Hi, long time lurker, sometimes commenter, never poster.
So I am working on an excelsior inspired, Galaxy class sized behemoth of a ship. I am using Shapr3d because, try as I might I can't get my head around traditional modeling. I am quite aware this may leave me with crazy topology to deal with once I move to blender to light, texture and render, but I will deal with that later.
I sketched out the basic shapes, and then cut the whole thing in half, then I will make the interiors and then merge it back together.
This is a basic perspective side view to give the overall layout and scale (with the flat 747 image in there) the actual scale will be decided once I kinda validate my deck layout (see later pictures). The warp engines are a placeholder, made when I was about 2 weeks into using Shapr3d and did everything wrong. Left just for the basic dimensions.
Front orthographic view. It kinda has always driven me nuts that warp nacelles are so floppily attached, and the modern trend to "we can make any shape now, so lets go crazy (think Enterprise E) thing" drives me nuts too, so you can kinda see that in my somewhat blocky design.
I made all the decks, and then I realized I didn't leave much interstitial space for utilities, Jeffries tubes, and that kind of thing. But at the same time, this
@#$%^er has enough decks that I could just use entire decks for that, or more of the interior of the ship without window access. At this scale, with Picard being 5'10 this comes out to 8 foot ceilings
Another shot of the basic deck layout.
Deck Layout and scale.
The main hanger deck is almost ridiculously huge. I haven't measured it out, but it might fit something Oberth sized in it.
The grey section on the bottom will allow for half cylindrical shaped "mission extension" modules to be added - extra matter/antimatter for trips to the LMC or Andromeda for instance. Or even additional cargo/science modules for stuff inside the federation.
Ok so where does this fit in canon, so that people know what to criticize and what to just sort of go with. Ok imagine a few things:
1. I am not sticking strictly to Star Trek history - I am more extrapolating from now, to say an alternative universe (from Star Trek) where NASA/ESA eventually converge on similar principles, and the major federation players are still around, but it'll be more reality based aside from us having discovered warp drive.
2. Design wise, it'd be like if TNG never happened (with its grey everything) but the excelsior type design was still extended out over a few classes to something Galaxy sized.
3. When I render it, I am going to for as photoreal as possible. It will be overexposed when near a star, it will be self illuminated in deep space (or on the night side of a planet in orbit).
4. I am going to model as much, but not all of the interior as I can - pretty much just in service of what you'll be able to see from the outside. For instance, the 8 warp cores this will have, will be placed intelligently near each other in the engineering section, and I'll figure out what the major portions of the ship are, but I am not going to model the 24th deck, third bathroom. The neck grill and other grill like things will be for cooling, and I'll try not to get into any Cerritos "wait, how do they get to that part of the ship?" kind of things.
Oh, I didn't forget the impulse engines. 2 will be in the back of the nacelles, and I'll be cutting 2 into the back of the primary hull.
Thanks! I hope to update this pretty regularly.
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I like the Enterprise E! I actually think that one was more reasonable than anything other than the B from a sturdiness of appearance standpoint. The J, not so much. In that case, yes, it horrible. But, I agree that things should look plausible. (Never look up the xcv-330, you'll cry)
I never figured that the warp drive exerted force onto the ship by way of the nacelles. But lots of people have their own head-canon. (and, if you are placing impulse engines on the nacelles then it will need the strength.)
I actually really like the doubly-supported nacelles just visually. I might try to fit the shape of the struts better into lines of the ship. The racetrack oval is a bit discordant. Maybe somthing like this, where the lines of the nacelle struts follow the lines of the saucer.
And I'm glad you're thinking about deck sizes. Ex Astris Scientia once pondered how the Oberth class gets people from the command and engineering saucer to the science pod. It was interesting trying to justify the sizes of things.
Oh and I haven’t even made a bridge module yet…
I make my deck-to-deck height 11 ft. 8.5 ft. for the living space and 2.5 ft. for structure and utilities.
Although, sometimes it doesn't seem like enough. Maybe 12 or 13 ft. would be better.
But you should really use metric.
Yeah, so since shapr3d doesn’t let you model things larger than 1 KM (in all fairness, this is meant for like, machines that are smaller than room size really.) I had to pick a scale, but i think I confused myself… so the scale was 10 cm = 1 foot. But then I think i made Picard 72 cm as 1 cm = 1 inch. So… what I actually did was make Picard 7 feet and change, and the space between decks is really 10 feet not 8 feet.
I have to sort this out. Take away is that this ship is either #$%^% huge or mother @#%$^ huge. I’ll sort it out before the next update.
Edit: Ok, so here is what it is. Its 10 feet (100 cm) between the center of each deck. The ceiling height comes out to 8.5 roughly. There we go. I can bring ceilings down if needed, but i can just instead hand wave it away since I am not building this for actual construction. It puts the rough dimensions as 2600 feet long and about 550 feet tall.
But, 10 ft. is about right. Typical floor-to-floor height in a concrete building can be 10ft. 8 ft. would require the floors to be very thin or the living space to be very cramped.