Daedalus-class Reboot

[evil_genius_180]

I’ve been wanting to do a Daedalus-class ship from Star Trek for a while now. Originally, I’d planned on doing the design commonly referred to as “Daedalus-Class,” the USS Horizon from Sisko’s office. Though, the only canon Daedalus-class ship is the USS Essex and it was never seen on screen. Anywho, I got the idea to do this model (again) after Steve Neill restored the original Horizon and did a customer build of his self-molded kit a while back. I’d done one years ago, but it went kaput in a hard drive failure. Unfortunately, what kept me from doing the DS9 model was a lack of decent references. All I have are a few pictures not showing the entire model, both from when it was labeled “Essex” for the ST Chronology and when it was labeled “Horizon” for DS9. Other than that, I have incorrect fan schematics and a render sheet of Doug Drexler’s model he made for the ST New Voyages episode In Harm’s Way. Unfortunately, the renders on that sheet are all perspective views, rather than true top, side, etc. orthographic renders, so using them was possible but the perspective might have thrown things off. That was a real setback, because Doug did a really lovely model based off of the original desktop model (an advantage to working at Paramount ) and I was going to use those until I was prepping them and I noticed the perspective issue.

So, there I was ready to do a Daedalus-class but I had so-so references. However, then I was looking at an article by Bernd Schneider on his site (Ex Astris Scientia) regarding the Daedalus-class and I found a fan-made reboot design by Christopher Freeman, AKA Aehternaut. I’d seen the design years ago on Scifi-Meshes, but I had forgotten about it.



This design is a more modern take on the Daedalus-class that takes the show Enterprise and Doug Drexler’s NX-01 into account. I like it, so I decided to model it. As you can see, the schematics are a 3-view, which gives me plenty to go by but also leaves some room for interpretation and throwing in my own things. Also, I will be changing a few things. One notable change is having the blue stuff on the warp engines only on the inside. This change is to go more with Doug’s more recent “Season 4″ NX refit, where he added a secondary hull and “capped” the outer warp blue stuff. (among other things)

Anywho, I’ve been picking at this for a few days and this is where I am:









Up next is probably some grid lines. I’ve been avoiding them but they need to be done.

[gmd3d]

Awesome start......

I have always liked this design.

finding good refs is always the hardest part, but worth the wait when you do find something you like

[evil_genius_180]

Thanks Ger.

NBTrekie did a version of this ship a few years ago and Aethernaut provided him with a few additional references, which he passed on to me.





I put the nacelle end cap bit to use and redid those.



I got it as close as I could to the drawing without rebuilding the whole thing. But, it’s a lot closer to what Aethernaut had, so I’m happy with it. As it is, I had to redo the internal stuff.

After doing that, I was all set to start on some grid lines when I realized that it would be a good idea to do the cut for the navigational deflector first. And, while I was at it, I did the deflector itself. It’s a pretty basic TOS-style deflector. The schematic called for a plain deflector like the NX had, but I added the “ridges” to the inside like the 1701 had. I’m happy with how it came out.







I opted for not a whole lot of detail inside the housing because the deflector is partly recessed and will cover up most anything inside there anyway.

[gmd3d]

good idea inside the deflector housing ..... makes sense... if you not going to see it, why build it.

modelling looks very very smooth .....

[evil_genius_180]

Thanks Ger. I'm glad somebody mentioned the smoothness, that wasn't easy to achieve. I had to redo the "hole" in the sphere for the deflector several times to get rid of mesh errors. I had to resize it slightly becuase doing it the size on the schematic made the polygons intersect in a way that woulnd't let me fix some of the smoothing errors. But, I got it on the 4th or 5th try.

[gmd3d]

I think its the main subject when modelling startrek ..... the smoothness of the hull..... doing a great job Chris

[evil_genius_180]

True. You don't get greeble fest ships like you do with some Sci-Fi but Trek makes up for it with the smooth, curving hulls. I think that's a main reason why Trek has always been so aesthetically pleasing to me. Sure, I love me some Star Wars, but the general design of the majority of the ships are simple by comparison. They make up for it with the massive details.