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Description

A mod by me for greater accuracy of my own port to OBJ from the fan-made low poly model created for the Starfleet Command (SFC) series of video games. Original Citadel design by David Schmidt, as first released in his fan publication Starfleet Officer Requirements and later reappearing in some of his subsequent fan efforts. Preview picture posed in XNALara XPS. NO MODEL DOWNLOAD.

I had to do some rather fancy gandy-dancing to make Mr. Schmidt's Citadel work with everything else fanon, semi-canon, and full canon in the TMP era, in particular Balson (a-hem), but in the end I found a way and that's described in my own Federation Fleet Review (FFR). I also drew on some of the backstory developed by ADB for its SFB take on the Kongo for that (wink). In FFR I talk about the Project Citadel program, which started near the end of the TOS/TAS era as a (hopefully) inexpensive way of converting existing Constitution type Class I heavy cruisers into basic command cruisers (CC) by replacing their existing secondary hulls with a custom-made one fitted with the necessary facilities for fleet level command operations, or C3 in naval slang (command, control, and communications, although that's probably C4 these days if you add computers). This custom secondary hull was about the same size as the normal model as you can see in the above preview piccy, and the price it paid for that was having its shuttlecraft facilities reduced to a very basic two-craft affair instead of what you see installed on the refitted Enterprise in TMP. All of that extra room was taken up by the full C3 suite in a Citadel conversion. Only one TOS era ship (USS Kongo, NCC-1710) got this conversion at the tail end of the TOS/TAS era, with the rest happening during the early part of the TMP era and being done with TMP era technology (see above preview piccy) and Kongo herself getting a TMP era upgrade at the very end (either LN-64 or LN-60, depending on who you go with). Project Citadel was eventually terminated once enough other starships with C3 capabilities became available to take up the slack, such as the all-new Balson class (a-hem!). No more Citadel conversions were ever done for the rest of the TMP era, although it was known that Starfleet still had "one or two" of the custom Project Citadel secondary hulls just in case (wink). Those ships that received a Citadel command cruiser conversion remained so fitted for the rest of their service careers -- or until their destruction, in the case of the Kongo.

This is fanon. How you use it or even if you do in your own thread(s) of the Trek multiverse is entirely up to you.

Live long and prosper.

ASIDE - For those of you who might say, "No, that can't work, it has no basis in reality," I suggest you look up the development history of the U.S. Navy's Blue Ridge class command ships or that of the early Cold War era command cruiser Northampton. In both cases both were adaptations of existing designs, and in Northampton's case of an unfinished regular cruiser left over from World War II. The same holds true for the later Balson class command cruiser. Other real life examples from Terran naval history include the various British Royal Navy destroyer leaders from both World Wars, the flagship versions of various cruiser and battleship classes built by several nations during that same time period, and on and on. All of these (and more) involved modifications to existing warship designs in order to add the necessary desired level of C3 capabilities, with the unloading of selected guns and gun turret mounts to allow for that mod often being required to compensate. That's why I've always accepted Schmidt's Citadel as a necessary intermediate step to get to Sofia's Balson, even though others might not look at it that way.

Description

A mod by me for greater accuracy of my own port to OBJ from the fan-made low poly model created for the Starfleet Command (SFC) series of video games. Original Citadel design by David Schmidt, as first released in his fan publication Starfleet Officer Requirements and later reappearing in some of his subsequent fan efforts. Preview picture posed in XNALara XPS. NO MODEL DOWNLOAD.

I had to do some rather fancy gandy-dancing to make Mr. Schmidt's Citadel work with everything else fanon, semi-canon, and full canon in the TMP era, in particular Balson (a-hem), but in the end I found a way and that's described in my own Federation Fleet Review (FFR). I also drew on some of the backstory developed by ADB for its SFB take on the Kongo for that (wink). In FFR I talk about the Project Citadel program, which started near the end of the TOS/TAS era as a (hopefully) inexpensive way of converting existing Constitution type Class I heavy cruisers into basic command cruisers (CC) by replacing their existing secondary hulls with a custom-made one fitted with the necessary facilities for fleet level command operations, or C3 in naval slang (command, control, and communications, although that's probably C4 these days if you add computers). This custom secondary hull was about the same size as the normal model as you can see in the above preview piccy, and the price it paid for that was having its shuttlecraft facilities reduced to a very basic two-craft affair instead of what you see installed on the refitted Enterprise in TMP. All of that extra room was taken up by the full C3 suite in a Citadel conversion. Only one TOS era ship (USS Kongo, NCC-1710) got this conversion at the tail end of the TOS/TAS era, with the rest happening during the early part of the TMP era and being done with TMP era technology (see above preview piccy) and Kongo herself getting a TMP era upgrade at the very end (either LN-64 or LN-60, depending on who you go with). Project Citadel was eventually terminated once enough other starships with C3 capabilities became available to take up the slack, such as the all-new Balson class (a-hem!). No more Citadel conversions were ever done for the rest of the TMP era, although it was known that Starfleet still had "one or two" of the custom Project Citadel secondary hulls just in case (wink). Those ships that received a Citadel command cruiser conversion remained so fitted for the rest of their service careers -- or until their destruction, in the case of the Kongo.

This is fanon. How you use it or even if you do in your own thread(s) of the Trek multiverse is entirely up to you.

Live long and prosper.

ASIDE - For those of you who might say, "No, that can't work, it has no basis in reality," I suggest you look up the development history of the U.S. Navy's Blue Ridge class command ships or that of the early Cold War era command cruiser Northampton. In both cases both were adaptations of existing designs, and in Northampton's case of an unfinished regular cruiser left over from World War II. The same holds true for the later Balson class command cruiser. Other real life examples from Terran naval history include the various British Royal Navy destroyer leaders from both World Wars, the flagship versions of various cruiser and battleship classes built by several nations during that same time period, and on and on. All of these (and more) involved modifications to existing warship designs in order to add the necessary desired level of C3 capabilities, with the unloading of selected guns and gun turret mounts to allow for that mod often being required to compensate. That's why I've always accepted Schmidt's Citadel as a necessary intermediate step to get to Sofia's Balson, even though others might not look at it that way.