Lieutenant Alex Hopper: We need to find a way to destroy that communications relay.
Petty Officer Cora "Weps" Raikes: Our last ship was just sunk, and we barely got off it. And we are completely cut off from the rest of the fleet. We don't have anything else.
Lieutenant Alex Hopper: Yes, we do. We have a battleship.
Yes that is right, we have a battleship. Whoops I just sunk Knight's Akula... My bad!
I am proud to announce that I am done with Federation ships, I have what I need (minus a work bee and maybe some shuttles). It's been a long time coming and this battleship took more than it's fair share of time to complete.
This design almost didn't happen as I was tossing up between a few designs, it was a bit of a challenge to model and half way through I almost abandoned it for another design. But I decided to stick with it. The texturing was equally time consuming, more so due to my lack of motivation than anything else, but today I managed to do 90% of it and get it complete. You'll also notice I did some work on the nacelles, not wanting to just do a copy and flip I purposely made a nacelle that looked like it was designed to go there.
Now a little backstory on the class:
[fieldset=Proxima Class]
The turbulent 2280's showed Starfleet that while the fleet was utilizing more advanced technology than they did just over a decade ago, many of their larger more powerful designs were never refitted, deemed too expensive for the overhaul. Other powers notably the Klingon's had no such concerns as they produced more powerful designs and a fleet wide review in comparison with the intelligence that Starfleet Intelligence had managed to gather from the Empire showed that if open war started, Starfleet would be at the loosing end and so it was decided to revisit the Proxima class. Rather than refitting it like the Constitution and Detroyat classes which Starfleet found to still be too expensive, it was decided in the long run it was cheaper to build a fleet of new Proxima's from the ground up using the new technology. Modifications to the design also allowed for additional hangars to be included allowing the class to also function as a fighter carrier if the need arose and in peacetimes as a large evacuation platform. However due to the cost of producing such vessels only four were ever produced, notably the USS Proxima, USS Missouri, USS Bismarck and USS Okinawa.
[/fieldset]
I must admit I don't like dual hull designs, but for what I was after in feel I really had no other choice, and so rather than doing a copy and paste of the Star Trek Legacy model, I made my own modifications to the design. I wanted her to display durability and power and so rather than just using Constitution class hulls, which are way too small by the way, I used them only as a rough guide and rebuilt the majority of them, to the point they are almost entirely new. Even when MS3D crashed on me when I hadn't saved for a bit I still continued on, re-doing what I had done.
Now I understand this may not be everyone's piece of cake, but you'd be surprised of how few decent battleships for TMP Federation there are. It really only boils down to the Proxima and Yamato. The latter I never really liked but after doing a quick and dirty kitbash using my Excelsior and Ulysses I found myself actually starting to like the design and don't be surprised in the future if you see it come to YY, possibly as an experimental battleship, alternative avatar unit or as a campaign unit. But for now the Proxima is the Federation battleship and I think she does them proud.
Oh yeah the image:
And for you Zax, since you said earlier more ships should have rollbars:
I may make it an upgrade, when equipped with a rollbar the Proxima has the same torpedo launchers as the Ulysses.
Tomorrow I will do a scale sheet with all the designs in one so you can see her size compared to all the other ships. I have an outdated one atm, before I did the nacelle and texture re-works.
:exter:
