Man, it’s been a crazy week. Busy, busy, busy. And I’m somebody who usually has too much free time.
Anywho, I finally had some time to work on the Apollo. The lack of response to the previous configuration told me it’s not all that popular. A few people commented, most that did said that it looked similar to the Akira-class. While that’s true, I don’t see why it’s an issue. It seems reasonable to me that Starfleet would build more than one ship with a similar layout. After all, there are several canon classes that are the same basic layout as the TOS Enterprise. However, some people seem to have a prejudice when it comes to the Akira and a certain two century older look-alike. If they built a ship that’s in that configuration in the 2150s and another 200 years later, it seems to me that there would be other ships of similar configurations. But, I digress. It’s not like that design was that near and dear to my heart, I just thought it was kind of cool. Though, I sort of lost interest in it, especially since it would have been a nightmare to UV map. However, the effort was not wasted because I was able to try out some different techniques that will be useful in future projects.
So, that ship is gone. I’ve redesigned it:
The only thing I saved from the previous configuration is the nacelles, those didn’t need to be redone. Everything else did. I decided to make the ship a bit more compact and less spindly. The ship is a bit smaller, but should actually have more internal mass due to the configuration. Also, I’m thinking this ship needs a pod, even though I normally don’t do those. I’ll probably install a small weapons pod mid-back-top.
The original idea came from a picture I found on 3D Gladiators of a ship I built years ago. It was a truly dreadful model that I was overly pleased with at the time, but it gave me ideas:
I toyed with the idea of having the nacelles angled upwards like that, but I decided instead to angle them downward, like they were on the first Apollo configuration. I think it looks better that way, with the way the secondary hull is designed.
