Ah, the 2250s in the Prime Universe revisited in 2017 . . . what could go wrong?
My goal here was to do a no-thrills, no-frills simple design set in the aforementioned time frame that would fit into the Jefferies' aesthetic, and to avoid embellishing it with my own let-me-see-if-I-can-make-it-more-realistic ideas. I used
Charles Casimiro's blueprints for guidance.
Yes, there is a Miranda/Stargazer/Centaur look about it, not that this is meant to be in that lineage. The saucer is just shy of 90 meters in diameter, and 8 meters at the sidewall to be congruent with the TOS Enterprise. The nacelles do not share the same scale and are just what looked right.
I wanted saucer separation ability, with the saucer as lifeboat/landing craft, the bottom being a heat shield with the lower sensor platform able to be jettisoned. I don't know if I'll keep the heat shield idea because as a heat shield, I'm loathe to make any openings in the mold line.
The impulse engines are just a stand-in, just emitting circles. And I so badly want to put details in that nacelle inset, but alas none existed for, I believe, The Cage model, which Casimiro notes as the First Pilot in his prints. I'm staying true to that.
Twin deflectors/long range scanners in pylon pods. I didn't want to hang a D/LRS off the saucer, or perch it above the saucer, or hang it under the Engineering Hull in the way of the core jettison plate, so the pylons were the only place left, giving it a vintage bomber look. The nose of the pod is a swappable module.
In the forward, lower corners of the Engineering Hull are phaser bank pods, and I'll render close-ups of those later.
I thought this ship might carry at the most three shuttlecraft (who knew there was so much conjecture and controversy over the dimensions?), and thought I might go with a upper hatch and the launching shuttle raised by an elevator. However, I kept in mind the radial bulkheads (going so far as to model dividers every 22.5 degrees), and found the only solution would be a tiny hatch at the saucer rim, and I did not want to do that. The other option was at the sidewall, hence those doors, which are not unlike some aircraft hangar doors. I thought about Boolean differencing the inset, but decided to extrude faces instead, and the option to forego the subdivision smoothing because creasing the edges afterward gave unsightly effects. It looks okay anyway. I have not put doors on the starboard side, but I may for symmetry as a cargo loading door.
I need to add the grills to the pylons, and I want to add detail to the Engineering Hull, and see if booleaning some windows doesn't cause a goddamned mess. The nacelle booleaned inset came out great.
Oh, and that weirdness in the Bussard cap is caused by the Fresnel in my nodes. I'm using the refractive index of diamond, but it looked the same in plexiglass. Could the reflectivity of the internal cage. Or its an effect of the caustics. And I do plan to fix the nav lights after I place some more.
Name, registry, mission, and history? Haven't thought of it, might not, just concerned with the design elements so far.
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I don't see it as a Hero Ship, but definitely as a utility ship.
renegade back 001.jpg
Not a whole lot of modeling done over the last two days. Turns out it was the translucent shader giving me the weird result on the bussard cage. I had two running into mix shaders, and replaced them. I ended up mixing a subsurface scatter with a white diffuse, mixing that with a glass shader, and mixing all that with a refraction shader. I could probably tweak it for more frostiness.
Added: a boxy, conduit-like detail under the nacelles, inspired by such features on the missile display at the local Air Force Air Museum, round details on the engineering hull above the phaser pods, and lamps over the doors. And I extended the nacelle spires.
Those nacelles are begging me for some blue glowing bits, but I'm going to be resolute in my discipline not to. At least not until I'm done and playing around with alternate ideas.
Compositing and Color Management attempt at film appearance.
As I see it, starflet was losing too many expensive to build ships and too many expensive to train crew. The steps from this to the connie involved a decision to save as much of the ship and crew as possible in a crisis. So, we get the engineering hull connected by the dorsal interconnector and a saucer holding impulse engines and life support to serve to save the crew if the engineering section, where all the scary dangerous antimatter stuff goes on, has a major boo boo.
Likewise we get a saucer capable of pulling off a one time landing on a planet to get the crew to a possibly livable environment.
Your nacells don;t have the rounded rear ends which according to the technical manual were "space matrix restoration coils" so maybe this was before startfleet became "spatial fabric conscious" and added them to largely undo the effect the warp engines had on space in their wake. I'm not sure what those door looking thingies are though.
So yes i do see this as a reasonable and plausible precursor to the connie class. I also see it being revived as the basis for the reliant.
A job well done, sir, in both design and modeling.
My in-universe thoughts are these. Given the 1701 was launched in 2245, we can conjecture that it's construction period could extend more or less from the late 30s to the early 40s. It was a production model. Was the 1700 also a production model, or was it first the prototype? If a production model, was it built at the same time, or before the 1701? If it were also the prototype for the class, it would have had a longer build time, and we could push that to the early to mid 30s. However, it is also possible there was an unknown prototype, or that the 1017 was the experimental/prototype. Given any of these options, we can speculate keels were laid for prototypes at anytime during the 2230s. This implies a research and development, and design phase taking place as far back as the 2220s. Now, if we accept that the USS Enterprise during the 2260s is an initial design product of the 2220s, then it is possible for smaller craft designed afterwards and no further than the 2250s to have more advanced technology, such as the Oberth. I could have gone with something that looked more advanced that the Enterprise, but I wanted to do something from the same technological family.
The elements I chose are from the Enterprise blueprints (from the link in the OP) designated "1st Pilot". As far as the restoration coil goes, I like to think there is a spherical unit inside the end cap, that was covered by this plate, and then upgraded to a grilled plate, and lastly upgraded to a partially exposed unit. I omitted the S-curve geometry to leave it a feature unique to the Constitution class engine model for what ever reasons we can speculate, while not necessarily meaning there is a drawback or inefficiency with this particular engine model.
My reasoning is that in the 2220s there were technological breakthroughs utilized in starship designs across the board. As stated in an above post, I've decided this to be a utility vessel, not to be used for exploration, research, or combat, but for servicing, maintenance, and transport of light cargo and personnel, to stations, starbases, and outposts. It would be only a precursor to later vessels of its type. I picture the Sirocco class as being in the same technology and design family as the Miranda and Constitution classes, commissioned in the same era, but not a prior design that lead to them.
As a utility vessel, it may be performing more hazardous duties more often, and designers foresaw a need for emergency landfall. If the need was rarely encountered, upgrades and refits would redesign the heat shield geometry to make better use of that space, leading to something more akin to the Constitution class. As is, it can eject the warp reactor, and jettison the nacelles separately, or with the pylons. In the event, one or all of these units have been jettisoned, the ship can use its impulse engines to execute orbital changes, and jettison the engineering hull prior to atmospheric entry. I also like to think that non-propulsive warp fields facilitate spacecraft maneuvering, and a thruster based RCS is only needed in emergencies, and are otherwise covered with squibbed panels.
I think most of the forward quarters of the primary hull interior is going to be open bay with emergency pressure doors and force fields, work space floor with room to pull in buoys and faulty array components.
The pylon to nacelle fillets are quite some trouble. Probably take another go at before it all said and done.
Improved the nav lights, added tractor beam emitters, and made a rough-in of an Inspection Pod whose design I'm still iffy about. Looks too "new".
Using dual spot lamps to create an effect of what I think might be more realistic. I couldn't devise a node set-up for a single lamp to use a texture image as a gradient for the "flashlight" effect, which may not be accurate anyway. Given the amount of strength (which Blender insists is in wattage) I had to use, the fictional light source is more in the category of a search light, than a spot light.
Can't plan for window placement without knowing where the floors and ceilings are.
Trial run for the registry. Flood lights were a bit of a hassle to place. I'm not a fan of phantom light sources.
Texture testing.
My color management setting were screwing up my logo. Had to set that to default.
Some detail for the side of the engineering hull.
Now adding windows. The new Boolean add-on seems to work well. They are about a meter by a half meter each, and are carefully planned not to intersect radial bulkheads. I may add rooms and make the emissive surface glass, but for now I have a theory that the window is one way to allow looking out, but treated against sensors looking in, but some photons escape, but are spectral mixed.
It was a bit of work for just one large, non-detailed room, so I don't know to what degree I want to proceed. I don't plan on doing the interior as it would be more work than what I want to do, eating up a lot of time. I think they look better from a distance than emitting surfaces.