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USS Hummingbird - Work in Progress

Posted: Sat Nov 13, 2010 9:09 pm
by b-guy
Hey all,

I think I posted this in another thread, but since I've actually been able to sit down and work on this for a few hours today, I'll start a new thread.

Name: USS Hummingbird
Registry: NX-? (Undecided. Any suggestions?)
Class: Hummingbird-class Prototype
Role: Courier/tug
Decks: 4
Maximum warp speed: Warp 9.5
Weapons: Wayward-ish or so.
Other goodies: Quantum slipstream drive. (That doesn't usually work right.)

I've started to put a little more effort into the Hummingbird, as it's been coming up more than I expected as I write the first few Halfway to Haven stories.

The basic design of this ship was a cross between Voyager and the Wayward model I half-finished for Alan a couple of years back. The nacelles are almost identical to the Wayward, just stretched out. The ring nacelle was added due to the fact that the ship is supposed to, in theory, be able to scout safe routes through quantum slipstreams, then tow larger ships through.

This project has actually been very educational, from a modeling and Photoshop standpoint. Usually, I'm working with perfectly symmetrical and round objects, like Silverado's saucers, waystation, or Haven's main hull. To make the Hummingbird's main hull, I actually used a technique that was very much like drawing contour lines on a map, then having the software contect them and create a three-dimensional surface. It turned out fairly well, IMHO. The downside was that the deflector grid and such can't be drawn in photoshop with nice, easy circles and lines. So I finally sat down and learned how to make more complex paths and shapes.

I still need to do weapons, the lower side of the hull, windows, sensors, the deflector dish and a few other details. The windows is actually something I'm shifting on. Originally, I wanted to have a few rows of windows, Voyager-style. But now that the model has some paint on it, so to speak, I'm thinking I might just do a single row of windows on the edge of the saucer...sort of like on the Enterprise-A. It think it would make sense, since it's such a small ship.

Oh yeah...I also decided the thing was too tiny for a shuttlebay. So it has a sort of custom (read: easy to model) shuttle clamped into a socket near the rear.

Thoughts? Suggestions?



http://www.khobrah.net/silver/images/vimy/HumNov13a.jpg
http://www.khobrah.net/silver/images/vimy/HumNov13b.jpg

Re: USS Hummingbird - Work in Progress

Posted: Mon Nov 15, 2010 8:40 am
by b-guy
Finished the hull plate patterns yesterday. I thought they were going to be really time consuming, since the ship has an irregular design as opposed to the perfect circle of Waystation/Silverado...but it turns out that Photoshop has this handy 'Warp' feature that lets you just drag an image around and distort it however you like.

http://www.khobrah.net/silver/images/vimy/HumNov14.jpg

Re: USS Hummingbird - Work in Progress

Posted: Sun Aug 07, 2011 11:27 am
by b-guy
Well, the Hummingbird-class is pretty much finished. There will be a couple of shots up on the Halfway to Haven website when it goes up (which is why I suddenly had motivation to work on it again), but in the meantime I've posted some images on the facebook page.

This little ship has definately grown on me.

Re: USS Hummingbird - Work in Progress

Posted: Sun Aug 07, 2011 11:55 am
by borgcrazy
Looks good; I can definitely see the Intrepid-class influence in the design, which isn't a bad thing given this ship's classification. It definitely looks better than those God-awful ugly orbital tugs from canon Trek.
One question; how big is the Hummingbird compared to, say, Voyager? I ask because at four decks, I'd expect the hull plates to be a bit bigger looking (thinking back to my own sizing issues with the veqlargh-class) but it's your design so if you're happy with it, then awesome.

Re: USS Hummingbird - Work in Progress

Posted: Sun Aug 07, 2011 3:59 pm
by b-guy
It's a lot smaller than Voyager, which is part of the reason why I decided to make some tiny interiors for the bridge and Deck 3 instead of just using the blank white 'lit window' texture. As for the hull plate size...wel...I dunno. I wanted a nice plate pattern, and I think it would have been harder to do with larger plates, unless I'd actually modeled the plates themselves instead of using a texture.

To give an idea of the scale, the bridge is Deck 1, the rim of windows is Deck 3, with of course Deck 2 between them and Deck 4 on the bottom. The airlock (which isn't shown) is at the very front of the ship, and the floor of the corridor directly behind it drops down into a gangway ramp when the ship has landed.

Re: USS Hummingbird - Work in Progress

Posted: Sun Aug 07, 2011 6:24 pm
by Star Traks
nice set up, given space constraints [ship is too small for shuttlebay, the designer may need to consider the poor man's holograph [Equinox part I & II episodes in Voyager] outside of essential holographs [namely EMH] the exact name used in the episodes eludes me at this moment
inevitable budget constraints may limit replicators to common areas [mess hall, sick bay, engineering, etc.]

A recent game of chutes and ladders with my children reminded me of a slide WW2 Japanese I class submarines had for moving personel from upper level to lower level - picture a crew practicing slide use and using the slide to foil boarding parties

Enjoy !

Re: USS Hummingbird - Work in Progress

Posted: Sun Aug 07, 2011 8:49 pm
by b-guy
Yeah, the size has already come up a few times in the first eight stories. If you look closely at the aft end you can see that instead of a shuttlebay, there is a single shuttle docked on the upper surface.

Re: USS Hummingbird - Work in Progress

Posted: Mon Aug 08, 2011 2:55 pm
by borgcrazy
b-guy wrote:I wanted a nice plate pattern, and I think it would have been harder to do with larger plates, unless I'd actually modeled the plates themselves instead of using a texture.
That's a valid point; Starfleet does have a tendency to go with aesthetics over function a lot of times so it's entirely possible they custom-made smaller hull plates to make it look better.
To give an idea of the scale, the bridge is Deck 1, the rim of windows is Deck 3, with of course Deck 2 between them and Deck 4 on the bottom. The airlock (which isn't shown) is at the very front of the ship, and the floor of the corridor directly behind it drops down into a gangway ramp when the ship has landed.
Thanks, that helps put things into perspective for my feeble mind, though the gangway ramp reminds me of a Voyager book (ironically) I read a while back that described Chakotay's Peregrine-class ship as having somewhere around 4 or 5 decks and simple ladders to connect them as the small size made installing turbolifts impractical. I do like Star Traks' suggestion for a "sub-slide". For some reason I find the mental image of Starfleet personnel using a slide to be highly amusing, especially since a traditional Traks crew would find all kinds of fun ways to misuse and abuse such a system!