psCargile

If you don't hear the theme music in your head seeing these renders, something has to be wrong with you.

Pretty good. The greebles look just enough.

Now that is nice. You made the design fit the TMP era better than the TNG.

These methods are new to me and a LOT different than how I did them in TrueSpace.

I believe that's everyone experience. I came off of Rhinoceros to Blender 2.64 back when booleans were trash. Vast improvements over the years, and sometimes I think my Rhino models were better because, like you, I was using a lot of booleans to get the geometry I wanted and there was no inset face options. My earlier Blender models had too many of the trademark Inset Faces/Extrude look, which made the models look far less impressive to me that what I could get out of booleans. However, extruding insets certainly have their uses, and I do use them. The method I use for panels can be a little more work, but it doesn't restrict you to the mesh wireframe, and for precision it best to use guides such as single arrow empties and mesh circles (you can't control the number of segments on an circle empty), and of course, the wireframe of the object you are paneling. And while this method is great for visual rendering, I cannot see it being used if you want to merge all your objects into one mesh, or if you want to make a printable model. I can see some major headaches with that. But the good thing that there are more than one way to get the results you want with Blender, and that matters is how good it looks when its done.

You can look over on my Repulse to see the panels I had made.

Oh, and Discombobulate is new to me. I've seen in it the menu, but never knew what it was for, and it looks worth trying out. Thanks for sharing that.

Fantastic work.

A way to do nondestructive panel lines is to make panels from a plane and give them a solidify and bevel modifiers. I usually collapse all the verts in a plane, snap it to the surface I'm working on, extrude certs, fill, and then duplicate a vert for the next panel. This method gives a lot of freedom of shaping panels, plus you can make areas to extrude for panels sections that extend higher than your height in the solidifier tab. And like all meshes, they can be duplicated, arrayed, and mirrored. One reason I do not favor inset faces is because I use the bevel modifier heavily, and tight insets decrease bevel radius. And being nondestructive, you got room to make changes. Or they could be used as a means to plan destructive panels line by insets or other means later on.