A few things, as I need to get more popcorn for the ongoing debates...
• The
Centaur is both large and small. Adam detailed it to be a tiny ship (scaled to the
Reliant elements), but has since come to feel it works better scaled to the
Excelsior elements. So everybody's right. I personally favor a large
Centaur, same way I favor a large
Defiant.
• Regardless of coloration, the ball features on the megaphaser mounts I have only ever seen used as movie-era phaser turrets. I agree the yellow markings nearby are lacking the details present elsewhere on the model for me to consider them RCS emplacements, but being proximal to both the lateral turrets and the primary barrels makes me take them as general "there are high-energy weapons systems 'round these parts" markings.
• Tangential to above: I would love to see a remaster where the standard staggered phaser blasts still come from the lateral turrets, but when they fire the main cannons in the nebula battle, I think it would look and sound spectacular to have an effect similar to the
Defiant's phaser cannons.
And the main thing I wanted to say, on-topic. Our Lady the Pregnant Guppy. Been going over and over a bunch of reference images of the original build, and the
Hood and
Repulse redecos. I had forgotten just how much I love the original detailing and have come to dislike more than ever the alterations made for TUC. I don't like the new bridge, I don't like the new deflection crystals, I don't like the new aft box... I saw your at-the-time current progress on the inboard profile views and the internals work better than ever in earlier passes.
One bit jumped out at me, though. The trench. Some of the unofficial drawings sort of take it into consideration, but not, I feel, all that well... This:
...looks to be, eyeballing hull thickness and such, about a good deck-height chunk taken out of the bottom of the saucer -- certainly more than half a deck. But Doug completely forgot it on his MSD:
It's not a new problem. The original
Enterprise had this much more substantial cove taken out of the underside of the saucer:
But Matt completely missed it in his cutaway:
And so did Doug, for that matter...
In the
Enterprise's case, the outer lower saucer rim deck cannot communicate directly with the coreward portion. It can only be directly accessed from the deck above. I'm pretty sure the portion of that deck on the
Excelsior is similarly cut off. Wanted to make sure you took that into consideration.
In other news, you've created about the most accurate
Excelsior drawings ever, and I'm wondering if you'd be okay with me using them to start laying out a 1:350 model of the ship to go with my Polar Lights
Enterprises and my
Cygnus scratch-build.