I've mentioned before that I never ever do Star Trek ships.
Never.
Okay, almost never. This will be my second one.
It's named S.S. Anthem. It's Federation, but not Starfleet. She and her two sister ships: Canticle and Overture are proofs of concept for various drive, weapons and material technologies.
I've started and restarted this a few times last week. I think I know the direction I want to go with it. Although I've thought that before.
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The egg-shaped things at the ends of the phaser strips are kreiger-enhanced phaser cannon. The standard phaser array discharges into the converters for the cannon.
The hull material is Variable Opacity Tetraluminum. The idea is to create windows where needed, without having to poke a hole in the hull. I was thinking the hull material might also be used as a storage, on-demand wave-guides, and/or slow-processing media for the ships computer.
...I've decided to rethink things again. Oh, well.
Have I mentioned that I find Federation designs difficult?
Federation designs can be hard to do because your trying to work within an existing design language but still trying to be orginal. Don't worry about it too much though, your doing great and is clearly a Federation ship while still being very orginal.
I've played around with the nacelles. They're almost where I want them. Looks like I'm going in an Art Deco direction again. Anyway, I was thinking since this ship is meant to test a soliton warp drive, why not have a low-power soliton version of the RCS? That's what the oval cut-outs are.
I added bunches of stuff to the secondary hull, then started over twice - maybe three times. I'll probably do it again.
It looks good.
Something with the file had gone wonky, so it was locking up and crashing a lot. I tried copying all the layers one at a time to a new drawing, and hoped the problem with the file got left behind. So far it hasn't crashed.
I hate it when stuff like that happens with files. It can drive you mad trying to figure out what it is. Hopefully, rebuilding the file did the trick for you.
done.
To your question... It's a testbed for new technologies (specifically the Soliton drive) built by cooperating organizations like The Daystrom Institute and funded by the Federation.