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After another 5-6 hours of sketchwork (and a rather bad case of carpal tunnel), I've finally finished design work on the Sentinel-Class Light Survey Cruiser, United Space Ship Highwind (Naval Construction Contract #0688). Again, I really do need to extend some major thanks to my Deviant Art collaborator, for helping me to get this design off the ground, because his assistance meant that I only had to do one more view and several minor details to finish this pet project. He created three more views of the ship for me that you can see here: [link]

This is the 2nd Federation starship I've fully designed - that is, for which I've drawn more than a side view, and for which I've established a detailed backstory and technical details. There is another starship, the U.S.S. Resilient, for which I contributed a background and technical data, but didn't do the art design, which was completely handled by making the project a true 50/50 collaboration.

This version of Captain (later Commodore) Gavazza's Starship Highwind shows:

1. Starboard Elevation (Right Side View)
2. Ventral Plan (Bottom View)
3. Emergency Separation Mechanisms

You see, one of the defining characteristics of "Star Trek" Federation military starships is their modular construction. They are literally built in pieces that are put together to create the final ship, and if any calamity ensues, the pieces can be ejected. But before the invention of the Magna-Lock system in the mid-24th century (TNG Era) and its implementation on the Galaxy-class, separation was achieved in a much more destructive manner. The Highwind has three main sections: a saucer hull with an upper and lower support brace, a cigar-shaped engineering hull and a gigantic single warp engine nacelle hung from the bottom brace that looks something like a very long vanilla wafer tube. The engineering hull and warp nacelle are linked to their respective support braces by a series of explosive separation bolts.

If either section needs to be ejected (or both at once if necessary), these ejection bolts must be detonated, detaching the section from the main body of the ship. Under standard operating procedure, the ship would then fire her impulse engine array and move away from the ejected sections as fast as possible. (That's because usually, a maneuver this drastic would only be done if, say, one of the other two sections was about to explode.) Unlike the Saucer Separation procedure on the much more advanced Magna-Lock equipped starships over 100 years later, this procedure is irreversible. The Highwind's crew cannot reattach an ejected module on their own. Instead, the ship must be reassembled at a separate drydock facility. This is another reason why modular separation procedures are only to be performed as a last resort on these early Starfleet ships.

I've also corrected a few statistics and added some more. The ship's armaments were corrected so that she only has 5 twin-turret Phaser arrays instead of 6, as I removed one Phaser array from her engine after deciding that a warp nacelle isn't a good place to put a gun turret, even if removing it created a massive blind spot in her defenses. I've given her a total of 26 levels (decks) with an average deck height of 3 meters from the ceiling to the ground (a good bit taller than the deck heights that will eventually become standard by 2245 in the Prime Reality), and her complement of small craft includes a total of 30 shuttlecraft of various types and a number of single-occupancy escape pods (such as the one used in "Star Trek (2009)" to eject Acting Lieutenant James T. Kirk from the Alternate Reality U.S.S. Enterprise). In the event of an emergency, the pods can be launched from the massive circular docking ports built into the sides of the cruiser's hull but were meant to be used in conjunction with the shuttles if the ship needs to be evacuated.

Furthermore, a close inspection of the ventral saucer section of Sentinel-Class Light GSC's like NCC-0688 will show two important architectural features that the original Einstein-Class Starships like the U.S.S. Kelvin (NCC-0514) did not have: two enormous open cargo loading hatches, one on either side of the saucer section toward the rear. These bays are based on the famous through-deck cargo hatches found on Doug Drexler's design for the NX-Class Starships of "Star Trek: Enterprise." However, unlike the NX-01's two hatches, these are not completely through-deck; there are no corresponding doors on the top side of the ship, so you can't simply load a pallet of supplies from the bottom and push them all the way out the top. (In reality, that's because I created the details after already did the top view of the design, but I've explained it by saying that the design flaw arose because the ship's designers were unable to fully rearrange enough of her vital components to make through-deck loading bays possible.)

UPDATE: This design has since been reinterpreted by two collaborators as a favor. helped me finish my design by using the prefabricated starship pieces available to him to create three more views for me: [link] while has redone the design in Masao Okazaki's pre-TOS style and even created a scaled pre-TOS starship recognition profile chart comparing the Sentinel-Class and her bigger sister, the Einstein-Class: [link] and [link] Thanks, guys! For such a quick project, I didn't think she'd engender this much interest.

Description
After another 5-6 hours of sketchwork (and a rather bad case of carpal tunnel), I've finally finished design work on the Sentinel-Class Light Survey Cruiser, United Space Ship Highwind (Naval Construction Contract #0688). Again, I really do need to extend some major thanks to my Deviant Art collaborator, for helping me to get this design off the ground, because his assistance meant that I only had to do one more view and several minor details to finish this pet project. He created three more views of the ship for me that you can see here: [link]

This is the 2nd Federation starship I've fully designed - that is, for which I've drawn more than a side view, and for which I've established a detailed backstory and technical details. There is another starship, the U.S.S. Resilient, for which I contributed a background and technical data, but didn't do the art design, which was completely handled by making the project a true 50/50 collaboration.

This version of Captain (later Commodore) Gavazza's Starship Highwind shows:

1. Starboard Elevation (Right Side View)
2. Ventral Plan (Bottom View)
3. Emergency Separation Mechanisms

You see, one of the defining characteristics of "Star Trek" Federation military starships is their modular construction. They are literally built in pieces that are put together to create the final ship, and if any calamity ensues, the pieces can be ejected. But before the invention of the Magna-Lock system in the mid-24th century (TNG Era) and its implementation on the Galaxy-class, separation was achieved in a much more destructive manner. The Highwind has three main sections: a saucer hull with an upper and lower support brace, a cigar-shaped engineering hull and a gigantic single warp engine nacelle hung from the bottom brace that looks something like a very long vanilla wafer tube. The engineering hull and warp nacelle are linked to their respective support braces by a series of explosive separation bolts.

If either section needs to be ejected (or both at once if necessary), these ejection bolts must be detonated, detaching the section from the main body of the ship. Under standard operating procedure, the ship would then fire her impulse engine array and move away from the ejected sections as fast as possible. (That's because usually, a maneuver this drastic would only be done if, say, one of the other two sections was about to explode.) Unlike the Saucer Separation procedure on the much more advanced Magna-Lock equipped starships over 100 years later, this procedure is irreversible. The Highwind's crew cannot reattach an ejected module on their own. Instead, the ship must be reassembled at a separate drydock facility. This is another reason why modular separation procedures are only to be performed as a last resort on these early Starfleet ships.

I've also corrected a few statistics and added some more. The ship's armaments were corrected so that she only has 5 twin-turret Phaser arrays instead of 6, as I removed one Phaser array from her engine after deciding that a warp nacelle isn't a good place to put a gun turret, even if removing it created a massive blind spot in her defenses. I've given her a total of 26 levels (decks) with an average deck height of 3 meters from the ceiling to the ground (a good bit taller than the deck heights that will eventually become standard by 2245 in the Prime Reality), and her complement of small craft includes a total of 30 shuttlecraft of various types and a number of single-occupancy escape pods (such as the one used in "Star Trek (2009)" to eject Acting Lieutenant James T. Kirk from the Alternate Reality U.S.S. Enterprise). In the event of an emergency, the pods can be launched from the massive circular docking ports built into the sides of the cruiser's hull but were meant to be used in conjunction with the shuttles if the ship needs to be evacuated.

Furthermore, a close inspection of the ventral saucer section of Sentinel-Class Light GSC's like NCC-0688 will show two important architectural features that the original Einstein-Class Starships like the U.S.S. Kelvin (NCC-0514) did not have: two enormous open cargo loading hatches, one on either side of the saucer section toward the rear. These bays are based on the famous through-deck cargo hatches found on Doug Drexler's design for the NX-Class Starships of "Star Trek: Enterprise." However, unlike the NX-01's two hatches, these are not completely through-deck; there are no corresponding doors on the top side of the ship, so you can't simply load a pallet of supplies from the bottom and push them all the way out the top. (In reality, that's because I created the details after already did the top view of the design, but I've explained it by saying that the design flaw arose because the ship's designers were unable to fully rearrange enough of her vital components to make through-deck loading bays possible.)

UPDATE: This design has since been reinterpreted by two collaborators as a favor. helped me finish my design by using the prefabricated starship pieces available to him to create three more views for me: [link] while has redone the design in Masao Okazaki's pre-TOS style and even created a scaled pre-TOS starship recognition profile chart comparing the Sentinel-Class and her bigger sister, the Einstein-Class: [link] and [link] Thanks, guys! For such a quick project, I didn't think she'd engender this much interest.