Federation Commander

Sorry to take so long updating, been swamped with a LOT of little things all over. To show what I've been working on, though, here's a color piece of the FJ Bulk container I'm doing as a test.

Nice!

Second test, more color, and more details.. the Starliner pod

Looking excellent!
The second is pretty stunning to my amateurish eyes.

Neale, I especially like the addition of the guide lights at the bottum of the airlocks. Are those ment to be used during black-out operations?

Those lights are the same pattern and colors as the aft-end of the Enterprise's shuttlebay fantail. I also think they are a spiffy addition, since those are shuttlebays as well (IIRC) and it only makes sense that approach lights would look similar or the same from one ship/base/etc. to another.

As to if they would be off "during black-out operations" I wouldn't see them as any different than the Red/Green running lights on the starships, etc.

Great work, Neal. I've toyed with the idea of building a couple of "actual" pods for my Federation tug fleets...

Adding actual shuttle bay doors instead of just decals, etc...

Seeing this lets me know just how good they could look, if I managed to find the time to do it right.

Lookin' good!

Tony -
Yeah, it got me thinking about decals again. I kinda wish I had done some tiny fantail approach lights for the cruisers. Now I'm thinking I should've done a starliner pod with bay doors and such while I was at it.

Will: PM sent

Gotcha Neale. I only asked because having done a few hundred hours of blackout operations, I was going to say that the green lights should be blue.

Course now that I think about it, I'm hard pressed to think of why one would need to operate in a black out condition in space. By the time period this is all suppose to take place in, I imagine that even EVA suits would have built in short range sensors, making visual scanning with MK 1 Eyeball redundent.

Neale has it right. They're green.

[edited by author to remove copyrighted image - 1/12/2012]

Sadly, the SFU never uses this piece, but I need it for Jaynz first.. this is the PB-31 MK/1 warp engine, based on her appearance in "The Cage". I've never really been happy with how the warp nacelles looked, and I can't really pin down why... alas...

Looks nice. You even have the tiny running light on the top front end.

Was the inboard grille copper on the pilot-version engines? I don't recall seeing any good-quality color photos, so I really don't know. I always assumed it was gray, like so much else of the detailing.

Just picking nits, but the way you go flat on the end of the aft nacelle shrouds (in top/bottom views) doesn't click with the way I've seen other people draw them. They definitely do indeed go to a flat (on-station) edge, but most folks have that portion of the curve smaller (so more of the shroud is the elliptical/conic curve segments). I'm comparing to Charles Casmiro's prints, for example. Proportionally, he keeps the "flat" segment a little tiny bit shorter (the end points are closer to the engine centerline).

This is a really subtle thing - only a couple of 1/16ths of an inch on-screen on my monitor, but on weird contours like this where those control points land really makes a difference.

I went back and forth on that a lot this time (seriously, I spent like 1/2 an hour switching that cap back and forth) and decided to leave it flat. Basically, I took the toy of the Enterprise (the good one), and just eyeballed it. The cap IS flatted on that, so that's the way I decided to go. The 'taper' looked off the other way to me. :S