Ringship

[RichMerk]

Lately I've been into the so-called "Ringship" Enterprise. So little is known about it. There's an awesome 2011 SotL image: http://drexfiles.wordpress.com/2010...gin-2011-sotl-–-sneak-peek-02-mark-rademaker/, and I know some other people have built their own versions. I thought I'd try building something similar, with my own twist. Here's what I have so far...

And after a bunch of penis jokes, I decided I needed to build a very rough approximation of the rest of the ship just to see if the horror of what I had unconsciously created would subside...

 

[Herkimer Jitty]

I reach, brother. It's very sleek and stylized, with a bit of deco/streamline flair. Groovy stuff, man.

 

[RichMerk]

Thanks!

The front radar thingy:

 

[Atolm]

Pure Win there mate!

 

[RichMerk]

Wow, thanks, Atolm!

I had a lot of trouble with the pod on the port side, which I decided to make a hangar deck pod. First I had an elongated ovoid with clamshell doors in the front, but that didn't look good, then I had this weird flat-topped aircraft carrier thing stuck on the side sort of like on the Macross, with a little control tower and Quonset huts, but that looked terrible, and finally I tried to do a sideways sort of mushroom starbase shape, and that seems to fit.

And here's the basic pointy hood ornament thing on top of the big rings, which also have a little detail now.

 

[TheLoneRedshirt]

Wow! That is a beautiful design for the ringship. I've seen several designs that I like, but this one really has style!

 

[publiusr]

One possibility would be for a second smaller pylon to connect to the forward ring even as the larger, more rakish dorsal in back rises up-ward.

In this way, the smaller inset rings have no connections to one another, allowing perhaps a glowing ball lightning discharge to float in between them, say?

 

[RichMerk]

Thanks, guys.

I finished the basic modeling and moved over to Carrara for the uv mapping and texturing and all that fun stuff.

 

[BK613]

Nicely done.

 

[RichMerk]

Thanks.

The front radar thingy:

From this angle you can also see the edges of the underside markings, my little tribute to the original Enterprise.

 

[The Axeman]

Looking great, the sensor has a very glassy look to it thats really nice.

 

[RichMerk]

Thanks, Kenny. I found a closeup of the SotL picture online somewhere (though for the life of me I cannot find it now) and tried to copy the look of the sensor dish. The original was more metallic and less glassy than mine, but I like how it turned out.

 

[RichMerk]

The starboard pod:

 

[T'Girl]

Lots more decks of windows, especially on the sphere, than I've seen on other incarnations. How long do you see this being?

 

[Clawhammer]

Hmmm I really liked that retro metallic you had on the first couple of renders. It felt right.

My only concern after seeing how many windows the dome has, is the now somewhat HUGE panorama front "window".

I certainly like the style of it it, it's a bit 50's and that I love.

Keep up to good work!

P.s. my worst problem with the XCV-330 was the neck connection, I really wish I could have asked Jefferies why the cylinder had to split directly in the center of the enviropod, instead of connecting to the upper or lower part of the pod. To me it looked overcomplicated in engineering terms.

 

[RichMerk]

I'm not really sure how long it would be. Judging by how the windows turned out, I'd think it might be one and a half times as long as the TOS Enterprise?

That retro metallic color was just the default modelling color used by Hexagon. Those weren't renders, just raw screencaps.

The row of lights in the nose (and the two blue rows on the sphere) aren't meant to be windows, but rather rows of lights. Maybe I need to actually model those instead of just using textures.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

A very interesting take on the "ringship." As some of you know, I have a personal interest in this as well, though I chose to model the "Spaceflight Chronology" version instead of the original Jefferies version.

One critique I got was that my version was larger than most people expected it to be (actually longer than the Enterprise, but not by too much).

We have reason to believe that Jefferies' design was intended to be a smaller crew (basically, as I recall, a crew of about a dozen, total?)... which would have eliminated the need to have lots of sets, reconfigure existing sets to fake other sets, or to have lots of (costumed) extras walking through the corridors.

But, of course, that ship design was never intended to be used in Star Trek. So when, in 1979, we saw it (distantly) on-screen, there was a ton of variability available.

I, PERSONALLY, like the idea of this being a bigger ship than the Enterprise, at least insofar as dimensions are concerned. It seems that your ship would actually carry a larger crew, so it's really many times larger than the Enterprise. Much more than 1.5 times.

I mean... the sphere you have there has twelve visible rows of windows. And there are at LEAST another ten decks in there. So that's a 22-24-deck high sphere, more than twice the depth of the Enteprise's primary hull, and nearly 2/3 as large in diameter.

This thing is probably something like 14x longer than the Enterprise, in other words.

I think that's probably "overkill," if it's intended to be a predecessor to the Enterprise. I'd be inclined to give that sphere eight or less total decks, if it were me.

That said... having a HUGE ship isn't the same as having "more advanced ship." So the fact that this ship is just massive doesn't inherently preclude it from being Pre-TOS.

 

[RichMerk]

I came across your design a few days ago. Very nice work. Yup, mine is meant to be large. Let's see... If we assume the sphere is about 22-24 decks high, then that makes it as tall as the Enterprise. So putting the two ship side by side, to scale, would look something like this:

Based on the windows on the sphere then, the ringship would be about 4 times the length of the Enterprise. Of course, only the front pods are habitable. All the rest is engines and stuff. Maybe a crew of 500?

Mine's not really meant to be the Enterprise predecessor. I think I'm taking it out of the Star Trek universe altogether.

 

[sojourner]

So, what is your take on what the "eyeball" window on the front of the ship is? At this scale it's obviously not an actual window.

 

[RichMerk]

Well, I'm not really sure. It's obviously not a window like the SotL version, just a big bronze dome with a row of glowy blue lights across it. Maybe it doesn't need to be anything beyond the ship's nose. Or maybe it's time I Googled around and came up with some plausible tech on how their FTL works, and then maybe the dome will get a purpose. Right now I just like the way it looks.