Friday, October 10, 2014

MicroFleet WIP: TNG-Style Coalition Fleet

So, bowing to peer pressure, I made up some Next Generation-flavored ships for my Coalition faction.  I'm not sure if I'm quite set on all of these, but here's where I'm at with them at the moment.

First, we have (from left to right), the Nova-class destroyer, Defiant-class frigate, and Valkyrie-class fighters:



Here are the Prometheus-class battlecruiser, Nebula-class heavy cruiser, and Akira-class light cruiser:



Rounding out the fleet are the Pregnant Hippo-class carrier, Sovereign-class dreadnought, and Galaxy-class battleship:


And finally, a family photo:



The only original design in the lot is the carrier.  The Pregnant Hippo is obviously just a kitbash of the Galaxy-class with an extra nacelle and a badly-distended engineering hull that serves as a through-deck fighter bay.


These ships were harder to build than the previous Coalition fleets because of the sheer number of curvy parts and weird slopes involved with TNG-era ships.  Still, I think they turned out okay, and when printed, should look decent on the tabletop.

Another challenge was that TNG canon doesn't necessarily follow TOS and SFB norms, so identifying what is a "cruiser" versus a "battlecruiser" or "battleship", so I just had to make some arbitrary selections and scale them relative to each other.

Finally, the minimum wall and wire thicknesses on Shapeways played merry hob with designing the warp nacelles.  The Nova and Prometheus should have much nicer, slimmer nacelles, but there's no guarantee that the 3D printers in New York would be able to accept them, so I had to make them thicker than they would be if they were a larger scale.

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