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I'm creating a thread for this to separate it from the other Star Trek projects I do, because this is a project I feel should stand alone. For those who don't know, I've built a lot of TOS Constitution class ships over the years. I don't know how many, I've done them in Truespace and Lightwave. But, I'm using Blender now and I need a Constitution class. But, I don't want to try to recreate the filming models. Not because it's difficult, at this point I can say with no real ego that I can get pretty close to accurate with little effort. That's mainly due to the amount of references available. There are great blueprint sets and lots of photos. So, doing the ship as it appeared on the show is a good thing, but just kind of mundane. Boring, if you will.

But, back before there were great references, before the internet age, there was basically only a couple references for this ship as far as schematics go. Those were the blueprints and technical manual drawn and written by a man named Franz Joseph.

For those who don't know, Franz Joseph was a German technical artist. In WW2, he devised a way to create pretty accurate schematics of enemy planes based on photos. If the photos had a size reference in them, he could even calculate the size. Franz wasn't a Star Trek fan. But, his daughter Karen was. In the early 1970s, she was a member of a local Star Trek fan club. Eventually, the fan club got big enough that they started having meetings. Franz went with her for the first meeting and saw where people in the club had made reproductions of props from the show that were very crude. He told them they could do better, so they said "show us." At home, Karen grabbed some slides from the show and Franz went to work creating schematics of props from the show, starting with the communicator. A week later, he had a few schematics drawn and they invited some members of the fan club over and they went crazy over the schematics. Then they started giving him requests for stuff to draw. He quickly realized they wanted a technical manual, so he set about making one. Using slides, pictures, the show in syndication and any other references he could get, Franz made schematic drawings from Star Trek, the first work of its kind being done by someone not connected to the show. He sent some work to Gene Roddenberry, and Gene loved it and encouraged him to continue. The Star Fleet Technical manual was published in 1975, as were a complete set of Constitution class blueprints that Franz had drawn.

For the longest time, these were the best references we had. To remind people, the actual ship was in the basement of the Smithsonian and had some inaccurate parts on it. So, he couldn't even look at the actual model. He had to get by with the series, photos and slides. Over the years, people have criticized his work as being inaccurate, but I dare any of them to do better with what he had available. I'm sure they couldn't. The more accurate sets of blueprints were done by people with access to the 11' model who could take measurements from it.

Franz's work was even used in the films. In TMP, during the establishing shot of Epsilon IX, you can hear the USS Columbia being ordered to rendevous with the USS Revere. They're both identified a "scout" ships. Both "scout" and those two ship names are straight out of the tech manual. Also, the Dreadnought Entente was calling the station. Both "dreadnought" and the ship name were from the manual. For TWOK, they actually did a series of animated displays for the bridge of the ships and they used pages from the tech manual, so the scout, transport and an outline of the dreadnought all appear on screen and are technically canon. And finally, in TSFS, when Checkov says there's an energy reading from inside Spock's quarters, there are blueprints of the inside of the ship displayed, they're from Franz's blueprint sheets. More recently, a ship obviously based on the scout/destroyer design from the tech manual appeared in Strange New Worlds.

So, I decided to build the Constitution class, but based on Franz Joseph's work. I have both his technical manual and blueprints and I love them, even if they are inaccurate. I started this a few days ago and this is where I am:





And, some screenshots:







This has been a fun one so far. The secondary hull on the filming models was done on a lathe. However, this version seems to be more based on Matt Jefferies' drawings. The sides and bottom are more bulgy than the top, especially the bottom. So, needless to say, there was some Sub D involved.

As for the rest of the thread, after I do the Connie, I plan to do the other ships from the technical manual, as well as the Starfleet Command space station. I'm only going to use the blueprints available that are based on Franz's work, and the technical manual as my references. I'm not using any other blueprints, photos or screenshots. If anyone says anything is inaccurate based on the filming model, I'm simply going to refer them back to the post. Also, accuracy is in the eye of the beholder. I can say that a ship that looks more like Franz's work appeared at least once in TOS, and that was the USS Constellation, which was built using an AMT model kit:



The AMT models of the day weren't highly accurate, but they were based on Matt Jefferies' drawings, not the filming model. It looks a lot like Franz's drawings. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if franz used the kits as a reference.

Here's a quick look at the ship with modeled grid lines on the upper saucer:





And yeah, I think I'm going to keep them and do the rest of the ship in that treatment. One thing I like about newer Blender is their improved smoothing options. Previously, I remember I had to add extra geometry to have a smooth saucer with these nice crisp lines. However, they've really improved that a lot to where that's not necessary. In fact, doing these in Blender 3.3.1 is faster than doing them in Lightwave 2018. This is due to Blender's better selection tools (something I've always liked about Blender) and also the fact that I can do these using only 1 tool, as opposed to the 2 tools required in Lightwave. One thing Lightwave definitely wasn't known for was its simplicity, especially in its tool sets and user interface.

Thanks a lot, guys.

I did another name and registry for the model. I really wanted one named USS Heracles. So, I went with that and the registry NCC-1729. In the tech manual, NCC-1729 belongs to the "USS Farragut II." I think the idea was that the Farragut, mentioned in the episode "Obsession," was destroyed in the line of duty and it was replaced. However, there's no indication in that episode or in any other episode that the Farragut was destroyed. So, I swiped the registry.

I loaded up my old mesh into Lightwave to look at the inner cut on the nacelle and I realized I was missing some vents on the inner side of the pylons, so I added those. Then I did the boxes on the side of the nacelles and added some RCS thrusters and the inner cut.






I'm going to keep the look of this ship consistent with my Enterprise mesh that I imported, so that they can look like they're from the same fleet. Essentially, TOS with a few added details. However, it should also fit nicely with the Franz Joseph Constitution that I did a while back.

Preliminary tests of the bussard collectors. I may tone down the reflections later, or I may not. They are supposed to be glass, after all. But, I'm pretty happy with them.

I haven't touched this thing in days, because I was doing other things. I'm off work today, so I cracked open the file and redid the back of the nacelles. I didn't like the shape of them before, plus they were inaccurate compared to this image:



So, I redid them and the shape is much closer to that photo:

This is supposed to be a planet with a lot of volcanic activity.

I finished up the details on the upper saucer. The only way any of this will change will be if I decide to do another detail pass later. But, that’s not likely to happen, as Starfleet ships aren’t known for having an excessive amount of exterior details. And, even though this is a reboot of sorts, there’s no reason to stray too far from tradition on this. If I wanted to do something with gobs of detail, I’d do a ship from another race (like the Klingons) or just switch to another franchise or do something original.

This is what the sensors look like with colors, lights and the dome:





It makes a huge difference from a distance.