They tried it. Up until some guy had half his prostate accidentally de-materialized.

From the Traks universe, there are threads there for custom builds of USS Silverado, Waystation and USS Roadrunner in either the WIP or Finished Work forums. Existing models used for USS Explorer, Secondprize and Aerostar were found on these forums too! (And their creators credited on the Nexus!)

Ambassador-class Variant Did an Ambassador-class mess years ago, when I had an educational license to 3DS Max. Tried to learn Blender when it expired...failed utterly.

Are you curious about the work and process behind modeling starships using computer software? Well, check out the Sci-Fi Meshes WIP Forum! The 'Ambassador Variant' is the 2021 build of USS Silverado...you can see how the design evolves...

forums.scifi-meshes.com/discussion/1...

#blender #startrek

I get what you're saying, but we never saw them speak telepathically to each other at all. It feels like the writers were trying to retcon something.

Or...they just didn't understand how Betazoids had been depicted before.

Tracking Tarima's issue. But that's not it. Her brother, their father. The Betazoid delegation. Nobody used it and it was never addressed.

Section 31 is problematic as a concept, yeah. But I liked the mirror universe episodes in Discovery.

It was having to have a civilization-ending or galactic-scale apocalypse every season that made Discovery...exhausting. Then SFA went and did it again.

I liked her! But also...I was really confused as to why the Betazoids in SFA had apparently lost their telepathy?

Although this is true, I'll point out that Trek has been very selective in terms of what it will address progressively. They've dived deep into racial inequality, wealth inequality, substance abuse, ethics, war crimes, all sorts of things. But man, the Berman-era Trek steered clear of LGBT+ stories.

They do have smaller stakes stories, but the 10-ish episodes per season really limits how much time they can divert from the big season arc. Some of them end up feeling shallow or cut short. Hugh's return in ST: Picard is a good example.

Also, Mary Wiseman was delightful as Tilly, and absolutely did not deserve the miserable fan treatment she received from some people.

There's no shortage of people upset because a black woman starred, or the Klingon is gay-coded, or the cheerful girl was 'too curvy'. Fuck those people. Trek has always been diverse and political.

And their shouting makes it harder to give nuanced criticism to actual writing issues.

You're totally right. In a post-scarcity society with that level of tech, people would be doing things they enjoy. Case in point, Joseph Sisko's Creole Kitchen, in an era of food replicators.

But I mean, this is where we separate the production from the fantasy. Nobody thought it through.

Yesterday's Son, Time for Yesterday, The Vulcan Academy Murders, the IDIC Epidemic, the whole Lost Years series, DS9 Millennium, Voyager Elite Force, the New Frontier series. So much great stuff. But it makes the blunders we get from professional TV writers so much more jarring in comparison.

Star Trek requires a lot of suspension of disbelief from reality. When you have to suspend disbelief from reality and from Star Trek's universe, it gets...exhausting.

He's got a great point, and there are fantastic stories in non-canon novels, games and fan efforts.

...but...I find part of what makes the best ones so good is that they fit so well into the established universe.

Yeah, the Control storyline felt a bit...contrived? Probably because "Evil AI takes over" is overdone. And because the end solution was...well, you needed a lot of plot reasons to force that outcome.

That was a really weird blind-spot for the series. I think it's in Wrath of Khan where they have somebody vacuuming the hall in the background, and even as a kid I wondered why it wasn't a robot...

What do these have in common? Outrageously massive stakes, and an inability to tell an interesting story without bringing everything to the absolute brink of destruction.

And to be clear: we *liked* a lot of New Trek. Just not impressed with some of the writing, especially for season arcs.

Yeah, not fan of the burn. But it's a symptom, not the core issue. We have the burn, the massive gravity thing from the 10-C, the progenitor tech, Mass-Effect synths from another dimension, Borg anomaly, Borg transporter assimilation, and mines that surround the Federation and break subspace.

It's decent. It just...could have been better.

Dr Zoidberg has entered the chat...

Yeah. No danger of misgendering, looking great.

But please, watch out for hostile aliens, carnivorous plants, poorly balanced boulders, venomous fauna, salt vampires, irate shape-shifters, mis-aligned gravity fields, explosive decompression, and transporters with a lit 'check engine' light visible.

Well...on this side, we're a group of hobby-writers who have been doing Lower Decks style Trek writing for...dear lord...30 years for the longest, 21 for the least.

But learning chaos magick does sound like fun...

I'm working through the second season at the moment. Not sure about the others guys

I don't know if we've all seen the first one, but all us Traks authors are big on Buffy, Star Trek and Doctor Who. At least one of us is huge into Stargate...not sure to what extent the other two are...

In Star Traks: H2H, the Hummingbird-class is a quantum slipstream tug, like the Delta Flyer tried to be in Timeless. Big drawback: it can only fly QSD routes that are thoroughly mapped in advance. Good for establishing a rapid route between two systems. Completely useless for exploration.

In the side view (nacelles omitted), the little external shuttle at the back was clearly not scaled properly. You can also see from the rough new hull geometry (black wireframe) that the new model will likely have more vertical depth to it. Also debating giving the saucer a more Dauntless-ish edge

Something I obsess over and modern Trek seems to ignore is things like scale and consistency in Treknology. Does this make sense as a 4 deck ship? Note the highlighted deck guides and the little human-sized green cylinders. I can see the windows on the old model didn't line up well, not a huge deal.

Some 15 years ago I modeled the Hummingbird-class ships featured in Star Traks: Halfway to Haven. 2 years ago I started a rebuild in Blender...and made virtually zero progress.
Played around today a bit with tweaking the new hull geometry from the old images. And sanity-checking.
#startrek #blender

Brendan put a bunch of his stuff on fan fiction dot net...but some older stories won't have the corrections made as part of the Nexus overhaul during COVID.