been a bit of an enigma in the starship world, from its very design to its registry number.
