USS Hoshea Development Thread

[Caltern]

New Saucer - I realized the deck heights were incorrect on the old one, and the old saucer was one of the main contributors to the corrupted file I mentioned earlier. No phaser strips, RCS, or carved out sections yet. The silvery edge was on a whim...realized it might look really nice, so I'm experimenting with it.

I'll be adding a Goodman class for size comparison later on, as requested.

[Caltern]

Starboard Impulse engine! Also you can see the Hoshea's 25th century ASRV Escape Pods in the background. Little red thing on the top right of the saucer is a 2m tall box. Needed a humanish-sized context for the windows I'm cutting in.

[BLZBUB]

"Look ma! I'm pixeled!"

[Caltern]

Started work on a new bridge based on the one I have currently from the Luna-class. Finished the general shape, tested the scale...and found it inadequate. I'll be working on it again, after the next RP post (sudden influx of clients has kept me busy!)

Purple/pink things are accurate humans sized at about 6'3" - except the larger ones which are sized a little bigger for Speaker. Green is Ready Room furniture. Light blue is bridge area. No consoles or ramps yet since this is a mockup. (Trying to avoid stairs where I can for the Hoshea.) Dark Blue is turbolift. Haven't decided what to do with the space behind the science wall. It should be machinery, but at the same time touch panels don't need machinery behind them.

Still, the upcoming  Act 1 Scene 1 post "Observations in the Lounge"is served by this layout pic. Totally not perfect (it was just sort of blocked together for me to test the space), it nonetheless shows a mostly correct bridge size, and a mostly correct observation lounge size. It correctly depicts where the Ready Room is (behind the medical alcove) as well.

Three escape pods and the access room for them will be placed behind the viewscreen. The Luna-class' placement of the pods don't work because of the much larger Simurgh mission module size. The bridge module is also ejectable and usable as an escape pod.

[Caltern]

Bouncing back and forth between the bridge and the lateral sensor arrays. The aqua-blue glow isn't permanent, but a test. I figured out a new way to light certain objects in the scene. Just need to make a custom map now that has various glowing light shapes with lots of dark areas in between, so we can see lights peeking out from behind the more prominent trapezoidal sensor grid. The idea there is that Hoshea's lateral sensors are layered and transparent to each other. The trapezoidal grid is a "macro" sensor grid. The varied lights and dark shapes would represent a "micro" series of sensor grids.

Oh. And you can see the rear torpedo launcher in this shot. Deck listing called for them to be on deck 4, so I figured that'd be the best place for them. Once I finalize the scale of the bridge and reshape the bridge island to match I'll be adding a guide ridge from the torp launcher aftwards to the rim of the saucer.

[Caltern]

Getting there... but time for work. Need to darken those widgets behind the trapezoidal grille/sensors, and dim that blue light or replace it. I think. What do you guys think?

[BLZBUB]

How about switching the light blue to match with the egg-yellow of the main deflector? May set them off better.

[Caltern]

Bit of a switch up.  This is the new Bridge/Deck 1 layout I'm working with. The four large boxes behind the viewscreen wall are the escape pods. Orange people are Speaker-of-Names-sized, blue-white people are 6'4" tall people. Textures aren't final, just slapped in stuff that looked good-ish. Lots of furniture not created, notably seats. Just wanted a solid layout before I took my second stab at the bridge module.

[Caltern]

The new bridge layout gave me a chance to reshape the exterior. Here's the new bridge shell. (I built this off an earlier save, and so had forgotten the blue glow wasn't yellow...) - image came out way better than I thought it would.

[Caltern]

Brand new secondary hull shape, allowing an airtight join at the "shelf" where the primary hulls rests upon it. This necessitated several changes in the secondary hull shape. In this image, my rim lighting was improved as well - went for more realistic than "the future is neon". The final mesh I had not worked on at all - the warp nacelle pylons - is now in place. Lots of reshaping to do still, but she's starting to come together. I might take STO's idea of using texture maps to create windows...it's not as nice, but with what I learned from the lateral sensors, it should be much easier to generate something more complete looking.

Tigerstriping on secondary hull was not intentional. Didn't realize the texture was going to do that based on the coordinates I gave it. Debating keeping it...it's certainly unique. There are some geometry issues I didn't notice in there too, most notably the gray strip running vertical in front of the pylon's attachment point. Gonna have to do some welding. >.>

The method I used to create the airtight join will be used to create the phaser strips, so in theory they'll be next.