New Miniatures, Old designs.

The above pictures contain some ships I designed based off of older models either conceptitualized or kitbashed from old babylon 5 miniatures.

There are four different kinds of models in the picture the Narn Midbase in the back is a military base that the Narn would deploy and then anchor cruisers to it to add additional space for living quarters and marines. , It is seen with several Th’nor class cruisers docked to it in the season 1 episode “Chrysalis”

The ship in the center is an Arctic cruiser that was meant to replace the Hyperion in the crusade-era of Babylon 5

But the two on either side of the arctic are special to me.  The represent another level when it comes to 3d modeling for me.  They are kitbashes of a sort, digital kitbashes.  What we have here are the Arion and the Callisto. The Arion is based on the Nova Dreadnought and the Callisto is based on the Omega.

I love the idea of designers on scifi shows like star trek building new ships out of old ones.  In the Battle of Wolf 359 you see broken remnants of  a new design the New Orleans class. which was a model kitbash of the enterprise and some other things.  The designers in that show famously used highlighters as torpedo pods. Ex Astris Scientia has a great article on the New Orleans class http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/articles/neworleans.htm .

We know from written material that the Omega Destroyer came about after the design of the Nova Dreadnought.  The fictional designers working for Earthforce wanted to make it so their crews could last longer than the Nova crews could due to the effects of low gravity on the body.  So the Omega was born with a large rotating section that simulated gravity on the ship adding longevity to the crew rotations and allowing the Omegas to operation on longer missions.  This had a profound effect on earthforce ships because now their missions could go further and last longer because any ships that didn’t have gravity like the olympus, nova and hyperion could also rotate their crews through a Omega to reduce the effects low gravity would have on their crews also.

Its this idea of taking an existing spaceframe like the Nova and making another ship out of it that stuck in my mind. That leads us to These guys:

So basically they are short versions of themselves.  I made changes to them to make them seem more realistic than their basic designed parts found at b5warsvault.wikidot.com

I like how they came out. The Callisto started as an Omega, I removed the portion between the bridge and the rotating section, but shortening the body made the rotating section look lopsided.  I tried to sell it to my control group but they found it visually unappealing.  I took a second look and found success cutting out the outer sections of the rotating section and I had a win.

The Arion was similar.  Parts were cut out to make the frame smaller, doing so required moving the gun emplacements or removing others.  The design called for some guns placed on pylons offset from the frame.

These two ships were very satisfying to make. I look forward to doing more.