USS Flying Dutchman

So I built the USS Flying Dutchman. I like this version pretty well, but I'm sure I'll revisit the design again in the future. In the bottom image, check out the "real" deflector array I made... don't know if I've ever made a dish per se before. I've usually just made a "bank" in the past, to keep the size down... I guess this is a precident.

USS Freedom

The USS Firebrand, which was destroyed in the famous battle at Wolf359, brought a good deal of attention to the Freedom class of Starfleet ships, particularly because of its unique single-nacelle design. Of course, anyone with even a limited idea about Star Trek warp technology would know that this design simply could not work. The fact that the craft has no deflector array whatsoever only adds to the overall problem. I've always hated the Freedom class design profile and wanted to come up with a way to use the overall shape while bringing in more accepted notions about how Star Trek's warp drive works. The following diagram shows my redesigned Freedom class (yes, another one named USS Akhenaten).





The first thing I did was to double the width of the nacelle, enough to get a second set of warp drive coils in there. Secondly, I brought the saucer section down closer to the drive nacelle. Then I added an actual engineering section along the top of the nacelle. I added a deflector array between the Buzzard collectors up front, and a square impulse set to the aft dorsal pylon. I made the above schematics from Freedom (saucer), Galaxy (nacelle), and Ambassador (engineering and saucer pylon) class hull sections.

The Freedom class has a problematic design, and the limited development that went into what is considered a canonical Star Trek class is shoddy. I can't claim to have achieved greatness in my own design but at least it's cooler than the "official" craft. Below is my Lego version.




I named this vehicle "Racinante" after Don Quixote's faithful horse and after the spaceship used to go through the black hole in Rush's classic song Cygnus X-1.

USS Challenger

Well, it's not technically a Challenger Class ship. I imagined this one as a pre-Challenger class type craft, something that would be really interesting with Ambassador Class era construction. I've given the engineering hull a larger that normal portion of the ship ( a little hard to see in these images here) because I wanted the ship to have heavy science specialization. Click here for more info on the canon USS Challenger.

USS Batlh

The USS Batlh takes its name from the Klingon word for "honor."
I envisioned this one as a new class under the moniker of USS Honor, with each subsequent craft being named after different worlds' words for "honor."

I'm a little wary of naming new classes of spacecraft - it's a problem that most fans get into. In general, I like to design spacecraft that are combinations of existing classes, which is a known design paradigm. I do, however, sometimes like to make special ships or one-of-a-kind type ships. In this case, I just go with it. In any case, you won't see a bunch of new classes from me; I like the official ones just fine.