All,
Thanks for your input and ideas, muchly appreciated! Been laid up in the hospital for a procedure and thus, have been pretty much out of it for a while... doing better now.
Back to JJ's 1701...
Much of the design elements I tried to incorporate were influenced from these very boards. So Mad Man, Dennis, and everybody I humbly thank you for my inspiration! (All of you are purveyors of good stuff and true keepers of the flame.)
Church's design was a tough one to get my arms around... The saucer section is not as tall as previous incarnations of the "Big E", which lead me to thin the secondary hull some to match. It was this "thinning" that lead me to the "diving board tail"/shuttle bay area. (Which had an unintended "Excelsor"-ish look to it.) I tried very hard at keeping the neck line which had in my humble opinion a very 66-67 Ford Mustang "Fast back" look to it. However, the automotive ethos didn't work for me so I went with tried and true designs from the past. (The Mustang "Notch back" if you will.)
The secondary hull Church designed got some important details absolutely correct. His shuttle bay doors were curved instead of straight ala; TMP Enterprise. This allowed the doors to be conformal with (in) the curve of the secondary hull. (Kudos...) The front end however, was a real nightmare. I struggled and struggled trying to get it to "feel" right, to no avail. It was here that I got sort of lucky. Frustrated with what I consider "studio imposed" size and dimensions, I imported my drawing of the TMP Enterprise and scaled the whole thing to match... OMG! It basically fell together at that point...YES! I even felt I had an inkling of what Church was trying to do with the design. (The moment of alpha.) Copied down the windows and the airlocks...yes...yes...OMG! (It actually works.)
(At this point I'm yelling and jumping up and down doing an "End Zone" dance around my den... My wife figures I've gone even farther off my rocker and sticks her head in to see what in the hell is going on. Our hero tries to explain, but to no avail... She gives me the old "Yes dear." and heads back to the TV... Sigh!!!)
Meanwhile, back at the CAD Program, our hero starts on the nacelles and pylons. Grotesquery at it's finest... what's wrong here? The "Locust Pylons" have got to go, because they look at best... silly. However, in ship's profile, they have a line which looks pleasing to the eye and almost feel right...almost. Ah! Its that stupid curve and the fact that the engines sit way to close together! After straightening the pylons and much trial and error I worked the engines out board to about the same position as seen on the TOS "Big E"... Ok. But I liked the fact that the lower pylon attach points are roughly center lined on the secondary hull... (Long time ago I worked for Lear , and learned about things like carry through spars and banjos.) Church and JJ used a type of carry through spar for mounting the pylons to the secondary hull. The banjo (like the instrument) is a hollow circular spar and many times stronger than the carry through type of spar. So yet more trial and error brought me nearly back to the TMP design. Structurally, I could also use multiple banjos for the neck to the secondary hull...hum-m... ah, done and done!
Now for her ..."Ample nacelles..." (How do you argue with a line like that?) That leaves me with the ships engines...what to do? Well, Church's concept of what the engines should evolve into looks correct somewhat. (It's the old turbo jet to turbo fan design/look which appeals to me as an aviation designer.) The execution not so much, however. The forward end of the current engines look like something hacked off a WW2 P-40-A. So after some searching I settled on the Boeing 737-800 for inspiration. The nacelles have a flattened bottom for ground clearance, which I turned over and made them the top. Again the requisite thinning of the foreword nacelles was done for conformity with the rest of the ship, but all else except overall length was done to follow the existing design of Church/JJ.
The 1701 is a work in progress, with several areas like the main sensor/mount on the secondary hull exist that I'm still not happy with and are stuck in place for now. I sprinkled the design with elements from all of Star Trek for my own flavor. (Being an old school fan of 67 years I'm happy with it thus far... more to be done down the road a piece)
Regards,
Chuck
I did something similar with my Defiant model. 
