Excelsior Refit Mesh

I recently came across a blender mesh for the Enterprise B by a chap called Martin Shaw. I've DL'd it and I've been playing around - however if you think it's worth while I could probably get into changing the decals and so on to USS Invincible - I'll drop the guy a line. This would then let me render new images of our good ship as we wanted them rather than having to hunt up screens or renders of the Ent-B on the web and pretend - also the ships current banner doesn't show a refit, it's a standard Excelsior, does this matter?

I'm kinda just messing about with graphics for the fun of it and don't claim to be an expert (or indeed any good) - The Boss caught me over at RSB messing about with character avatars so I thought I'd fess up and offer.

On a purely technical point, would be nice to get the actual Excelsior Refit on there. I had originally thought the Invincible to be a standard Excelsior when I first applied.

Profile of them together.



There's the original Excelsior.





There's the Excelsior refit. Or sometimes referred to as the Lakota variant.


The Excelsior variant has some fins on the primary hull, as well as some fins on the warp nacelles. Plus, there's the addition of two impulse vents positioned on either side of the original impulse engines that the Excelsior has. Otherwise they both have mostly the same starship silhouette. Actual benefits over the original Excelsior had something to do with being a sturdier warship or some such.

As for what Bravo Fleet has to say about it:
Here's a bfinfobase link

As far as I understand it IRL was cos they needed to blow a hole in the hull for Generations (for Kirk to fall out) and didn't want to damage the Excelsior prop. So they added the bulge on the engineering hull that they could then smash up and remove later. However it would have been really obvious if they had only done that, so they added a couple of impulse engines on the back of the saucer and some other little changes to cover it. And 'Lo a new class was born!

The other irritating bit of model trivia is that there are far too few Ambassador class ships on screen compared to Excelsiors cos they dropped the freaking model.... realistically if you think about it Excelsior should have faded out - some if not most of the Excelsiors seen in TNG and DS9 really ought to be Ambassadors or Nebulas, but they have a nice model for Excelsior and not for the others so when it comes to filming time.....

It broke my heart when I found out about them dropping the Ambassador model. Really like that ship too, Excelsior being my favorite.

Bugger me side ways this blender lark is hard! Bedtime!

I'd noticed that too but it shouldn't be a huge deal.

Excited to see what you do with the mesh, if you choose to work with it, John.

OK... so after learning a bit about Blender here is a first pass.

I repeat I did not make the mesh I've just been altering the name, however even that was tricky - I never realised how hard it was to map text onto a 3d surface!

I'm however gaining confidence in blender so I'm willing to do more cosmetic alterations as we go, Also I'm learning about lighting and rendering - a topic I haven't covered since High School - so hopefully images should improve over time, that all said...

https://i.servimg.com/u/f60/15/90/49/38/stars10.jpg

if I got this image hosting thing right.

That's not bad.

Now make it do flips and stuff

One word is all I have for that!

SWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEET

So next task is learning how to animate so I can make her spin... Anyone got a good source for a back ground borg cube soI can try making a mission picture?

I'll get looking and report back if I find anything.