Greetings!
Welcome to Scifi-Meshes.com! Click one of these buttons to join in on the fun.
Quick Links
3DKlingon Empire D7 Redux
JWWright171
Posts: 0Member
I thought I'd take a stab at the groundbreaking Jefferies design for an aggressive alien starship.
The problem with tackling this is that the original was such an effective design, it's difficult to improve on. The D7 really looks alien. In an era of flying saucers and rocket ships it was (like the Constitution class) a radical departure from anything seen before and still holds up to this day.
So I have some rough geometry, I may do a more radical D7 variant in the future but for this one, I'm faithful to the proportions of the original design:
The problem with tackling this is that the original was such an effective design, it's difficult to improve on. The D7 really looks alien. In an era of flying saucers and rocket ships it was (like the Constitution class) a radical departure from anything seen before and still holds up to this day.
So I have some rough geometry, I may do a more radical D7 variant in the future but for this one, I'm faithful to the proportions of the original design:
Post edited by JWWright on
Tagged:
Additional credits
- Icons from Font-Awesome
- Additional icons by Mickael Bonfill
- Banner background from Toptal Subtle Patterns
© Scifi-Meshes.com 2001-2024
Posts
Joking of course but the greeblies on the back remind me of exhaust pipes.
Cheating? Well... that's a strong word... I like to think of it as kitbashing! Yeah, that's the ticket!
It does save some time, but not as much as I'd hoped, I keep editing the greeble packs to get them the way I want.
Well, I was joking about that. Hence, the winking smiley.
Oh, I dunno about what 'Star Trek' looks like... I'm pretty much ignoring what many consider to be the 'established' aesthetic, a lot of which I'm not crazy about at all.
Often my models, like this one, are meditative design studies, I let the geometry take on it's own life and design direction as I go, probably not the best way to model. I might try working from a design one day.
As I'm working on this, I'm getting the idea to do a very organic, highly curved version of this hull configuration... I'll try and finish this first.
More to come!
I notice a lot of smoothing errors at the moment - do you deliberately leave these until later in the modeling process?
Looking forward to seeing more of her.
More plating!
It's looking really good. I like the K't'inga inspired plating.
I love the Klingon Ships.....
You know what your beautifuldesign and render makes me think this ship is: An economy class battlecruiser. I see this ship as the klin gons acknowledging they don['t have the tech to produce a ship that can match a federation cruiser one on one so have decided to build a massive number of ships that were designed to be as cheap and easy to mass produce as possible. Think of Liberty ships in ww2 or the soviet t-34 tank. Cheap designs that win thru sheer numbers. (BTW, the t34 was cheap and easily mass produced but still well armed and effective.)
So I see this as a klingon effort to design an attrition ship meant to beat the federation in a war of attrition thru sheer numbers. I mean, if you look at "errand of mercy" "friday's child" and "Elayne of troyius" it's obvious klingon battlecruisers were vastly inferior to federation ships. Apparently they could not produce a ship of equal quality and power to a federation ship, so they were goingto go with mass nhumbers of cheap ships in a war of attrition.
I'm not saying your ship looks cheap or it's a bad looking model, I wish I could model this good and this fast. (Dammit all!) It's a beautiful model that's likely better than anything I'll ever make. I'm just saying the ship looks likeit was designed to be built rapidly and easily at low cost to produce a mass attrition fleet, hence straight lines and angled replacing curves. Maybe the klingons were building these before the organians came in and stopped the war.
SoI could see this as an attrition unit or an "Economy battlecruiser" design.Very beautifuly designed and modeled. Wish I was that good.
Oh, your modeling and greebling are just great. In fact they're so great I'm stealing a few of your details to put on a ship I'm working on, OK? I've been thinking of attitude control thruster systems for a more hard science ship I'm modeling and a few of the greebles you had on the rear hull just jumped out at me as the perfect solution. No hard feelings about the lift, OK?
The detail bits, as I stated earlier, are from a few free greeble packs, to save time, but I ended up editing them heavily to look the way I want, which still saved a little time, but not as much as I had hoped. You have some good, imaginative ideas, very interesting!
Quick update, beginning work on the boom and forward hull:
But yeah, when I design something I try to create a backstory for it that validates it in the universe it's part of. I considered your ship worthy of my attention and came up with that background for it if you want to use it.Hey, I'm ripping off one of your greebles, you can use my storyline if you want. As I see it the ships we saw in the series would remain mainstays of the klingon fleet, with the most experienced and successful crews and officers on board. these are the 'peon' units in RTS terms. They could also be made of cheaper, more abundant materials that were strong enough to serve as warship hulls but were harder to work and form than the more expensive and rare materials the original klingon vessels were made from, hence the simpler. angular shapes.
As to the forward thingy, in TOS it was a sensor system. Even klingons need to see, you know.I suppose it could be a disruptor cannon on an assault cruiser as an assault cruiser may not need long range sensors since long range sensor data would be provided by the higher grade klingon ships in a task force that would honorably and heroically stay in the rear of the fleets in battle.. Klingons had photon torpedoes in the movie era, after several years of the organi9an peace gave them time to develop reliable torps or honorably and heroically steal the tech from the federation. (Get the impression I'm not much of a klingon fan?)
I suppose you could argue this vessel has photon torpedoes in limited qualities as they're not quite perfected yet and have a nasty habit of failing to detonate at all or detonating before you want them too, so naturally they get fitted on the disposable units.:devil:
Another option is to make 3 variants of this. One has a big sensor array for guiding the fleet and would bge in small numbers and expected to not usually be as aggressive in combat as they're important units but under armed.
Another variant could have a disruptor cannon. The third gets the somewhat unreliable photon torpedo system. These would usually be assigned to the least experienced, valuable crews with officers that have below average records.Assignment to one of these ships would generally be regarded as a :flippy:
Hope my ideas help you, I always wanted to be a sf writer, I still have a little talent for making up stuff like that.
The navigational deflector has become the torpedo launcher. It started firing torpedoes in TMP and has since. Whenever we saw disruptors/phasers fired, it was from somewhere around the nacelles (TOS, TNG) or the little details to the left and right of the big bulge thing under the flat part of the "head." (TAS) Some schematic sheets label those details as disruptors. However, the navigational deflector never fired disruptors, just topedoes.
Evil, I'm torn between going full geometric or spherical for the fwd hull... this is kind of a compromise... the facets on this one might end up looking like an armor plated spaceframe, I hope... everything is an experiment.
I always imagined the hexagon bumps under the top decks were phaser emitters:
Designs for warp ships that have no apparent nav deflectors (like the Reliant...) always bothered me, so I put twin nav d's on the main hull for this design. I might go with a more hexagon shaped tube for the torp/disruptor emitter.
Stay tuned, more to come!
One issue I had with the photorp launched on the klingon ships was that since ST2 the torps were actual p0hysical objects. Look at the size of that tube and think how big a torp to fill it would be. The command pod could hold like what, 2 or3 of them? And how hard would it be to load them into the tube?
Now the render above makes it look far more polausible for that to be a torp tube if the torps are physical o0bjects.
Says who? In The Animated Series, they fired weapons, either phasers or disruptors. In TOS, they did nothing.
These were the closest thing to official blueprints for the original klingon battlecruiser that ever existed and they list them as tractor beams. They also show 9 phasers on the battlecruiser that were never used, one explanation was that they were actually low power defensive phasers meant to shoot down incoming weapons, which is why they were never used in the series, they were short range defensive phasers.
http://www.cygnus-x1.net/links/lcars/book-of-klingon-plans.php
As to firing phasers and torpedoes in the original series, you can't go by wha was aired at the time. The SFX team did whatever they wanted without regard for continuity or accuracy.How many times did they show phasers firing from the planetary sensor dome and photons firing from the same spot? They never looked at the blueprints, and sometimes had phasers firing in pulses like torpedoes.
As to the enterprise, the official blueprints which existed for a long time listed the ship as having 6 phasers in 3 banks, 2 on the underside centerline, the other 4 in two banks on the upper side of the hull. The torpedo tubes were under the bridge.
http://www.cygnus-x1.net/links/lcars/blueprints/constitution/constitution-08.jpg
I generally go by the stuff done in the starfleet tech manual which served as the basis for a lot of trek fandom until paramount made the movie. I don't consider a lot of the tng era stuff to be canon as rick berman openly wanted to defy long establish "fan canon" and in fact often went against it just to declare it null and void.
Love those Cygnus blueprints, that's a fun site. Got some more work on the fwd hull, it might be time to think about what the command deck should look like.