Nah, no more than usual. Here's what I've got cooked up thus far (sorry about the size of the link pic, but my editing options are still a bit limited): As I've stated before, with the design lineage we've been stuck with, the spherical-hulled design just doesn't make any sense any more, and besides, there was a very good reason why it was originally rejected: It's butt ugly! So, I propse this design as a more logical middle ground between the NX and the more familiar configuration (not quite Constitution class, but the damn close earlier starship we saw in the example of the USS Constellation NCC-1017). Discuss.
Well looks interesting but your right it does look ugly. I would prefer to see the NX classes that have been made over on Bridge Commander, with the secondary hull w/o the neck connection. I guess this is more of a prototype, intergating NX w/ Constitution. More of a study model, like those early Excelsior designs?
No, not a prototype, this is pretty much what I'm aiming for. The neck connects up where the shuttlepod bays are on the NX, and both the hangar deck and Engineering are moved down to the secondary hull. After all, gotta have some access to the engine room and the hangar deck and other junk.
A little more backstory to justify the amount of ripping off of the NX, specifically the Romulan War and the need for proven design concepts. Basically, take the NX, beef up the structure, add in a secondary hull to accomodate a larger power plant, freeing up more room in the saucer for more equipment and a larger crew complement, and voila! a ship that can better handle itself in a much more hostile environment than the NX class found itself in.
Nice work! I always wondered what a TOS-style version of http://bridgecommander.filefront.com/screenshots/File/41035/6 might look like.
Nice concept drawing there, CRA! But I think you should definitely call it something else than "Daedalus", as that class is deeply rooted in the extended Trek universe. Your design, especially the secondary hull and the pylons, make it look to me more like a contemporary of the refit Enterprise/1701-A rather than a precursor of the original Big-E from TOS. You may well call the Daedalus ugly, but IMHO it was a stroke of genius to enrich the Trek timeline by including original Jeffries artwork and make an early precursor of the Enterprise that we all know and love exactly that - an early precursor. I think it is a perfect link between the Phoenix and all later designs. It has - at least to me - a distinct russian appeal to me and that is always a good place to look for proven and robust engineering. How does the NX-01 fit into that picture? Well, of course it diesn't really - like so many other aspects of "Enterprise", unfortunately. On the other hand are there only supposed to be around 10 years between the two classes IIRC. Today we have all sorts of vessels at the same time on the seven seas with a wide variety of design finesse. And one thought on the ugliness: IMHO the Vostok wasn't very beautiful, nor was Mercury but I always look at those spacecraft with fondness, because they delivered and brought us further. The same it true for the ISS. It is nice to envisage that with time we can get so adept in our engineering that the objects become graceful like the Enterprise, but in the course is there in (operating) truth no beauty?
The secondary shouldn't look SO much like the TOS Connie in details like the bits around the front saucer mount and the fantail. Either simplify them, make them more extreme or lost them altogether. Keep the idea of the secondary hull, just re-work it visually so that there will be more of an evolution from it to the TOS version.
There is a little fly in the ointment: Wasn't Daedalus supposed to be a Federation starship? Of course, this doesn't address the ship's origins, but I would imagine that if Daedalus were even a Federation evolution of an Earth design, it would have to have a unified Federation influence in it. The reason I bring this up are the "Warp 7" lines invoked in "All Good Things..." We don't know exactly how long it took for the Federation to perfect a warp drive capable of sustaining that speed. (I'm suggesting that there is a major difference between achieving a speed for a brief period and sustaining it.) ENT seemed to show Andorian and Vulcan ships capable of at least Warp 6, and that their starship designs were head and shoulders above the NX class. It's kind of a damned if you do/damned if you don't situation. You want to show a link to the NX past, but you want it to be head and shoulders above the NX.
Actually Daedalus was an earth vessel. According to Okuda's Chronology she was launched in 2155, which is six years prior to the founding of the Federation.
Are we then assuming that there is a disconnect, or a loose connection, between the Starship Daedalus and the Daedalus-class of Federation starships, of which the U.S.S. Essex was a member?
A part of the mindset here is, "Suppose the folks at Paramount lost their collective minds and put me in charge of designing the Daedelus class ship." And, sorry, but however much I liked the homage to Jefferies with that desk model on Sisko's shelf, I would not put that forth as a ship to be canonized, especially with, for better or worse, the NX class in the design lineage. I might fit that spherical hull design in there somewhere, probably as a hospital ship or freighter, but not as a ship of the line. What we're looking at, in my world view at least, is: NX > Daedelus > AMT model > Constitution class. One needs to flow to the next (yes, I know real life doesn't work like that, but this is fiction; it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't have to make a lick of sense). Some of the details will become clearer when I get some better drawings done, maybe even some inked, and definitely when I try a cross section, but one thing I'll point out now is that the hangar deck in the aft doesn't have clamshell doors. More like a big garage door that rolls up.
But if you think about it, if fiction -- especially Star Trek fiction -- had to make sense (in that one thing "needs to flow to the next"), we wouldn't have had very much to discuss over the years. The fact that there are conceptual gaps is what (at one time) left room for speculation and the imagination to roam free, unconfined by the harassment of damnable disciples of "canon".
^ That's the difference between books and movies, where you have time to do a little fact checking and making sure that you're not crossing yourself up somewhere, and television, where you're always under the gun, and even with the help of a research firm to take notes on everything, sometimes you're lucky if it takes a few years to figure out you contradicted something. Or, you could think of those occasional slip-ups as a little dose of realism, to make the place a little less plastic.