Nah, Patrickivan is right. Too much detail on the outside. Those runabouts looked more like they were inspired by ILM than Boeing -- and I say that as a huge fan of DS9. I still prefer the MJ school of thought for Trek designs; keep as much as possible on the inside where you can get to it in a shirt-sleeve environment. But given production values of the 1990s, I wonder how likely that would fly when the expectation generally seemed to be that more detail on the outside made it look cooler and more futuristic. And these were values shared by both producers AND the audience! I wish Trek had kept a traditional clean exterior throughout all its incarnations. For the Federation, at least, it could have been as iconic as two warp nacelles and a saucer section.
I have to agree with Psion, but there are a couple of things that stand out about this, one is the size of the nacelles vs the rest of the craft, they seem awful small. The other is the size of the ship overall. This looks like it would carry a large cargo, or a number of people. This seems like the kind of ship you'd drop shock troops into an area with.
The NCC1701D didnt exactly have huge nacelles, it still went pretty fast. I'm thinking of putting a big door at the back, for cargo/troop deployment.
Yeah, that would be cool. A nice edition. You would think that there would have to be some sort of way to get everything out manually, in case of power failure.
What if additional "pods" could be attached to the ass end of this thing... Sort of like the Work Bee cargo train in TMP? That would add to it's flexibility while maintaining Trekian design thought.
What might quell the crits of the "small" nacelles is if you did an X-stretch of each nacelle inboard toward the CL, which would preserve the Y-thickness but give the nacelles some of the flattish qualities of some of the other structures on the model (assumes the Z axis is fore-aft). They already do a little interpenetration with the lower hull, and this would maybe visually anchor them better. Just a little bit more stylistic continuity. Sounds like art school talk, don't it? Rick www.spacemodelsystems.com
I will certainly give that a go, if anyone is qualified to say what would make a nacelle look better its you. As for the art school, I wouldn't know, back in school I was always told I was never any good at art, so once it became optional I dropped it. I often wonder what my old art teachers would make of my work now, or if they still think only true art comes from a pencil or paint.
Ook-ook, I like. Are the nacelles parallel to the centerline? They looked a little angled in one of the front views. Not a big deal, just curious. One other nitpicky little thing would be the RGB values for the RCS thrusters. On my monitor they look a bit too green; normally we spec'd a yellow ochre that was more orangish-brownish. How's that for clarity? And then you can soften all the edges more, and add landing pads to the bottom of the chassis, don't talk with your mouth full, and stop tracking mud across my nice clean kitchen floor. Rick www.spacemodelsystems.com
OMG, OMG...! It's Rick! It's RICK! OMG! Rick, I've got to ask you, what do you think about people that try to interpret your work and the work of Matt Jeffries? You know, people that say things like "Well.... I think Matt wanted to do this, or Rick really wanted it to be like this....." Doesn't that drive you nuts? Anyway, sorry for highjacking the thread Bio, I just had a Fangasm when I saw that the Rickster had replied to the thread. Sorry.
Hey hey hey - settle down or I'll have to get out the neuralizer. It's a big sandbox, and we all get to play in it on certain levels. I don't have a problem with people fiddling with stuff I originally designed; keeps the brain active and healthy. With the historical TOS-type material, though, I think there's a point of diminishing returns in the discussions, particularly those regarding the Enterprise bridge or the ship models or eensy-weensy details that may have changed over time. I don't think it's a wasted effort, since there are occasional discoveries that pop up, but since Matt's not around for clarifications, we can only speculate about why things were the way they were, and move on. And now back to your originally scheduled program already in progress. Rick www.spacemodelsystems.com
They look fine flattened out- Other then visually stimulating, I don't see the technical value of them being like that. I too, was wondering if they are angled down- so that some part of the nacelle are in view of each other- as it was surmised that warp nacelles had to be. You know what I mean- I hope. I'm not being very specific- I only had 5 hours sleep after being up all night. .
They are parallel, I put a little bit of a taper in so they were thicker in the middle than at the top and tail, thats what may give them an angled look, I'll make my next render a dead on shot from the bottom. I just went for bright yellow until I could get a proper texture going on them, I will probably try and get the RGB values from an image from the show, and match those, but thanks for being very specific with the colour! Yeah I realised a while back the chamfer I put on the edges was too subtle, and they still look sharp, not sure how easy smoothing them off at this stage will be, but it will be a learning process. Any ships I should look at for landing pads? And I'll be sure to keep talking with my mouth full and walking mud into your kitchen to a minimum.
Looking pretty spiffy! If it was me, I might taper the warp nacelles towards their forward end to more resemble the nacelles on Voyager, and similarly trace the 'wing' edges of the shuttlecraft. But that's just me nitpicking. Great looking stuff!!
Nice. I suppose you could look at the undersides of ships like the Delta Flyer or Voyager's "speedboat" shuttles for the landing pads. They're just simple short runs of corrugated material that imply a non-skid touchdown pad. The DS9 runabout had long runs of corrugated stuff along the nacelle bottoms, and IIRC the AMT kit reproduced those. You could do short ones p/s about 1/3 of the way back from the nose and two slightly longer ones about midway, parallel with the center of mass along the bottom frame surface, mimicking main gear and nose gear of a heavy jet, but in this case you'd have two nose pads. You can certain ditch the idea of two on the frame bottom and go with a single pad on the centerline near the nose, like the DF had. Rick www.spacemodelsystems.com
The model is coming along great, but I have to say that I would much prefer if only the two nacelles on the inner underside of the ship were retained, and not the new additional ones. The original ones look nice, and having ventral inboard-tucked nacelles is a cool new twist on things. The new nacelles look a bit unsightly, and detract from the flow of the overall design. But that's just my opinion. Rick, was it the intention of the original design to have the warp engines be tucked into the underside of the hull like that? If so, it looks cool, and it's a shame we never saw it realized.