# Engineering Hull Plans



## bigjimslade (Oct 9, 2005)

I have moved from the saucer to the engineering hull. Thought I would share what I have so far for critical comments. There is no detail, only the basic shape. However, if you compare these to other sources I think you will find subtle differences as I have tried to get as close to the model as I can get from photos.

Some of the things where these differ from what's out there is how I have tried to get the non-uniformer narrowing at the stern done and the shape of the fantail undercut.

The coloring is for my own use to help me position the various parts.


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## Chuck_P.R. (Jun 8, 2003)

I just recently came across your earlier "shoulders" email and see what you mean now.

I'll have to do a little research and try and figure out why the Kerr blueprints show them...


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## uss_columbia (Jul 15, 2003)

I'd seen these on starshipbuilder (I think it was). Looking good!

Recently, I've been experimenting with doing 3d computer models and then overlaying them on photos to see how the shapes match up. I've found it to be very useful!

Are you doing the same thing with your refit? What software are you using?


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## bigjimslade (Oct 9, 2005)

I am using Turbocad and Illustrator. I am doing exactly what you suggest in embedding photographs in the file and drawing over them.


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## Chuck_P.R. (Jun 8, 2003)

Bigjimslade, you've got mail!!!

Hope the files help with your saucer, I'm still looking at what you were asking about the stern overview.


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## Chuck_P.R. (Jun 8, 2003)

Okay, after studying all the photos I have and pouring over the drawings in question I'm convinced the shoulders are there.

They are difficult to perceive unless you are looking at the model from directly above or above and parrallel to the the area, or look at the side curve in question from a 3/4 rear perspective, but they appear to be there.

I'll go ahead and email a few of the files that seem to show them best. I think they look a little weird in the orthographic overhead view because you would never notice the slight jutting of the curves except from one or two rare angles.


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## Griffworks (Jun 24, 2002)

What shoulders are you talking about, exactly? I'm assuming something around the hangar bay area?


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## Chuck_P.R. (Jun 8, 2003)

That is the area. If you compare that area in BigJimSlades rendering to the overhead view seen in the Gary Kerr plans what BigJimSlades means by "shoulders" becomes apparent.

I don't have a high res set of his blues but the low res set posted on Culttvman's site are clear enough to be able to make them out.

They virtually disappear when you view the refit from all but a couple of rarely viewed angles. Few still images capture them well. I would post the still photo files that do but there is a really low file size limit here plus I am also near my personal file limit.

I did email some to BigJimSlade. Maybe he can host and link to them if anyone needs more info about what we are talking about.


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## Griffworks (Jun 24, 2002)

OK, I _think_ I see what you guys are talking about. I'd never noticed that before. Or if I did, it must not have been terribly important enough to me to log it in my brain pan.


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## Chuck_P.R. (Jun 8, 2003)

Here is a pretty good description of the area in question,
taken from part of Kerr's plans posted as part of one
of Thomas' fix files.

The areas in question are highlighted in yellow.

It's an extremely subtle point.

In the hundreds of photos I've been able to find from Phil's site and the some a partner in crime sent me from the Christie's auction; the detail is only discernable in a grand total of three photos.

Which only goes to show how great Gary Kerr's blues are.
It's a crying shame he is not allowed to publish them.
I really really wish Paramount would put some money into allowing him to publish them for sale.

They would make money, he would make money, and for a few bucks we could all finally have the most accurate blues available - short of physically scanning the original filming miniature. 


BTWay, although PNG files are tremendously better for saving undistorted line drawings, at least in my browser they often need to be downloaded and opened locally. In case some of you are having trouble seeing the attached file:


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## Chuck_P.R. (Jun 8, 2003)

BTWay, after doing a ridiculous number of measurings of the Secondary Hull of both the PL kit and the Kerr drawings as best as I could, over and over and over...

I came to a conclusion that I found unacceptible.

The Secondary Hull of the filming miniature is actually proportionally smaller then the "official" blueprints.

Now, no one has put much faith in the "official" TMP blues as being representative of the actual filming miniature.

Some changes had to be made to the nacelles for example, in order to have them not droop. Those differences are as one would expect.

But I never expected the Secondary Hull to be proportionally slightly smaller then the official blues. Larger yes, but smaller?

The difference is relatively tiny, but if BigJimSlade is pulling his hair out over the "shoulder" issue I think it's only fair that I point out the variance before he wastes a ton of time going through the various phases and steps of denial and acceptance I went through.

He might still want to confirm it himself, but I still thought it might be helpful to say before he gets that far and wastes too much time trying to deal with the seeming incongruity.


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## ZStar (Sep 7, 2005)

The "shoulder" effect is real. The approximately conic shape of the aft secondary hull is being cut by a sloping plane at the shuttle bay. In the side view we see the plane edge on so it looks like a straight line. From above we see an oblique view of the plane and so the intersection between the SH and the plane results in a curve. 

The bulge of the control room complicates things. Also note that the PL control room blends much more sharply with the SH than on the filming model. The relatively large curve blending the aft shuttle bay wall and the flight deck in the side view also adds to the odd curves when projected to the top view.


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## bigjimslade (Oct 9, 2005)

*Thought I would post one more*

As I am nearing the finish line....

Working on the final details of the warp engines. In previous pictures of mine the grills were just flat. Now I have added the actual texture. I counted I counted the number of grill lines in photos to get the right number. Have done the large side grills. Need to do the copper colored ones.

I have been going bridge, saucer, sensors, neck, engineering, pylons, and finally warp engines trying to work out the final details.

Should have all the data one would need to scratch build soon. Then I have to figure out how to make the data available.

Doing it in 3D is tough but it reveals A LOT of errors one finds in 2D plans.

One thing to note is that even here some artistic license has to be taken. There are a few defects in the model, differences between the model and the blow up model, differences betweent the model and what you see on screen and some "busy" areas that you just have to use your imagination a bit. What I am coming up with is an idealized refit.


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## SteveR (Aug 7, 2005)

Bigjimslade, are you "lofting" the hull in your 3D app?


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## bigjimslade (Oct 9, 2005)

SteveR said:


> Bigjimslade, are you "lofting" the hull in your 3D app?


Most of the parts consists of lofts among frames. The saucer is an obvious exception -- it is a spin of a profile. The body of the warp engine is a cylinder. The bridge has a lot of spheres and cones.


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## SteveR (Aug 7, 2005)

Thanks, Jim.


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## bigjimslade (Oct 9, 2005)

This might give a better impression of the 3D


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## bigjimslade (Oct 9, 2005)

*Some more*

The last thing I have left before preparing for publication in some undecided format is to clean up the details on the warp engine.

Here are of detail shots.

Everything shown is in 3D. The groves on the tail fins and side grills are physically engraved in the surface rather than being simply drawn.

I started engraving texture once I became aware of the ability to use such a model in 3D printing. Some tests have been made and they really look unbelievably good.

Enjoy


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## uss_columbia (Jul 15, 2003)

Always a pleasure to see your refit work!


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## bigjimslade (Oct 9, 2005)

It's unfortunate that there are few to no pictures of the refit under construction exists. The warp engines are the most complex part of the model. In breaking creating the 3D model it appears that one can see an how and why the warp engine was created the ways it was.

Here I have an exploded view of the components. The main body of the engine is simply a tube (shown in green here) The stern appears to be a taper added to the tube (blue).

The pylon goes at the junction of the red and orange pieces. I have to suspect that these pieces were created as upper and lower wrappers around the frame with the upper (orange) then serving as the resting place of the tubular body on the frame.

The red top trim piece looks inspired by a submarine. 

The white side pieces and the yellow crossbar then cover the seams.

When you you break the parts up in 3D it seems to give a give a good picture of why things are the way they are.


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## bigjimslade (Oct 9, 2005)

*Update*

Hard to believe it's ten years. I've switched from Turbocad to Rhino. Turbocad is an ACIS solid modeler. If you want to get started with 3D CAD work, it is the most intuitive out there to use.

The long term problem with Turbocad is that when things go awry, the issues are difficult to diagnose and correct. The other big problem with ACIS is that you are limited to its solid constructs. If you want to do a ship hull, you are pretty much SOL because there is no effective way of bringing such a solid to a point. That and the availability of a Rhino Mac version caused me to switch.

I have been converting my models bit by bit to Rhino. Much of the Turbocad version remained the same but as I switched to doing the things the Rhino way more and more of the TC stuff has vanished. I think almost all of it is now gone. Rhino is NURBS modeler. Everything is a surface. A "solid" in Rhino is a group of joined surfaces leaving no openings. Things are much more difficult in Rhino than in Turbocad but you can do a lot more in Rhino. In Turbocad you don't have to worry about surfaces no joining like you have to in Rhino. On the other hand, when things are screwed up they are much easier to diagnose in Rhino. Another Rhino downside is filleting is much less reliable than in ACIS.

In addition to doing the Rhino related changes, I have made a number of changes to reflect new views of photo references. I have also done a lot more "straightening." I have faired all the lines. Things are smoother and straighter than on the studio model.

Here is the area discussed above. It was the most complicated part in the whole thing to do. It was nightmare to in Turbocad and extremely difficult in Rhino. 










Others obviously have had problems in this area as well. None of the many plans I consulted were consistent among views of this area. In other words, any two views combined produced a 3d impossibility. So there was little help here outside photo references. I made the spine a bit wider than I had done in the past, moved the cab back a bit, and staggered the door segments.

Another view:









Another change was the submarine deck here. In ACIS I made this as a solid block and filleted the edges. In Rhino, I define surfaces.










The bridge is pretty much the same other than faired lines and some surfaces. The area on either side of the dome and wrapping around it is now all one surface making things smoother. Before the sides and front were formed from separate solid creating a discontinuity where they met.










In ACIS I had to make the bezels here using intersections and subtractions. In Rhino I can make them as individual surfaces. The result is the bezels have uniform widths where there was some waviness in the Turbocad version (and the studio model has a lot of waviness).










This is the only interior I built and I only did so because the Windows are so huge. The Enterprise has a TARDIS interior with variable scale. For example, on the saucer, the giant rec dec windows work out to be 24" in scale. if you put place a deck so the lower windows are at eye height, the upper windows are a knee height.

The ears on the side here were done by filleting a solid block in Turbocad. In Rhino the shape is defined by surfaces. This is one of the areas I have straightened from the studio model. 










With a 3d model, one small change can create a chain reaction throughout the model. Positioning curves in 3D is much more difficult than doing it in 2D. And in 2D you can use a line to represent a grid. In 3D you have to create the actual grid.










Unfortunately, Rhino Mac does not yet have the conversion to 2D feature of its Windoze version. So it will be a while before I can generate a new set of plans off the model.


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## Fozzie (May 25, 2009)

Beautiful work!


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## [email protected] (Jun 30, 2016)

Amazing work! What are your plans when you've finished?


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## bigjimslade (Oct 9, 2005)

I'll probably do another set of plans; help people who are working on this; that kind of thing.


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## Bernard Guignar (Sep 9, 2006)

Great work there Big Jim. Interesting about Rhino and the filleting. At work we downloaded a trial version to test out but projects have exploded and I haven't had the time to kick the tires so to speak.


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## publiusr (Jul 27, 2006)

I always loved the Balson hull of Aridas Sophia

I modified it for what I thought would be a next-gen refit:
2D Bashes, modifications, and more

Second from top. Something you might want to do.


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## bigjimslade (Oct 9, 2005)

Bernard Guignar said:


> Great work there Big Jim. Interesting about Rhino and the filleting. At work we downloaded a trial version to test out but projects have exploded and I haven't had the time to kick the tires so to speak.


What are you using?

Here is an illustration. It shows the frame used to build the spine. In Turbocad/ACIS I had all the corners square and would fillet the resulting solid as desired. For Rhino, I had to filled the upper 4 corners of the frame before lofting. The wirecut curve used to create the angle is also filleted. The only edge I fillet on the surfaces is the outer one in Rhino.

Rhino's filleting is much more powerful than Turbocad/ACIS but it is much more finicky.


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## Bernard Guignar (Sep 9, 2006)

bigjimslade said:


> What are you using?
> 
> Here is an illustration. It shows the frame used to build the spine. In Turbocad/ACIS I had all the corners square and would fillet the resulting solid as desired. For Rhino, I had to filled the upper 4 corners of the frame before lofting. The wirecut curve used to create the angle is also filleted. The only edge I fillet on the surfaces is the outer one in Rhino.
> 
> Rhino's filleting is much more powerful than Turbocad/ACIS but it is much more finicky.


I'm using Cimatron to design Checking fixtures.


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## bigjimslade (Oct 9, 2005)

That's pretty specialized. 

I understand that a lot of people use multiple tools. It's common to create things in Rhino then switch to Solidworks. There was a T-Splines product that was integrated with Rhino that got bought by Autocad who in turn are ending Rhino support (no shock there).


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## Bernard Guignar (Sep 9, 2006)

Yes I know. we are a small company and to get a second seat for some one to help me with the workload is a daunting prospect so we are looking for more cost effective solutions.


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## bigjimslade (Oct 9, 2005)

There is a bit up up front learning you have to do with Rhino. The main issue is that Rhino likes four-sided surfaces. Like here on the lower part of the neck, there are 5 sides. This does not even have area under the front removed that adds even more edges.










I build the side four-sided like this:










then trim along the green curve. The really hard part here is to get the shape of the blue frames correct. From this view they look like lines but, in fact, many are splines. That's the tough part about doing the work in 3D. If you do it in 2D you just have to do the outline. In 3D, you have to get the outline and the frames.

The red curve marks the hull intersection. You can see that extending the blue frames creates a bit of chaos at the lower left of the surface. But it's all below the red curve so it disappears. I could have used the red curve for the bottom because that still results in 4 sides but the assembly is easier to build with planar surfaces and, if there are slight changes to the hull, I don't have to completely redo this section.

I run into 3- and 5-sided surfaces all the time that have to be made 4-sided. This is unusual, a 9-sided shape that breaks down down into five four-sided surfaces. None of these need to be trimmed.










Here's an example of the difference between the Rhino and ACIS (Turbocad) result. 










The top is a screenshot from Rhino, the bottom from Turbocad. If you look at the left end of the TC version, the curve does not go smoothly all the way around. That's because that whole red part is just a rectangular block that is trimmed and filleted. You get the intersections where they fall.

The cyan shape in the TC version has an arrowhead at the left side. That's because there is no real way to loft to a point. Even the sides kind of fall where they may.

The way I do the Rhino version is to loft curves past the end to create a 4-sided surface, then trim to form the curve. As always, the really hard part is getting the frames to form a correct 3d surface.

TC does multi colors better than Rhino. In Rhino, every surface joined together has the same color. You can set the color of a solid or surface in TC. If you add two solids, each piece keeps its original color. Because I have always been concerned about solids (and ignore painted lines completely), that is a non-issue for me. If you really want to, you can explode all the surfaces and give them different colors and textures. In project this, that is THOUSANDS of surface. I don't bother.

I should add the support for Rhino is VERY good. I have heard that something comparable to T-splines is in the works. T-Splines was an add-on to Rhino that did t-splines (duh). These do not require 4-sided-ness like Rhino's NURBS surfaces. Then Autocad bought T-Splines and is dropping Rhino support.

That's the kind of mindset change you have to get into to use Rhino.


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## Bernard Guignar (Sep 9, 2006)

Thanks I really appreciate the information.


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## bigjimslade (Oct 9, 2005)

*3-Sided Corners*

I got an a message asking me to address how to do three-sided corners in NURBS. Specifically, the questioner was trying to build this corner on the Warp engine. Finally, I have a little time this morning to answer. 









(Note that I have cleaned up the area behind the corner vis-a-vis the studio model.)

The problem described was easy to reproduce. This shape looks like something really simple but you always end up getting something like this with a bump at one corner:










That is because NURBS hates 3-sided shapes.

There are a few ways to solve this problem. The one I use the most is to extend the shapes. I generally use mirror copies to start off then use blends to fill in the gabs. The mirroring preserves tangency. This creates a bowl shape:











Then use the frame lines to trim:










Then you get a 3-sided surface with no bumps.


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