MerMay: A Whale of A Time

 Because The Very Mistress was washing her hair on Saturday - and therefore missed streaming Star Trek: Lower Decks - I said I'd make it up to her by posting some more Star Trek stuff on a different day.  

 Well, today is that day!  So, be sure to thank TVM after you've hastily scrolled through this post to see if there's anything of interest other than the muscular merman at the end enjoyed the last two months worth of my Star Trek fan art!

 

 Right.  We'd better get on with it.  Here's last month's Star Trek Fan Art Challenge: 

April: Inspired by Laura

"As some of you might know, @Laura Cynthia Chambers has been doing her own, very unique starship designs in Microsoft Paint for a while.  Some are simple and almost crude, while others can be super complex, especially if they were realized in three dimensions.  For this theme choose one of her designs and make it your own.  Recreate it in 3D, draw full orthos from all views, build it as an actual physical model, make a detailed pencil drawing of it à la @Atolm, let yourself be inspired … the possibilities are endless.  And please make sure to post a link to the starship design you picked."

 By 19th April I'd already picked three of Laura's starship designs (Starships 52, 57 & 58), but found another one that piqued my interest (31) and started sketching:

 At the top is #57 - I envisage this "stuck with plungers" ship with a spherical hull bristling with sensor antennae.  The three middle sketches are of #58.  To me, Laura's design looked rather Oberth-like, but she mentioned that this is a top-down view.  So, rather than having a secondary hull/sensor pod overshadowing the saucer, I made it part of the primary hull (as in the USS Kobayashi Maru) with the central ridged part a 'greenhouse' dome (as this could be a botanical crusier).  At the bottom middle-right is a head-on sketch of # 52 - I imagine this is the side view, with the grey ovals on the left being the front of the ship, and the six vertical bars are large, exposed warp coils (or small, in-line warp rings like the Vulcans use).  And bottom left is #31 - what I interpret as its undercarriage.  My sketch next to it is how I imagine a side view to look.  [Ignore the fishy Excelsior on the right - that's an idea for MerMay]

 "Stuck with plungers" (#57) kept popping into my thoughts, so that's the design I decided to work on. While I like a spherical hull now and then, it just wasn't working in my sketches, so I tried something different: a slanted-saucer version.

 I had a bit of mind-boggling fun coming up with the front view for this design.  I'm not sure if the secondary hull really works with an oval cross-section, so I thought about trying triangular with chamfered edges (I thought triangular would better suit the three nacelle pylons, too).

 As for what's going at the rear, I haven't thought too much about it yet.  Maybe a couple of impulse engines spaced between the three pylons under the saucer edge, and a shuttlebay in the undercut?

 A thought I had about the antennae is that they're manoeuvrable.  The forward-facing position they're in above is for when the ship's at warp and/or for tight-focused scanning.  Then they can stand upright for general scanning/comms while at rest, or fan out for wide-angle consumption of all that delicious interstellar data either at rest or sublight speeds!

 I had the very devil of a time in the last week of the challenge trying to work out exactly what the rear and underneath of this ship look like.  I had a general idea, but found it difficult to put it down on paper - or MSPaint, as it were.  It didn't help that I kept dithering between having a triangular or oval cross-sectioned secondary hull - or a combination of both!  Plus, the weather was amazing at the time, so I was sorting the garden out rather than working on this.

 So, as producing a full range of orthos was nixed by dithering and weather, I tidied up the side views displaying the different positions of the comms & mapping antennas and added a very basic cutaway MSD:

 

 As you might be able to tell, there are two different gravity envelopes going on.  The primary hull/saucer section is mostly all cetacean navigation and cet.ops so the gravity (& decking) follows the plane of the saucer to allow for a lovely big air bubble (the blue bit) for the whale & dolphin crew to breathe in.  The light grey part of the secondary hull has gravity & decking following the plane of the nacelles - this part of the ship is mostly given over to shuttle & work/repair bays, and probe/relay manufacturing/drop bays.

 Each nacelle houses two sets of warp coils and its own M/ARA and is accessible by both cetaceans and humanoids, but they're highly automated so won't require a physical presence except in extreme circumstances.  The ship can run on one, two, or all three nacelles depending on requirements, and can descend to and traverse the K-layer* - a deep subspace domain - for piggyback signal concealment, "matter switching", and defensive manoeuvring.  There are two impulse engines at the rear of the saucer situated between the nacelle pylons.

 The Chambers-class is lightly armed with one forward-facing probe/torpedo launcher, and four phaser arrays (two dorsal & two ventral).

* From the DS9 Technical Manual.

May: Signs and Symbols

"Every good organization has a logo, a banner, or insignia.  Design a variation on an already-seen icon, such as the Starfleet Delta or the IDIC (perhaps an earlier version, or a different race's take on it).  Or create a flag, symbol, or emblem for a race that currently doesn't have one. Your fanon design might just become canon someday!

Lots of intriguing directions to go in with this one: mission or project patches, department logos, starship insignia or "nose-art"...?"

 I was doing another Excelsior MerMay sketch (which didn't come out any better than the first one up there) and wondered if I could turn it into a starship assignment patch for this month's art challenge.  I had a look on Memory Alpha for Excelsior-class starships with aquatic-themed names, and there's only really the "maybe Excelsior" Atlantis - which is good enough for me!  However, while I was at it I remembered the Miranda-class Nautilus, and thought that the shape of the Miranda lends itself well to an actual nautilus cephalopod, so of course I did a sketch of that too.

Oof!  Some quick and dirty colouring - I'll add the ship name and registry number to the ring at some point.  Maybe

 I finally got around to working on MerMay's Excelsior this past Sunday (thanks to an extremely wet weekend which kept me indoors), specifically an assignment patch or nose art for the USS Atlantis which I'll use for this month's art challenge.

 Well, I got as far as these slightly detailed sketched, anyway...

 I decided to go with this Excelsior merman for the USS Atlantis' nose art - or, pennant decoration, anyway.  I spent ages working out where & how the Excelsior details would work on a twisting human/icthyoid body, but I wasn't sure what I was going to do with the head.  I've given him pointed ears because originally he was going to be Atlantean, but then I thought he could be a Vulcan merman when I remembered that Excelsior's transwarp engine nacelles were constructed by Shuvinaaljis Warp Technologies of Vulcan (according to Lora Johnson's Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise, at least).

 Today has been another wet and soggy day - ideal weather to be indoors finishing off my muscular merman.  However, I rushed the face and messed up his eyes - poor Atlantis!  I wanted to give his head some features from the lower/planetary sensor dome of the Excelsior class, but I couldn't get anything to really work. In a last ditch attempt, I tried to at least make his eyes look like the blue-white lights in the six chevrons that encircle the dome, but the ink bled into the paper too much and then I made matters worse by attempting to correct it with a white brush pen!  Ah, well...

 Oh, and he had to shave his head due to a Kerplickian lice infestation!

 And that, you may be disappointed to hear Very Mistress, is that!  Star Trek Fan Art Post finished.

P.S. Yes, that's me wearing the Star Trek: Lower Decks Kimolu t-shirt at the start of this post.  As I'm sure you all know by now, Kimolu is one of the two Beluga whales who work in the USS Cerritos' cetacean operations department.  You did know that, didn't you?  Didn't you?!?