# Mapmaking Discussion & Philosophy (WIP/Critique) > Sci-fi/Modern Mapping >  WiP: USS Singularity, NCC-74855

## mearrin69

Hi all,
Got some things cleared off of my plate lately and I'm working on a pet project: a GURPS Star Trek campaign. I've decided to attempt deckplans of the PC's ship, the _USS Singularity_. It's a Nova-class vessel, a small science scout first seen in the Voyager episode _Equinox_. The deckplans will be based on the ones here but I'm going to be making a few changes to them.

Edit: BTW, I posted a rough 3D model of the ship in this thread. Don't know if I'll take it further.

Here's the in-game description of the ship:



> USS Singularity (NCC-74855), Nova-class variant light research cruiser. Constructed: Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards. Commissioned: April 4, 2375. Assigned: Alpha quadrant (May 5, 2375). Mission: Seek out and investigate various 'subspace tunnelling phenomena' for the development of new trans-warp propulsion technologies as directed by FSC and ASDB. Command crew: Commander Matthew LeBrasseur (Captain), Lt. Commander Tu'pok (First Officer). Current location: Deep Space 9 (May 11, 2375), awaiting new crew transfer.


The two players will have three characters each: a department head (lieutenant), a junior officer (ensign or lt. JG), and a regular crewman. They'll attempt to follow their mission and get into all kinds of trouble in the vicinity of Cardassian space. I've got to check dates and such but this is set just after the Dominion war so the 'shovelheads' (Cardassians) are in disarray and their space is pretty lawless right now. The Bajorans are getting uppity and maybe there are some rogue factions causing troubles. Plus they PCs will be pushing out beyond known space looking for interesting stuff. Maybe later they'll be testing some new drive technology...and will, just possibly, run afoul of a cosmic loop and get sent somewhere in time and have to deal with that.

I'm attaching a draft of deck 1, containing mainly the bridge. The SD plans showed quarters for the captain, first officer, another senior officer, and a conference room. I'm moving the conference room and replacing the spare officer's quarters with a ready room. Two reasons: 1) the captain should have a place other than his quarters for private meetings, and 2) who gets the other luxury primo-location suite? There'd be lots of fighting over it, I think! Most everything else is the same though I'm considering whether the transporter really needs two transceivers. I assume that's what SD was intending.

The map is overlaid with a 1-meter hex grid. GURPS uses yards but meters are close enough for horseshoes and photon torpedos so I'm going to go with that. I'd actually like to go with LCARS style for the final presentation, even though it means losing the cool old-skool font...will look into that. I'd also like to eventually draw out the main areas of the ship as battlemaps at 1 hex = 1". That may be difficult because I don't know where to get hex paper that large. I do have some large paper with 1" squares and that may have to do. I doubt I'm going to do these deckplans so they can be printed at that scale.

The walls are created by building shapes with the selection tools and then stroking them in black (4px for bulkheads and 10px for hull). The light blue areas are primary 'habitat' space, the light grey are 'walkable' engineering spaces, the dark grey are inaccessible (without some difficulty anyway). I probably won't keep that color scheme, it's just a convenience for now.

Hope you like it...though there's not much to see yet.
M

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## mearrin69

And here's my very lame attempt at an LCARS-style overlay. I kind of like the overall layout so far but the colors are *very much* a work in progress. Examining screenshots to see what's the norm...a lot of the stuff on the Web is way wacky, like clown barf. The picture of the Equinox will probably go away but I dropped it in for fun.
M

Edit: What *is* with all of the numbers anyway? Very few of the buttons on the interfaces have text of any kind. I want a "next" button, not "03594".

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## tilt

looks great - to bad I don't live in Portland or I'd come play  :Wink:  ... love Deep Space 9 as that was my (real) first Star Trek Experience ... and loved that the story line was continuos. I think you made a good job of the overlay too  :Smile:

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## mearrin69

Thanks. You're welcome to join if you're ever in the neighborhood!

Here's a little better version...a much improved color scheme based on a screencap of the schematic on the bridge of Equinox.
M

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## mearrin69

Decks 1 and 2 are finished except for adding 'furnishings'. I'll be overlaying some schematic-style things in the engineering compartments and furniture, consoles, etc. in the habitat areas.
M

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## tilt

very nice - just take out life support for a bigger Captains office, no need for that on board  :Wink:

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## mearrin69

Hmmm. Can't seem to upload files at the moment. Decks 5 through 8 are laid out. Made some improvements on D5 that I'll need to go back and add to the others. Apart from touch-up all of the decks except 4 are ready for decoration. When I'm done with all of that I'll collage them into the LCARS display file with extra data (ship specs, etc.). The end result will likely be several sheets, but I'm not sure how many at the moment. Will post the other decks when I can upload images again.
M

Edit: Yay! Uploads are back. Amazing how much of a fix posting stuff here turns out to be.

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## mearrin69

So, decks 5-8 are in the previous post. In the meantime I've gotten deck 4 pretty much done (it's *huge*) and realized that I've only gotten deck 3 partially completed. I'm posting it anyway but will note that I'm still working on the port side of the ship. 

Right now it's symmetrical. The foreward section (surrounding the two large computer core octagons) was in the SD plans a 'security complex', something I don't need for Singularity. I'm reworking it into a small security suite/brig and maybe some sort of general briefing room. The port-most bit under the turbolift (orange circle) is supposed to be sickbay (right now it's just a copy of the starboard lab.  I'm thinking of reworking the two enlisted quarters (p/s of turbolift) into two holodecks and maybe something else. There aren't any holodecks in the SD plans and it seems good for crew morale, useful for simulation/reseach, and just pretty good overall in case I want to do a story centered around them (and you know I do!)

As soon as I finish up deck 3 I can move on to getting all of the decoration on there. I might actually wrap these up by the weekend!
M

Edit: Also note that I've added a zip file containing an Excel (2007) spreadsheet with speeds and distances for impulse and warp propulsion. The tables I was finding online (and in the ST Encyclopedia by Okuda-san, et. al.) were a little too rounded for my tastes. There are two tabs, one for impulse and one for warp. They both list speeds and some distances (Earth to Moon, Across Oort Cloud, etc.) and the time to travel that distance at that speed. The top table in each tab is noted in hours...more useful is the bottom table, which lists time in convenient units (years, months, days, hours, minutes, or seconds, whichever is most appropriate). If you note some errors or have some useful additions I'd be happy to consider them. This is just for my home game so feel free to use or adapt as desired. If you distribute it some credit would be cool...but I won't sue you if you don't.  :Smile: 

Edit again: I'm thinking my WF speeds are pretty good up until 9+. That's where the formula breaks down (for 1-9 it's WF*c^(10/3) but after 9+ it rises to infinity) and I pretty much just bunged about with figures to get close to Okuda's values without actually trying to research or figure out the formula in detail.

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## mearrin69

And, for fun:

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## tilt

this is very cool mearrin, if we ever get a ST campaign going again, I know where to look for the ship  :Smile:   ... and its little stuff like the plaque that makes the whole (but perhaps the text should have a little bevel to make it part of the plaque instead of floating in front).   :Smile:

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## mearrin69

Thanks. Yeah, the plaque needs some work. I'm going to play with the background and text to get it looking a bit more integrated. I was copying the attached photo of the plaque from the U.S.S. Sao Paolo. Would like the final to look more realistic, maybe incorporating the spotlight effect in this image.
M

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## mearrin69

Here's deck 3 mostly complete. I've added the holodecks and moved things around a bit in the 'security complex', though I guess it still is that more or less.

Now on to decoration and furniture. edit: which will be largely based on the very schematic/simple way these things are represented on the attached screenshot.
M

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## tilt

damn cool sideview, my wife says "woow"   :Smile:

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## mearrin69

To be clear, the sideview is not my creation. I think it's a screenshot from the show...though it's possible that it was created by the fellow that put his name on it twice (looks like a screenshot to me, however).
M

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## tilt

ok... well, looking forward to seing yours then  :Smile:

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## mearrin69

Mine will be less spectacular. For now, top views. Here's a start on the bridge and officer's cabins. I'll try to color code things a bit: power items will have a yellow outline, for instance, and 'inert' things will look like the furniture in these shots (though I'll probably need to recolor the consoles). I don't have a definite scheme in mind yet.
M

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## tilt

good start - the grid is a little heavy - and the battle mapper in me wants to color it all in and throw on shadows *lol*

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## mearrin69

I believe that's 2x zoom. I will probably cut the grid from the final...it's mainly for me to work with as I create hand-drawn battle maps for the game. These maps are just for reference and to be pretty so it can go away I guess.

Hey, thanks for sticking with me! You're this thread's number one (well, only, really) fan!  :Wink: 
M

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## mearrin69

As I suspected, the fellow who plastered his info all over that Equinox MSD is not the originator. I'm pretty sure it's a screenshot from the show. Why he marked it up like that I can't say...but some folks on the Interwebz have funny notions. I once saw a sheet of sprites ripped from a Mario game ROM and the guy who did it had a notice about how people shouldn't steal his sprites and required them to contact him for permission to use them. Go figure.

http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__..._class_MSD.jpg

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## mearrin69

Here's the ship's waverider atmospheric shuttle _Event Horizon_, computer core, and some crew/officer quarters on deck 4. The torpedo room is forward, I think, but I haven't done anything there yet. Taking this in pieces to see if I have the stomach for it. The furniture along the curved hull is a bit borked because it has been rotated twice...have to redo those I think.

FYI, the ship also carries four additional shuttles: two Type-9 (_Einstein_ and _Rosen_) and two Type-8 (_Kerr_ and _Tipler_). If anyone has better naming suggestions (based on the ship's name and mission) I'm open to hearing them.  :Smile: 
M

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## tilt

a find it a little strange that people would have to share a room when with moving a wall or two you could easily have two small rooms there, of course the head could still be shared or made smaller  :Smile:

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## mearrin69

According to the deckplans I'm working from those are eight 'bunkrooms' with two three-tier bunks. You're right that they could easily be turned into two single-, double-, or triple-person rooms and I'm not quite sure why the designer didn't do that. In TNG and beyond we don't much get to see how enlisted crewmen live; in fact, we rarely see them at all beyond the occasional reference to somebody by the rank of "crewman". In TOS we see them more often but, even then, we never get to see if they live in small staterooms or shared rooms or barracks or what. You'd think that at least petty officers would get their own rooms, however.

If I was designing this from scratch I'd probably include several tiers of room: luxury (captain, XO, VIPs), senior officer, junior officer/senior enlisted, cadet/mid-enlisted (maybe two-person rooms), and junior enlisted (maybe bunkrooms). The Nova-class *is* supposed to be a short-range ship, however, so maybe the inconvenience is okay for short periods. There's not even all that much to do outside of the room...just a gym and lounge (though I've added two holodecks). I'd definitely want that arrangement on a Galaxy-class or something where there is scads of room.
M

Edit: Deck 1 senior officers' conference room. Working on the captain's ready room but I'm being indecisive about the design.

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## mearrin69

Deck 1 nearly completed. I've decided to punt on the general engineering machinery...this is as detailed as I'm likely to get on it. Still needs a ready room. It's just a sketch at this point.
M

Edit: or does it look better as just an outline schematic? Hard to say.

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## mearrin69

Deck 2 coming along. Can revert to outline schematic if I decide to go that way. I like the little spots of color on the equipment, however. In the center are the two six-person transporter rooms. To the right is impulse engineering. 
M

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## mearrin69

Deck 2 completed. I think I'm likely to stick with the colored schematic style. I'll probably redo the furniture in the quarters, as it got borked from 2+ rotations. The desks in the offices could use some work as well. Note also that there is a stray line crossing the horizontal Jefferies tube running between the transporter rooms. Have to go back and fix that in the deckplan file when I do cleanup there.
M

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## mearrin69

Here's deck 8. Not so great looking. The outline things up forward are the landing gear...but they look a little hinkey.
M

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## tilt

one thing I find interesting with the whole design - and leading back to the room question. When you look at ships today, they have lots of space for the crew - cause there is plenty of room - especially since it takes less and less crew to operate a ship. It seems like there are a lot of crew needed to run a spaceship "these days"  *lol*

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## mearrin69

Are you and I really the only Star Trek geeks on this board?  :Smile: 

ST has always been a little wishy washy about crew. Hard to find exact figures but: 
* The TOS Enterprise under Pike (Constitution-class, 2250s) had 200ish (mentioned in the pilot) 
* That grew to 400 by the time Kirk took over (later 2260s). 
* Enterprise B (Excelsior-class, 2284+) had 770 crew.
* Enterprise C (Ambassador-class, mid-2322+) had 900 (125 was a skeleton crew in the episode Yesterday's Enterprise). 
* Enterprise D (Galaxy-class, 2356+) had 1,100.
* Intrepid-class ships have a crew of 168.
* Nova-class ships have 100.
* Defiant-class ships have 50.

These are rough and are a mix of (possibly wrong) figures I dug off of the Internet. They're also not the hard-core 'how many does it take to run the ship' sort of figures. Voyager could run the ship with 80-90 crew and it seems like I remember the Defiant operating with just an away-team's worth. 

Starfleet, even in the TOS era but especially in the TNG era, has a lot of science-types aboard who aren't crucial to starship operations - and, in the TNG era, you'll find families on the larger ships and civilian staff (bartenders, barbers, etc.) 

The thing that bugs me most about the Nova-class design by SD is the huge officer to enlisted disparity. As drawn, the ship has room for 159 personnel; 15 of those in nice officer's quarters and 144 of them in big six-person bunkrooms. It's a research ship, though, with five labs. 15 officers is barely enough to staff the three-shift operational rotation of the ship's critical departments, let alone man the labs or act as non-critical administrators (logistics and support, etc.) What are all of those enlisted crew *doing* exactly? They can operate and maintain the ship's systems and such, and the senior enlisted can handle a lot of the management tasks...but I doubt they have the advanced sciences degrees necessary to carry out "hard" research. If somebody from the Daystrom Institute rides along, where does she stay? In the bunkroom? I doubt it.

So, I'm assuming quite a few more single- or double-person staterooms for officers, warrant officers, and civilian adjunct science personnel. I'm *not* going to redraw the plans to show this, however.  :Smile:  My game plans call for a team of scientists (three for now) from the Daystrom Institute being aboard. And...I may need more ensigns, lieutenant's J.G. and such to serve as replacement PCs if the player's original characters get themselves killed.

One thing about S-T: it's not very consistent despite all of the ret-conning done by Okuda et. al. I can squish things around a bit as needed...and these deckplans aren't central to the game, just a way to put something showing where sickbay is located in relation to the bridge into the players' hands. They're also sort of fun to do, game or no.
M

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## mearrin69

Deck 7 astrometrics lab and lateral observation room. Trying out a new style for consoles. Think it looks okay.
M

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## tilt

by the way, I like the idea of players playing different roles on board, that way you can make different kind of scenarios. I remember a friend of mine had a scenario going where the players all played a wizard/lord and also his apprentice/squire - also a great idea, especially since there has to be a million things that the high lords would never do...   :Smile:

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## mearrin69

Yeah, thanks. It was my way of being able to ensure that a player will always have a character that can participate no matter what's going on. It also lets them explore their own paths in the game...I might end up having one of the PCs assume command of the ship at some point but I've made it clear that role can only fall to a character that takes the 'command course' and wears a red shirt. If one of the players doesn't want to go that route then he/she can make that decision for the characters they're playing...or even for a single one of their characters.

The adventures I've outlined so far are pretty varied, the sort of stuff the TNG Enterprise got up to. Maybe they're on their way somewhere and end up in a sideline situation that requires combat and/or diplomacy. It's not their mission (science) but they're Johnny-on-the-spot for the Feds so they have to take care of it. In something like that it's going to be the diplomatic and security/tactical types (and maybe medical) that get to shine. Other missions will be mostly scientific and that's when the science-focused characters will come into the spotlight (and maybe ops and maybe the conn...as he tries vainly to keep the ship away from that cosmic string or whatever).

I'm hoping the players pick a wide range of characters to play. Even if they don't have a character that's appropriate for a given scene I plan to have NPCs available so they can still participate (one of the Daystrom scientists or a red-shirt for an away team or whatever).
M

Edit: Deck 7, main engineering...

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## tilt

a red shirt for an away mission... uh oh...  :Wink:

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## mearrin69

Yeah. I think they're yellow shirts these days.  :Wink:  BTW, do you know 'official' uniform colors? I think blue signifies science, green (or sometimes blue) medical, yellow is ops, tactical, security, etc., and red is any branch personnel with command training. That sound right to you? Am I missing something?

Here's deck 7 pretty much completed.
M

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## tilt

those colors sounds just about right to me yep  :Smile:

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## rdanhenry

Just remember, if someone catches you in a deviation from ST canon, just say "Time travelers changed it". That's your out for anything.

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## mearrin69

That is a good strategy...I shall use it.  :Smile:  Fortunately, mine is set at the very end of the shows so I should be good, at least for not conflicting with much that's yet to be written! Believe me, I have a thick set of reference books and the Interwebz close at hand as I work on this project. Fortunately I have a very friendly audience. I doubt I could run (or play!) the game with a true Star Trek bolt-counter at the table with me.

Tomorrow, before our zombieapocalypse game we're going to take a little time to explore character creation...the players have been thinking about it for the past week and I've been collecting lists of skills, racial templates, etc. to get ready for it. We won't start playing for at least a few weeks, so we have time to sort out issues along the way.

Deck 6 coming up!
M

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## mearrin69

Deck 6: primary deflector generator bay, defense field generator bay, main engineering (distribution), and waste recycling compartment. Going up!

I would hate to be among the crew stuck bunking on this deck!
M

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## mearrin69

Here are some bits of deck 5. It's coming slowly...darned real-world responsibilities!

Edit: Secondary deflector is up front. There's also a briefing room, a couple of cabins (unfinished), the chief of security's office, armory, and brig. Along the middle strip is the computer core, holodecks one and two, crew cabin, an enginering bay and the main cargo bay. The bit to the far right is the shuttle emergency egress hatch on the hull (shuttlebay is above (or below, or something, I forget).

Edit again: Sorry. This is deck 3, not 5. 
M

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## mearrin69

Deck 3 mostly completed. The empty room on the starboard side is currently undefined. I'm thinking of making it a set of personal holosuites but a player has suggested an auxilliary control room. The bit on the aft port side is a set of locker rooms (vacc suits, etc.) and still needs to be finished.

Edit: Forgot the pic, added. BTW, some of the bits (phaser banks especially) are messy and need some cleanup...and there's still another round of editing to go on the deckplan itself.
M

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## mearrin69

The aft end of deck 5, main shuttlebay and engineering compartment.
M

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## Dark Cloud

Wow, this trekkie is beyond impressed.

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## mearrin69

Heh! I knew there were more of us on here. Thanks!
M

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## mearrin69

A break from deck plan drawing...beginnings of a campaign map. Lots of work to do on it but this is the basic layout. I wanted to get Sol in there (even though we'll be mostly in the far spinward side of this map for most of the game) so the players have some landmarks and know just how far they are from the heart of the Federation. This is in Illustrator (which I don't know very well) after some disappointing results in PS. I'm hardly an expert starmap maker at this point!  :Smile: 
M

Edit: The grid is 20 ly. I'm using the star charts from Star Trek Star Charts by Geoffrey Mandel (Pocket Books) as a reference...but won't be putting anything like that level of detail in there. This is supposed to emulate an LCARS map so will be simple and show mostly just information relevant to the mission. I'll be adding subspace anomalies through out the Bajor sector and neighboring regions...as that's the (nominal) focus of the game.

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## mearrin69

Like I said, decks 4 and 5 are going slowly. They're pretty massive and there are lots of doodads. Here's deck 5 with the structural integrity field generator bays, the upper level of the main deflector bay, deuterium tankage and the deuterium injection portion of engineering, the main replicator bay, and the shuttle parking bay (these last two bits have already been posted I think). This is the 'walkable' portion of deck 5...the rest (foreward of what you see here) is a whole bunch of stuff: phaser banks, sensor suites, additional batteries, the underside of the Waverider shuttle, and (apparently) another subspace transceiver. Lots of stuff to draw before I can call it done!
M

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## mearrin69

Here's the rest of deck 5, minus the tactical/lateral sensor arrays - which will fill all of that open black space (and makes my skin crawl to think about attempting...see small pic from the SD deckplans). There's a lot of cleanup that needs to happen with the equipment coloration. I used the wand to grab and color areas but, since the lines were anti-aliased, there's a lot of chunking that happened. I'll go in with the eraser and paintbrush to smooth it out as a final stage. I'll probably also vary the color a bit more at that point...looking a bit drab.
M

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## mearrin69

Deck 4's a madhouse, plain and simple. I've got a lot of the gadget outlining done but it's still missing the forward torpedo bays, scientific sensors, p/s RCS thrusters, and the nacelle innards and PTCs running up into them. I expect all of this to take quite some time. Also, the cabins all need heads and the ones along the hull need better furniture.
M

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## mearrin69

Deck 4 is getting there. Now down to the pylons/nacelles and cleanup.
M

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## mearrin69

Just about finished. Last post of this deck. Cleanup is done, just working on that pylon now...it's a bit complex. Have to go back to the deckplans and fix a couple of things.
M

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## tilt

totally cool... whole project is cool. Must play Star Trek now... lol... to bad only one of the boys in the rpg group is a trekkie, the others would probably prefer to play Star Wars.

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## mearrin69

Same here...only two of my group are interested (or *qualify*, in my opinion). 

Deck three completed *except* for that little room in the upper middle. Don't know what to make it. Was thinking about a little suite of offices and private conference rooms. Kind of fits the administrative nature of that area. Any thoughts?
M

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## mearrin69

Here's the finished nacelle...deck 4. I didn't bother trying to draw the shaft around the power transfer conduit in the pylon. Meh.
M

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## mearrin69

Here's something like how the final might look, though there would be callouts of major details as well as additional information in the top bar and maybe margins. I also plan to make a couple of refinements to the LCARS interface, after looking around at other examples. This is 50% of total resolution, FYI.

I think decks 1-3 will go on one sheet, deck 4 by itself, deck 5 by itself with info, decks 6-8 on one sheet. Will see how that layout goes. I'd also like to do a cutaway side view and exterior views. Not sure if I'll get to that.
M

Edit: Eh? The registry number is wrong...how odd. I must have just copied some other ship's number inadventently.

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## mearrin69

Had some finishing up to do on deck 5. That sensor palette took forever but ended up looking pretty good I guess so maybe it was worth the time.

My to-do list for this set of deckplans is getting shorter. I've set an artificial deadline of tonight to get it done. If I can put in some good hours tonight maybe I can post them all in the Finished Maps section soon! 
M

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## mearrin69

Pretty close to final layout. Finishing up the decks and bringing them in to the main file. Trying to figure out something about exterior views.
M

Edit: Yeah. Close to final except for the spelling mistakes. I before e, except after c and all that.

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