Due to the recent praise I received from the man himself, I’ve resumed modeling work on John Eaves’ starship design. This is the design that will separate its inner saucer section whilst maintaining the shape.  Here’s John’s sketch again (The “B”):

The main work today was adding the windows.  Boy, adding windows is not my favorite pass time. In 3DS Max, I use the shapemerge tool mainly and then clean up the result using the Edit Poly modifier earlier.  See this tutorial from SciFi-meshes.com. On the whole the technique works well, but it takes such a long time and is very repetitive.  If anyone has any quicker ways of working on this sort of thing, let me know!

John sketched elongated horizontal window shapes on the ship, rather than the usual vertical windows you see on mid-24th century ships like the Enterprise-D.  If you look on the future Enterprise J you could almost imagine there is a horizontal slant to the windows there as well. Almost. So you could argue that it was the start of a trend in the late 24th century which was continued on through to the Enterprise J era.  Maybe. Sort of.

I am imaginatively calling the ship the “Eaves Class” for now – there were a few ideas about the name from posts on John’s blog but I don’t think it got resolved…I shall leave this one to the public!