In 2007 I made my own Star Trek starship in LightWave 3D. I’d made a few others before, but this one became a labour of love. The USS Pioneer had a lot of little details, some subtle textures and a fairly elaborate lighting rig designed to make renders look good. The ship was intended to be an earlier-era version of the Constellation class starship.
When it was finished I released it1 for others to use. Then I forgot about it! This is my own rendering of the ship from that time:
I also made a video rendering2 showing off the animated textures and shuttlebay doors (the model includes a shuttlebay interior).
Seven years later…
Last night I was Googling my username, as you do, and I saw an image I hadn’t seen before:
A Light in the Darkness by Rob Caswell (April 2012)
Someone liked my ship enough to make a nice rendering of it! The comments are amusing too. Not all are complementary as the 4-nacelle configuration divides opinion amongst Treknologists, and as someone put it: “My, what big nacelles she has!”. Later still Rob quips “When you turn the speed dial all the way, it goes to ‘Warp 11’.”
The big engines were quite deliberate. I imagined this ship as a fast response vessel of some kind, but looking at it again I would probably make them a bit smaller. But for every person who didn’t like the concept for its imagined technical rule breaking, there is someone who likes the design. In fact, there seems to be a few big fans of it.
Then I carried on looking to see if there were any more images of my ship out there. Turns out that Rob Caswell had made quite a few…
halfblog.net 
