StickPrise

[erifah]

Are those two extensions on the sides of the neck meant to be docking ports?

That's not what they started out as. I originally had intended to have some sort of a ring there.

But, as I stared adding in details, the ring looked like two booms with stuff going on.

I decided that they were, indeed, either docking ports or landing platforms, or a combination of both.

I started to think, "why on earth would it need docking ports on booms?" Well, maybe it's in a variation of a reality where transporters can't be used as willy-nilly as we usually see in Trek. And maybe there are spacecraft you don't want inside your shuttle bays, and/or they are too large and/or cumbersome to sidle directly against your primary hull.

Looks instable. The middle section reminds me of proposed NASA spacecrafts. They are not very agile like usual Trek ships use to be.

That's actually the look I'm going for - instable, somewhat fragile...

I'm looking to achieve the same effect as they did with TOS Enterprise, with it's long, thin struts holding massive nacelles - the fact that they couldn't work by our standards suggests mysterious, advanced futuristic engineering that makes it all possible.

Both ideas sound good to me. I really like that it looks fragile, and unusual... Trek ships had started to look very crunched in towards the end, and I think they started looking like unibody cars.

I don't know what the scale of this thing is going to be.

I don't think bigger=better, like so many designers seem to think -look what kept happening to the Enterprise.

I like to think that this sucker got big because it HAD to, for whatever reason/mission. So, there should be engineering compromises. Things shouldn't look perfectly proportioned.

Remember the original DC-9? Small, elegant passenger plane. Then, McDonnell-Douglas modified the original airframe into stretched variants, such as the MD-88. You had this freakin' long fuselage with basically the same stubby wings and engines.

That's what I want to do with this. It needs to be made with a bunch of off-the-shelf components. I think the warp nacelles are too big.

 

[erifah]

Thinking out-loud here, it's almost like I'm a proponent of "kit-bashing done right."

We've all know about the way it is done wrong - cutting and pasting parts from different drawings, with no regard to scale, proportion, artistic style, even line thickness!

On the other hand, done with awareness, it works, and it parallels the real world. Pratt & Whitney, Rolls Royce, General Electric all develop turbofan engines for aircraft, but each proven powerplant ends up being used on varieties of different planes, depending upon the customer's needs.

So, I don't see why you can't do that with particular sets of, say warp nacelles, or bridge modules. Heck, the way I first learned computer art 15 years ago, was to take a piece of someone else's work, such as a nice warp nacelle, and build a new ship around it, replicating colors and line styles as much as possible.