WiP: USS Singularity, NCC-74855

[mearrin69]

Hi all,
Got some things cleared off of my plate lately and I'm working on a pet project: a GURPS Star Trek campaign. I've decided to attempt deckplans of the PC's ship, the USS Singularity. It's a Nova-class vessel, a small science scout first seen in the Voyager episode Equinox. The deckplans will be based on the ones here but I'm going to be making a few changes to them.

Edit: BTW, I posted a rough 3D model of the ship in this thread. Don't know if I'll take it further.

Here's the in-game description of the ship:

USS Singularity (NCC-74855), Nova-class variant light research cruiser. Constructed: Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards. Commissioned: April 4, 2375. Assigned: Alpha quadrant (May 5, 2375). Mission: Seek out and investigate various 'subspace tunnelling phenomena' for the development of new trans-warp propulsion technologies as directed by FSC and ASDB. Command crew: Commander Matthew LeBrasseur (Captain), Lt. Commander Tu'pok (First Officer). Current location: Deep Space 9 (May 11, 2375), awaiting new crew transfer.

The two players will have three characters each: a department head (lieutenant), a junior officer (ensign or lt. JG), and a regular crewman. They'll attempt to follow their mission and get into all kinds of trouble in the vicinity of Cardassian space. I've got to check dates and such but this is set just after the Dominion war so the 'shovelheads' (Cardassians) are in disarray and their space is pretty lawless right now. The Bajorans are getting uppity and maybe there are some rogue factions causing troubles. Plus they PCs will be pushing out beyond known space looking for interesting stuff. Maybe later they'll be testing some new drive technology...and will, just possibly, run afoul of a cosmic loop and get sent somewhere in time and have to deal with that.

I'm attaching a draft of deck 1, containing mainly the bridge. The SD plans showed quarters for the captain, first officer, another senior officer, and a conference room. I'm moving the conference room and replacing the spare officer's quarters with a ready room. Two reasons: 1) the captain should have a place other than his quarters for private meetings, and 2) who gets the other luxury primo-location suite? There'd be lots of fighting over it, I think! Most everything else is the same though I'm considering whether the transporter really needs two transceivers. I assume that's what SD was intending.

The map is overlaid with a 1-meter hex grid. GURPS uses yards but meters are close enough for horseshoes and photon torpedos so I'm going to go with that. I'd actually like to go with LCARS style for the final presentation, even though it means losing the cool old-skool font...will look into that. I'd also like to eventually draw out the main areas of the ship as battlemaps at 1 hex = 1". That may be difficult because I don't know where to get hex paper that large. I do have some large paper with 1" squares and that may have to do. I doubt I'm going to do these deckplans so they can be printed at that scale.

The walls are created by building shapes with the selection tools and then stroking them in black (4px for bulkheads and 10px for hull). The light blue areas are primary 'habitat' space, the light grey are 'walkable' engineering spaces, the dark grey are inaccessible (without some difficulty anyway). I probably won't keep that color scheme, it's just a convenience for now.

Hope you like it...though there's not much to see yet.
M

[mearrin69]

And here's my very lame attempt at an LCARS-style overlay. I kind of like the overall layout so far but the colors are *very much* a work in progress. Examining screenshots to see what's the norm...a lot of the stuff on the Web is way wacky, like clown barf. The picture of the Equinox will probably go away but I dropped it in for fun.
M

Edit: What *is* with all of the numbers anyway? Very few of the buttons on the interfaces have text of any kind. I want a "next" button, not "03594".

[DEWLine]

What *is* with all of the numbers anyway? Very few of the buttons on the interfaces have text of any kind. I want a "next" button, not "03594".

I've never been entirely sure. I could ask Mike Okuda, Doug Drexler or the like directly, I suppose. I don't think those old random number blurbs were meant to hold up under the more direct scrutiny that modern levels of screen resolution have made available to viewing audiences anyway. You could explain it away as some kind of coding only Real Starfleet Personnel were meant to understand...?

[tilt]

looks great - to bad I don't live in Portland or I'd come play ... love Deep Space 9 as that was my (real) first Star Trek Experience ... and loved that the story line was continuos. I think you made a good job of the overlay too

[mearrin69]

Thanks. You're welcome to join if you're ever in the neighborhood!

Here's a little better version...a much improved color scheme based on a screencap of the schematic on the bridge of Equinox.
M

[mearrin69]

Decks 1 and 2 are finished except for adding 'furnishings'. I'll be overlaying some schematic-style things in the engineering compartments and furniture, consoles, etc. in the habitat areas.
M

[tilt]

very nice - just take out life support for a bigger Captains office, no need for that on board

[mearrin69]

Hmmm. Can't seem to upload files at the moment. Decks 5 through 8 are laid out. Made some improvements on D5 that I'll need to go back and add to the others. Apart from touch-up all of the decks except 4 are ready for decoration. When I'm done with all of that I'll collage them into the LCARS display file with extra data (ship specs, etc.). The end result will likely be several sheets, but I'm not sure how many at the moment. Will post the other decks when I can upload images again.
M

Edit: Yay! Uploads are back. Amazing how much of a fix posting stuff here turns out to be.

[mearrin69]

So, decks 5-8 are in the previous post. In the meantime I've gotten deck 4 pretty much done (it's *huge*) and realized that I've only gotten deck 3 partially completed. I'm posting it anyway but will note that I'm still working on the port side of the ship.

Right now it's symmetrical. The foreward section (surrounding the two large computer core octagons) was in the SD plans a 'security complex', something I don't need for Singularity. I'm reworking it into a small security suite/brig and maybe some sort of general briefing room. The port-most bit under the turbolift (orange circle) is supposed to be sickbay (right now it's just a copy of the starboard lab. I'm thinking of reworking the two enlisted quarters (p/s of turbolift) into two holodecks and maybe something else. There aren't any holodecks in the SD plans and it seems good for crew morale, useful for simulation/reseach, and just pretty good overall in case I want to do a story centered around them (and you know I do!)

As soon as I finish up deck 3 I can move on to getting all of the decoration on there. I might actually wrap these up by the weekend!
M

Edit: Also note that I've added a zip file containing an Excel (2007) spreadsheet with speeds and distances for impulse and warp propulsion. The tables I was finding online (and in the ST Encyclopedia by Okuda-san, et. al.) were a little too rounded for my tastes. There are two tabs, one for impulse and one for warp. They both list speeds and some distances (Earth to Moon, Across Oort Cloud, etc.) and the time to travel that distance at that speed. The top table in each tab is noted in hours...more useful is the bottom table, which lists time in convenient units (years, months, days, hours, minutes, or seconds, whichever is most appropriate). If you note some errors or have some useful additions I'd be happy to consider them. This is just for my home game so feel free to use or adapt as desired. If you distribute it some credit would be cool...but I won't sue you if you don't.

Edit again: I'm thinking my WF speeds are pretty good up until 9+. That's where the formula breaks down (for 1-9 it's WF*c^(10/3) but after 9+ it rises to infinity) and I pretty much just bunged about with figures to get close to Okuda's values without actually trying to research or figure out the formula in detail.

[mearrin69]

And, for fun: