Star Trek: Fleet Operations, Origami and Daybreak…

Hey everyone,

With the release of the newest patch of Fleet Ops, we’ve already started working on the next patch. One new ship we are introducing is the Nova class.

The Nova is one of my favorite ship classes for a few reasons. For one it is a great design which shows how Federation ship design is going to progress. It feels like it takes the sleak Sovereign and compresses it down into a smaller ship. The Nova also has the interesting distinction of having two deflectors. It also happens to be in possibly my favorite episode of Voyager.

The modelling for the Nova is pretty much done. It weighs in around 2500 polygons, about 500 less than my B’rel. I’ll post again once the Nova’s texture is finished, which hopefully won’t be too long. In the mean time you guys can freely speculate on what the Nova class is going to be like in the game . You can also check out my regular site which has just gone live. It need some tweaking and needs to be made Firefox compliant, but the basics are there. All you need to do is go to www.nathanzeichner.com.

In other news I’d like to congratulate Star Trek Online for going into Open Beta. It has been a long road since the game was announced in 2004, but it is finally getting public testing and looks like it will be a lot of fun. I look forward to seeing others in the game.

And now on to the pretty renders…


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I can’t believe it took me this long to use this pun. Anyway… Today’s post is just going to be an update of the B’rel model with the work in progress texture. The texture for the wings is almost done and then I’ll start on the body. I’m hoping that it will be done for the next patch, but I’m not sure if it will done in time. I’ll talk a bit more about the creation of the B’rel/K’vort texture once they are done.  Read more...

Today is the first of many updates regarding the Cardassians in Fleet Ops. I think they maybe the most requested feature on the forums since the release of beta 2. The Cardassians are my favorite race in Star Trek and now I have a chance to create new designs for them. In this post I’m going to talk a little about my philosophy for designing original cardassian ships and stations and give you an exclusive look at the first original design in Fleet Ops.  Read more...

Another Saturday, another update. Before the update, I would like to mention that I am using a new protection program to block spam, so if you are having problems posting comments I recommend two things: either A. post on the Fleet Ops forums that you can’t comment on the blog, or B. register with the blog to avoid any problems. On to the update. For those of you who read the todo list on Fleet Ops website, the Galaxy and Nebula redos have been on the list for awhile. Obviously this is because the Galaxy and Nebulas classes are related. In fact, from the start I wanted the Galaxy and the Nebula classes to share one texture. So I am going to talk a little about the process of taking a full model and dividing it up into many models that share the texture.  Read more...

For a third time in a row, we are going to look at a refit of a cannon design: The Excelsior II class. I promise next time we’ll look at something besides a refit design . I believe this was the first non-cannon design I did for Fleet Ops, which makes it sort of special. It also makes it a very old design, so unfortunately I don’t have any of the original sketches of this ship.

When designing this ship I wanted to keep two things in mind: keeping the original proportions of the excelsior and updating the saucer section to have more Sovereign like qualities. Back when I was designing this guy I spent a lot of time looking at the original Excelsior, the Excelsior refit (Enterprise B) and the old Excelsior II we had in Fleet Ops. I actually had a design way back that had three deflectors like the old Excelsior II. However if you look at my original Excelsior model in Fleet Ops currently, you’ll notice that the Excelsior has odd proportions. The nacells are incredibly far back and really long. When you look at the Excelsior from above, it does not feel right. If you look at all the movies where the excelsior original appears, you’ll notice that the Excelsior was never meant to be seen from above. It has a sleekness that is seen only when you see it from below. I feel like my final design for the Excelsior II definitely captured those proportions for better and for worse.  Read more...