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OMG! Design the next USS ENTERPRISE (Offical Contest)
Fuzzy Modem
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I just can't say no!
http://www.startrekonline.com/enterprise
[edit] I've read through the rules maybe a dozen times now, and I'm confident that the "Assets" that may not be used elsewhere are existing Star Trek assets, like if you wanted to use a sovereign for scale. The "Submission Image" must be created originally for the this contest specifically, but the rules say nothing about posting it, or wips elsewhere afterword. Now that the submission period has closed, I can restore my wip images to this thread. I couldn't find them all, but you should still be able to see the design evolve. Thanks again for all your help
Original text follows:
The idea is to make her really big, almost starbase sized, and to join the warp nacelles to the saucer.
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The Enterprise is by definition a vessel used primarily for exploration. This Enterprise would serve the same purpose, but also support a small fleet for long, dangerous expeditions.
[edit] It's been pointed out that I need to be working within the confines of an unfamiliar game universe. I'll do some research, but this idea^ doesn't seem to be logistically implementable, and I'm back to square 1.
The Enterprise D was so much sleeker and more futuristic than it's earlier counter-parts. Why did the design aesthetic seem to get more utilitarian and... ugly after TNG?
http://www.startrekonline.com/enterprise
[edit] I've read through the rules maybe a dozen times now, and I'm confident that the "Assets" that may not be used elsewhere are existing Star Trek assets, like if you wanted to use a sovereign for scale. The "Submission Image" must be created originally for the this contest specifically, but the rules say nothing about posting it, or wips elsewhere afterword. Now that the submission period has closed, I can restore my wip images to this thread. I couldn't find them all, but you should still be able to see the design evolve. Thanks again for all your help
Original text follows:
The idea is to make her really big, almost starbase sized, and to join the warp nacelles to the saucer.
[edit]
The Enterprise is by definition a vessel used primarily for exploration. This Enterprise would serve the same purpose, but also support a small fleet for long, dangerous expeditions.
[edit] It's been pointed out that I need to be working within the confines of an unfamiliar game universe. I'll do some research, but this idea^ doesn't seem to be logistically implementable, and I'm back to square 1.
The Enterprise D was so much sleeker and more futuristic than it's earlier counter-parts. Why did the design aesthetic seem to get more utilitarian and... ugly after TNG?
Fuzzy Modem on
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Posts
We can't even critique the only image you have, because you've scrapped it. :?
The only advice I can think to give at this point is to try and think out of the box a little more. This ship looks way too similar to the older version.
Hard to argue with any of that. My bad. If the mod wants to lock again I'll wait until I'm well into the process before starting again, but I should have some basic shapes out by this afternoon.
I've been criticized recently for not showing enough of my early wip, so I guess I was starting with that in mind, and over-shot the mark.
I was actually thinking the other direction, disconnecting the nacelles from the saucer and reverting to something closer to the original.
It's a hard place to be, because If you move away from the same basic shape, you've failed to create the Enterprise, but you want it to be distinct enough to get noticed. Right now I'm thinking circular saucer, and sleeker than the D, but I think I need to work in a more subtle direction. It should still be instantly identifiable as the Enterprise at first glance.
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[edit] As to the contest guidelines, I haven't found any yet. The page say's it won't begin until Dec 9th, did you see something I didn't? If so I'd love to know. Right now I'm really just doodling, specific guidelines would be very helpful.
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Currently staring at this picture:
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While I'm pondering, I've modeled the most recognizable aspects of the enterprise, and I'll now start deciding what characteristics I want to move away from.
I'm doodling on paper too, but there are advantages to looking at things in 3D, where you can easily move shapes around to see how best to arrange them.
I haven't been able to get my scanner working with Windows 7, but maybe I'll just take some photos.
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Paper doodles:
I may be moving in a direction now, with the orthos on the bottom.
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I'm learning that Star fleet design philosophy has changed in specific ways since TNG.
I admit to having bailed on Trek in favor of Babylon 5. I've probably missed 75% of the material that came after TNG (movies excluded) so it's not surprising that I'm having trouble.
I was a huge trekker as a kid though. TNG was on every day after school during the only time I had to myself before my parents came home. I had toys, books, schematics,scale models and talked about all of them pretty much non-stop, to the irritation of my friends and relatives :P
I won't win this contest. I could visualize it with the other two, but not this one, and that's fine. I'm still jazzed. As long as I've been doing 3D modeling, I've never made an Enterprise.
Anyone else planning on entering?
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I think I need to re-imagine the nacelles completely. I want them to overlap the saucer section like they do, as I haven't seen that done before, but I think they need to be longer, extending farther back, and less like tng/tos.
I'm also torn on the current no-neck design. I'm tempted to make it nice and thick like the excelsior, but it seems that would be continued movement toward the past, rather than extrapolating the designs of the future like I ought to be.
I've been looking at this ship:
-and I think it's the closest to the direction I want, but with everything swept forward.
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Another paper doodle:
I'm pretty happy with this one
You should post you wips here
I kinda agree with Arden on this - I think you could get away with really pushing the design, here. You could probably get pretty crazy with the bulk of the ship, and maybe keep the nacelles similar, and it would still come across as "Enterprise".
The latest WIP seems to have unnecessarily long nacelles, and again, the design is much too identical.
Maybe make some black and white silhouettes (of just the ship from an aerial perspective) and play with shapes...make shapes that you think are too crazy, too out of the box, too out there. Usually when I'm doing thumbnails, a lot of the first iterations are kinda cliché - they're the first things that pop into my head, and they're not incredibly interesting. The more you do, though, the more you challenge yourself - and I've discovered that even after I've made a silhouette (#5) I think I'm going to go with, later on I end up making something that I find a lot more interesting (could be #15, #30, whathaveyou).
And another low poly model revision:
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Minor progress:
None of these objects will make it into the first real draft btw. I'm just trying to establish shapes, curves and proportions before I actually get started.
Just my two cents.
I'd recommend doing a ton of different designs (just quick, tiny sketches). Give some multiple saucers, cut the saucers in half and use three of them, connect the nacelles to the ship differently (like your original idea), change the shape of the necelles, give it a flattened body, etc, etc. Any and all ideas you can come up with.
I think this, as opposed to just tweaking one basic design, will flex your creative muscles, and eventually you'll find an idea or two in the mix that will set you apart from the crowd.
And try to make sure it's got a unique silhouette, like the popular Akira class (Here: http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/File:Akira_class_ILM_CGI_model.jpg)
Keep it up! I'm watching with interest!
I think after I model each hull section I'll stitch them together, then experiment with smooth settings and subdivided surface conversion. My hope is to get something a sleeker than the Enterprise D.
I'm still learning Maya's modeling tools. For a decade I modeled in Rhino, then exported to Maya for texturing and rendering. I left Rhino behind a couple years ago now, and I find there is still a lot of Maya I just haven't scratched the surface of yet.
Fortunately, a buddy sent me a Maya textbook. Thanks man
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Minor changes:
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Gak. Apparently I just re-created this:
Coming up with something that hasn't been tried before is proving rather difficult.
-but does it look like an Enterprise?
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I think I'll move forward with this horseshoe shape idea, which I'll refer to as the "Entusi" from now on (Homeworld players will catch the reference
I may abandon it eventually in favor of something more recognizably Enterpris-ish, but in the meantime, what can I do to make it look bigger and more like the traditional Enterprise without loosing too much of it's distinctness?
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And no, I don't feel I'm ripping off Homeworld any more than they ripped off the SpaceJockey ship from "Alien." Crescents and horseshoes are fair game.
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Made a few minor tweaks and re-uploaded.
EDIT - I have no WIPs to show yet >_>;;
But your latest ship looks like the Ushaan class already in the game. Here: http://www.startrekonline.com/ships/ushaan
But I'll admit, your ship looks more federation than the Ushaan :P
No, it's a good thing. I need stuff like this brought to my attention so I know which direction NOT to go. I appreciate it.
I think by focusing on the horseshoe shape (which that design lacks) I can still come up with something distinctly unique.
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Playing with the idea of 4 nacelles.
It's starting to look a bit like a tOS Romulan bird of prey.
I think I need to go longer/slimmer to avoid this similarity.
Here's an idea: put the engineering hull above the saucer section. Or, get rid of the saucer altogether (GIS A7 aircraft, with the deflector being the air intake).
As much as I love Trek and the Enterprise, the saucer, engineering, two nacelle design is tired. It's too iconic to change in a serious way (seriously, look back at all the bitching done about the NX class ship). Think outside the box. An Antiprise would be more interesting than another ship with the same general Federation shape.
Just my $0.02.
Getting pretty far out there...
Does anyone know if saucer separation is supported in-game? I'm guessing not.
I may keep the same basic shapes though.
Are the curved nacelles kosher?
The first one I drew is the big one on the left. After that I decided to retreat back to the familiar enterprise silhouette, but keep the stacked saucer/horseshoe, as you see on the bottom right.
The doodle on the top right is the only one I really like.
Some real-world goings-on in the design and construction of contemporary naval vessels which may influence your thinking about how Star Fleet might have gone about designing a new vessel: currently the trend around the world is towards smaller hulls designed to operate in littoral environments and away from larger blue-water hulls. Smaller ships are cheaper and easier to build and operate. They're a more cost-effective solution to a lot of the maritime challenges we're facing in the 21st century -- if we remember back to the incident off the Somali coast when pirates boarded MV Maersk Alabama and held her captain hostage in a lifeboat, we had to send an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, U.S.S. Bainbridge, to deal with the situation. It costs the American taxpayers millions of dollars every day to operate Bainbridge, while it costs the average pirate company in Somalia a couple hundred dollars to mount a raid. Additionally, the situation was finally resolved with a .50 caliber rifle, a marksman and a bullet that costs a few dollars. We don't need to tie up a strategic asset like a 9,200 ton warship armed to the teeth with tomahawk cruise missiles every time a handful of mopes in a rickety boat and a couple of AK-47s decide they want to try and run down a cargo ship.
The problem with a smaller ship is, obviously, you can fit less stuff on it, so it has fewer tactical systems built into it; or, if you put a lot of tactical systems into it, you have to go into battle with fewer or smaller warheads because there's not a lot of space for more munitions after your initial salvo. Some navies approach this engineering challenge by purpose-building its ships for a single tactical role -- some boats are designed to provide an umbrella of air-cover with more surface-to-air missiles while missile boats provide surface-warfare punch.
The U.S. Navy tends to prefer hulls that can multi-role because our experience has been that on a long enough timeline, invariably the commander of a warship will be asked to accomplish a mission outside of the design specifications for his vessel. Multi-rolling is difficult with smaller hulls. One of the solutions to this challenge we're looking at is increasing the amount of modularization in our future hulls. Hulls are built with large open bays, and various missions packages can be loaded into those bays as the situation demands. So if an LCS is operating inshore near the border between North and South Korea, for instance, we know from recent events that they have used small submarines to torpedo ROK-flagged patrol ships in that area, so we can anticipate that there might be a need for an anti-submarine warfare package to be loaded into the mission bay. Before sending that same ship to the straights of Hormuz to enforce navigation rights for ships entering and leaving the Persian Gulf, we can remove the ASW package and put in an mine-sweeping package if we believe the Iranians may attempt to mine the straight.
As that might apply to imaginary spaceships? Maybe think of a smaller, faster starship that's deployed for months at a time, not years. Imagine a saucer section that's essentially a framework for plugging in various geometrically-identical mission modules which can be hot-swapped either in starbase or by a support vessel, so the ship is capable of being customized for the mission at hand without having to try to specialize in all possible missions at all times.
I'm going for kind-of a flying animal vibe.
[edit] Reading and digesting SammyF, response soon.
[edit] Arleigh Burke was my great uncle
[edit] Here is a thought, what if the lower horseshoe shaped section of the saucer is removable, and can be replaced with any number of mission specific modules, the default being heavy firepower?
That's an interesting concept, but impractical as far as storage of the module units or transport by a support vessel would go. For replaceable mission modules, at a bare minimum you want something that's large enough to be independently functional but small enough that it can be shipped in bulk with multiple other mission modules. Ideally, if you were in charge of designing and procuring multiple mission platforms for a single fleet, you would probably look for designs that utilized mission modules which were interchangeable between platform designs -- in other words, in a perfect world you would be able to detach a medical support missions package from an Excalibur-class starship and plug the exact same module into a Scimitar-class starship, preferably in less than 24 hours. Or whatever you want to call your hypothetical starship classes.
You can't do any of that with a removable horse-shoe shaped section because it's too big and too bizarrely shaped. On the other hand, if you have a saucer section that looks kind of like a bicycle wheel with several spokes radiating from a central axis, and you wedge interchangeable pie-shaped modules between those spokes to fill in the gaps to create a saucer, that would give you smaller, more-manageable and more-interchangeable modules that would add an element of authenticity to your design -- it's the sort of thing a room full of engineers designing a new ship by committee might imagine.
That's a really good thought. Makes me think of Trivial Pursuit game pieces. I don't think it's the path I'll take though. Maybe someone else wants to work in that direction?
Regardless of whether I make the horseshoe detachable, I am thinking I'll cover it with weapons, and put the impulse engines on the back of it. The upper saucer will be the primary habitat area, and will have lots of windows and maybe an arboretum.
Where should I put the bridge?
I really like this version.
Also, it is fucking huge, so I won't inline it.
Linky
Also, you asked earlier if saucer seperation was supported. It is, but is only available on the Vice Admiral cruiser retrofits.
Klingon ships if you're interested...
Also, if you're still interested, here's an obscenely long Let's Play thread from the Something Awful forums. The guy does a good job of making the game entertaining by removing about 90% of it from his videos.
That's AMAZINGLY helpful! Thanks!
All one object, just extrusion modeling and a smooth.
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[edit] Gonna slim the neck a bit too.
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Drawing on my screenshot in photoshop:
I can't help but agree with NightDragon. Those two images have been my favorites so far. They're very streamlined, very cool, and don't really remind me of any ships the federation has already.
You've tried other horse shoe saucer sections, but maybe just take one of those two designs and use it as the saucer section? If not, they stand alone nicely too.
As for your latest design, it's side view silhouette looks crazy disjointed and out of proportion. Even though there is no air in space, you want your ship to look aerodynamic to appeal to the eye (gotta win those votes in a contest!) One of the designs you were getting inspiration from even went so far as to include fins lol