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Description

Image originally posted 20 January 2022.

My own OBJ port of the low poly model created by Adam Turner for Activision's Starfleet Command II.

Mars, or Ares if you go with the Greek instead of Roman name, is an original creation by the Amarillo Design Bureau (ADB) for its old Star Fleet Battles (SFB) tabletop sci-fi wargame set in the Star Trek universe, and which later served as the basis for the Starfleet Command series of video games by Activision. This came from one of the expansion modules for the original version of SFB back in the day, before the Commander's Edition revisions, which focused on the Klingon B-10 class space battleship and how the various other major interstellar powers responded to it. In the original the Federation never did, but Mars/Ares was put up as sort of a design study thing that they would have done had they chosen to build space battleships of their own. This later got TMP-ized by the fans when the Starfleet Command series came along, although Mr. Turner was kind enough to do this model of the original TOS era Mars/Ares design for Starfleet Command II along with a lot of other original SFB starship concepts. It has since appeared in both its original and TMP-ized forms as redone by other and later fan modelers, and the Mars/Ares concept itself got seriously reworked as the Federation's Yamato class space battleship for several of Star Trek based space combat video games (which itself has been further tweaked and reworked by fans, nudge-nudge). That said, the SFC Yamato's tale is best saved for another time ....

Although all of the old big fan Starfleet Command and Bridge Commander sites are now gone, you can find most of the old models for them at places like NexusMods, Lone Bullet, and so on -- and you can port almost all of them either with the SFC3 plug-in for the old Milkshape 3D modeling program or with a similar plug-in for the ancient but still usable GMAX, the hoary free ancestor of the retail 3DS Max. Happy hunting, and live long and prosper!

Description

Image originally posted 20 January 2022.

My own OBJ port of the low poly model created by Adam Turner for Activision's Starfleet Command II.

Mars, or Ares if you go with the Greek instead of Roman name, is an original creation by the Amarillo Design Bureau (ADB) for its old Star Fleet Battles (SFB) tabletop sci-fi wargame set in the Star Trek universe, and which later served as the basis for the Starfleet Command series of video games by Activision. This came from one of the expansion modules for the original version of SFB back in the day, before the Commander's Edition revisions, which focused on the Klingon B-10 class space battleship and how the various other major interstellar powers responded to it. In the original the Federation never did, but Mars/Ares was put up as sort of a design study thing that they would have done had they chosen to build space battleships of their own. This later got TMP-ized by the fans when the Starfleet Command series came along, although Mr. Turner was kind enough to do this model of the original TOS era Mars/Ares design for Starfleet Command II along with a lot of other original SFB starship concepts. It has since appeared in both its original and TMP-ized forms as redone by other and later fan modelers, and the Mars/Ares concept itself got seriously reworked as the Federation's Yamato class space battleship for several of Star Trek based space combat video games (which itself has been further tweaked and reworked by fans, nudge-nudge). That said, the SFC Yamato's tale is best saved for another time ....

Although all of the old big fan Starfleet Command and Bridge Commander sites are now gone, you can find most of the old models for them at places like NexusMods, Lone Bullet, and so on -- and you can port almost all of them either with the SFC3 plug-in for the old Milkshape 3D modeling program or with a similar plug-in for the ancient but still usable GMAX, the hoary free ancestor of the retail 3DS Max. Happy hunting, and live long and prosper!