by Bernd Schneider
by Bernd Schneider
New Starship Designs
There are at least 50 to 60 known past and present classes of Starfleet vessels that have been mentioned yet and their number is growing fast. However, only some 20 to 30 of them could be seen in the various episodes and movies or were shown in another way as e.g. the Daedalus class starship model in Sisko's ready room. We cannot be sure if the shown starship classes are in some way the most important ones, though it seems that Excelsior and Miranda starships are omnipresent. Unfortunately, the budget for models ("real" ones as well as CGI's) is limited, so we will probably never get to see an Istanbul class, Surak class or Yorkshire class starship. After all, there is a great progress since the 1960's when the Constitution class was the only one to be shown. Another reason to veil the actual number of starships and classes as well as their outer appearances and characteristics is to allow the authors to invent not only recent designs, but also to date them back some decades.
For those who cannot get enough of Federation starships (like me), I have designed some more classes of different eras from the foundation of Starfleet to the end of the 24th century. Of course, all starships depicted in this section are non-official. I suppose I was careful to fit the new designs into the timeline, meeting the various technical requirements of Starfleet vessels as well as the registry scheme (maybe Rick Sternbach has a look at this site). If you nevertheless detect any deviation from starship design rules, a duplicate registry number or a duplicate name in conflict with official starship designs, feel free to inform me. You may publish the following starship graphics as you like, but please include a link to my website. I used Micrografx Designer 4.0/6.0 for the drawings, so if you like to modify a design or use it as basis for a new one, I will probably be able to send you the original vector graphics files (*.ds4 or *.dsf) via e-mail. Finally, there is one request: please do not ask me for technical details of starships, for this is where my considerations on the design end.
Here are the first new starship designs. Click on the thumbnails to view an enlarged and colored image and a text description. The ships are depicted in four relative scales: 100% for the huge ships (>500m long), 150% for the large ones (>250m), 250% for the smaller ones (>100m) and 400% for the tiny ones (<100m). There are some starship classes mentioned in the descriptions that will be shown later.
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Last changed: 21.01.98
