www.ditl.org

The most interesting ship design exercise I did was as part of a Star Trek on-line role playing game called Star Trek Québec. Seven original ship classes had been invented and drawn by various members of the club but most of them were never detailed. As a result, there were huge inconsistencies like two ships of the same class having crews of 200 and 800. Many original technologies had also been invented. Some were deeply integrated into the storyline and mostly made sense, others worked much less.

My job was to get it all to make sense and to give every ship class something different and interesting. The fact that it was kind of done backward made it very interesting. For example, the reason I invented the Kébec class' "warp stabilizers" is simply because I had to explain why the ship had "wings" on top of it.

I also had to detail the station at the center of the club's story which had also been designed by another.

I'm no longer involved with the club but I think it's still running and the site I built is still on-line. I'm posting a link to it in case you're interested. Unfortunately, there is only a French version of the site but I'm sure you can still appreciate some of it without understanding it all.

http://sfrd.lys5.com/

Hope you find it interesting.

I like the Independance ... very unique.

DarkOmen wrote:I like the Independance ... very unique.

I'll second that. It's far-off enough to seem completely different from any thing the universe had seen, but doesn't seem completely unreasonable. Though the 2 nacelles in the middle are odd, but I guess with the different modules it almost makes sense. Honestly I'm a little bit curious why we don't see more modular tech. Imagine a series that various parts of the ship actually change from mission to mission. It'd be wild.

I like the polaris. I think the independence is to streched out.

Teaos wrote:I like the polaris. I think the independence is to streched out.

Yeah it's a little funky. But think about that: Three different large modules. Essentially a miniature floating starbase.

I distinctly remember as a kid/young teen thinking that a huge warp-capable multi-purpose, multi-platformed ship would be wonderful. Sure, it's a lot of fuel, etc, but so what. Build it as a mobile platform that could go between a limited number of systems at say a maxiumum of warp 6. But within this, you have essentially a small version of a starbase with a few thousand crewmembers/civilians, and could interchange these parts as needed.

If it was slow and only travelled between a few systems what would be the point of it. May as well make it a star base and then make proper starships.

Mobile platform for various operations in a limited sector. Throw one that could go between close sectors for which building a full base may not be fully practical.

We do see some modularity anyway, take the Nebula.

However, I do havea lot of ideas for modular ships, but most FAIL due to bulkhead issues, docking issues, size issues and a few other issues, but I will gladly re-try to make my modular starbases and modular ships when I get a 3d artist helping me