3DKlingon Beholder WIP

JRXTIN

For a while I've been considering what I wanted to do for Klingon ships. I'm not really interested in designing another version of the D7. IMO the TMP K'tinga is close to perfect for that design. It bothers me that it has balls on its chin, but there's really nothing else I'd want to change about it. I'm also not sure what to do about the Klingon Bird of Prey in the "Sovereign Timeline" (what I'm calling the timeline created in "First Contact," because there are so many Enterprises creating new timelines you have to distinguish by the class name). I'm sure that ship didn't exist in TOS, and the Prime timeline Klingons didn't get it until TMP era, but they had to have one in Enterprise. Despite also having a Romulan Bird of Prey that was a completely different ship. I don't really know how to square that circle, unless someone had gotten into the crashed Borg sphere before "Regeneration." It's not implausible, you'd think the sphere would have showed up on Vulcan scanners. This is a big can of worms to open, but if someone else got into the sphere first and spread Borg data around the alpha quadrant, it would also explain why the Romulan BoP looks more like a TNG era ship than a pre-TOS ship. What a mess though. It was fun seeing the Klingon BoP in Enterprise, but the continuity problems it opens . . .

I thought I would try to do an original Klingon design, something that could be as iconic as the BoP and make more sense to encounter than the big D7. So here's what I came up with - the Beholder, successor to the Enterprise era Raptor- a combination of the SR-71 Blackbird and an RC-135 Rivet Joint (and an AWACS). It's very fast, it has a long range, and it has a big sensor dish. It sees all, and it may be able to use the dish to strike from extreme distances. I'm not sure yet if it would be a disabling attack like an ion cannon, or a destructive energy blast like the Enterprise-D tried to pull on Locutus's Borg cube, or something else. It can store enough energy to make one good attack with the dish without losing all power. It can still transform to flight mode and run. Can a Connie catch it? It'd take everything the Connie's got. The Beholder's dish attack is a threat to a Connie, but otherwise it isn't as strong. Unless everything goes it's way, a Beholder won't beat a Connie in a fight. For lesser ships patrolling the borders of the Federation though, a Beholder is a dangerous opponent.

I'm tentatively going to say Beholders have a crew of 50-100, depending on the mission. If encountered in unexplored territory, the bulk of the crew could be scientists, much like a Connie. It's also a good ship for special operations missions though, and can be found carrying troops instead of scientists. Or maybe it can't be found - with it's electronic warfare suite, it may appear to be in one place while actually being in another. It's not a ship for duking it out, but it takes a unique skill set to defeat it. Most Federation ships can't do more than drive it away, if they can even find it.

JRXTIN

Got most of the modelling done on the warp engines, and roughed in the transformation to listening mode. I'm starting to think the wing arrangement is too much like B5's White Star. Then again the four nacelles and everything else creates a different look . . . well I'm happy enough with tonight's progress. Overall I'm more pleased with this than the Romulan Bird of Prey, although it may have too much of a post-TNG feel to it. The short D7 nacelles just aren't going to cut it here though. I'll try to get more of a TMP look into the body. I'm for scrapping the TOS smoothness, I don't think there should be a great visual differentiation between TOS and TMP era Klingon ships. The Klingons probably upgraded the D7 internals a bit, but the outside can can look mostly the same.

Aresius

It looks interesting.