OMG! Design the next USS ENTERPRISE (Offical Contest)

[RogueIce]

Well, one thing's for sure:

It won't have a neck.

Oberth-iprise, here we come?

EDIT: I love this comment I found:

Yeah, the haters will "deal" with it by blowing it up in PvP when it is added as a playable ship(which dstahl said will happen).

I wonder if you'd get in trouble by making a Foundry mission against the Mirror Universe which just sp happens to have a fleet entirely composed of whatever class name they give the Ent-F?

[Fuzzy_Modem]

I'm beginning to wonder if CBS ever saw my entry. If you were Cryptic, and you wanted to design the Enterprise yourself, begrudgingly holding a contest and using the winning entry as "inspiration"... would you show a complete, polished close-up to CBS?

Maybe CBS wanted something more concrete and didn't see it, maybe that was why it took three months to find a winner.

But then I'm probably just grasping at straws to stop the mental hemorrhaging... It's a dumb theory... and it's arrogant and egotistical, and I don't wanna be "that guy"...

[fractalsponge1]

That sucks. Pretty shitty way to run a contest.

That said, probably best not to overthink it. They pulled a fast one on everyone submitting, and you got had. Don't let it poison what you like doing.

On another note, WTF were they thinking picking that two-necked abomination?

[Thanas]

Now the winning design will not even have a neck? WTF?

[HMS Sophia]

Now the winning design will not even have a neck? WTF?

I think they mean it won't have a central column, just the side.... attachments...

[Thanas]

Yeah, those abominations. I thought the federation was fighting a war? A single well-placed hit can completely shatter the structural integrity by severing one of them - causing the saucer to sheer away and trash the rest by sheer inertia. Nevermind the hazzle from moving from one side to the other....

Really, I cannot see the federation at war picking such a ship. You already got the notoriously unstable warp cores, why would you add more weaknesses? Especially considering that all "post-borg" designs we see in the shows have somewhat thick necks (Voyager, Sovereign).

[Marko Dash]

my knowledge of trek is somewhat limited, but wasn't there a series of rules given for designing ships? IIRC one of them was that the nacelles should not be obstructed from the front or back, witch this design seems to violate. that said i don't have the game and with my admitted lack of knowledge of trek means i'm not bothered by any of the choices.

[Agent Sorchus]

The Nacelles "Should not be more than fifty percent obstructed" as I have seen it in various fan sites.

Link here is what I have seen as the common opinion of serious fansites.

Rule #2 Warp nacelles must have at least 50% line-of-sight on each other across the hull.

So fuzzy's design is in perfect understanding of the rules. (And the rules can be broken like the Defiant for a good design anyway.)

[Fuzzy_Modem]

My Enterprise F is now available for free download: http://www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/I ... /ID/603090

Maya for the moment, Max and Lightwave formats to follow.

Please take the time to rate her, and let me know if you have any problems

[Starglider]

A lot of the Trek ships are structurally silly, but the winning design is structurally offensive. Oberth just about gets away with it due to small size and the fact that a short-range science ship could conceivably have an unmanned engineering section. This does not.

OTOH Fuzzy's design is pretty ugly; although it is of better quality than many of the finalists it's quite possible one of the judges just saw it, went 'ewww' and tossed it.

[fractalsponge1]

Good for you to make it public - just keep an eye out for people trying to re-sell it under a different name - oh, and the thousands of unattributed web RPG uses .

[Crossroads Inc.]

The winner offered them orthos and they declined?!?
http://trekbbs.com/showpost.php?p=49455 ... count=1251

They've taken control now... It's the ability to improvise they wanted, not a finished product!

Fuuuuck...

The Eve contest was the opposite. They didn't care about the perspective, their only requirement was all 6 orthos. THEY wanted a finished product but Cryptic just wanted a doodle to inspire them to create their own design.

Even more ironic is that those artists in the Eve contest created BEAUTIFUL perspectives too: http://www.evecontest.com/finalvote/ -even though they weren't required!

How could I have misread what this contest was so badly? The website design alone should have told me. Of course they only wanted thumbnails. You can do ANYTHING with a reference that small. I thought I was so clever by figuring out the maximum vertical area...

I could have given them flex room if they'd told me that's what they wanted!

I killed my chances by working to hard. I really just can't believe it.

>sigh<

I'll be fine. Already better than yesterday, and tomorrow is the weekend. I gotta get out of town... go out to the hot springs or up to the hills...

I had been meaning to say this for a while, ever since I first heard about the finalists and didn't see yours initially in the pics. Basically don't beat yourself up over this, because the instant the CSB execs got involved we all should have known there would be no chance of the winner being just who got the most votes.

lets be honest, more likely then not, the execs went into a room, started looking at things and said "Lets go with that" The fact that they picked a sketch is largely because, from the start, they had no intention of actually "using" what was picked, but just grab something and bash it into a new design so far removed that the initial creator wouldn't even recognize it.

Further, in many regards you did "win" The fan community is behind you, you have immense support, and mroe to the point, no one disputes that you worked your ASS off for this thing. Forgot the Execs picking something out of a hat, the skill and amount of detail you displayed is going to be remembered long after the current winners fad has warn off.

Again, don't beat yourself up over this. "We" know who the real winner was.

[Fuzzy_Modem]

This quote from dstahl confirms my suspicions.

The winning ship seemed to inspire the team to make an enterprise that will be both beautiful and new. It inspired the most discussion and the most debate. For some judges, it was a clear winner, for others it was not their favorite by a decent stretch, but in all it was the most talked about and inspiration ship. There have already been numerous concept sketches done internally that were inspired by this ship to help flesh out directions this ship could go.

Just note that we are in contact with CBS hashing out details to make the winning ship fully realized - inspired by the winning sketch and the concepts I've seen that have more detail than the drawing are really beautiful. I can't wait to share them with you.

http://forums.startrekonline.com/showth ... ?p=3524149

So I really did work myself out of the running.

[phred]

So I really did work myself out of the running.

Obviously what you should have done was waited till five minutes before the deadline, and thrown up a rough line drawing of your ship. That way at least you would have had the advantage of being near the top of the pile.

[Dalton]

This smacks of legal finagling to me. What are the chances that they did it this way to avoid having to pay the original designer anything? I'm by no means an expert; this is an honest question.

[Themightytom]

This quote from dstahl confirms my suspicions.



So I really did work myself out of the running.

Ahahahaha Sorry fuzzy but that sucks! Your design was so polished, they probably figured they couldn't alter it enough to avoid having to pay you royalties every time they used it. i say screw it, start developing your own back story for the thing and start moving on fan vids, maybe you can get it accepted into canon the same way peter David did with his new frontier ideas.

I mean come on, a starfleet captain who uses a sword and has assembled a crew of extras from the Enterprise? Fanfic+talent= success, so in your case, you have the talent, just flesh it out in a different way. Now that it's not the Enterprise F give it a new name and paint it on the side. you call it the USS Hindsight heh heh heh.

[fractalsponge1]

My (non-lawyer) understanding of it is that you cannot charge royalties for designs based off of someone else's IP, even if you made the mesh. It might be one of those things where Paramount/Cryptic/Lucas(name) just has a bigger legal department than you do though. This is also probably covered in whatever fine print came with the contest. My wild-ass guess is that they did it this way so they could generate buzz but not actually be in any way constrained by the little peoples' design ideas. In other words, bullshit, but legal.

[Havok]

This is the design that won:
http://www.startrekonline.com/enterpris ... share=1259

At least it's different.

I wouldn't even remotely go that far.



That's pretty blatant plagiarism to my eye. Lowered the saucer section and did dual pylons and that's about all he changed.

These dickheads didn't even want an original idea to get their 'inspiration' from. Might as well just have called it 'Send us your favorite Star Trek ship' contest.

[Thanas]

WTF? I cannot believe nobody pointed this out to the "judges".

[Crossroads Inc.]

If they didn't know then, they know now,I just sent an E-mail with that jpg "explaining" things to the ST-online staff, and I'd invite everyone else to do the same as well as post that on their forums.
If ther fans were upset before about this travesty, imagine how incensed they will get upon learning that the "winner" is a blatant ripoff an existing concept piece.

[Crazedwraith]

They already know, I'd bet. Certainly there's already a thread on the STO forums.

[Flagg]

Wow, that's actually worse than Fuzzy Modems design.

[RogueIce]

They already know, I'd bet. Certainly there's already a thread on the STO forums.

Indeed. It's been pointed out for quite some time on the STO forums. They definately know, even if there isn't total agreement that it is a ripoff.

[fractalsponge1]

It's got a similar silhouette, but the radical (and stupid) two necked feature is the signature bit, and sets it apart, in the worst possible may, I might add. There aren't that many elements to most trek saucer/primary/nacelle designs.

Wow, that's actually worse than Fuzzy Modems design.

Have you seen the 3d version of it?
http://www.modelermagic.com/?p=28446

Best Enterprise, ever, imo (no offense to Fuzzy's design).

[Themightytom]

It's got a similar silhouette, but the radical (and stupid) two necked feature is the signature bit, and sets it apart, in the worst possible may, I might add. There aren't that many elements to most trek saucer/primary/nacelle designs.

Wow, that's actually worse than Fuzzy Modems design.

Have you seen the 3d version of it?
http://www.modelermagic.com/?p=28446

Best Enterprise, ever, imo (no offense to Fuzzy's design).

I actually like that design more than the actual ambassador, however, the image Havok posted was ridiculous. As I pm'ed him, there are So Many Windows. It's a flying greenhouse.

Now the submitted version was just "Hey here's a better idea, that I turned to shit by changing one element because I am uncreative."

It would be like tacking a third nacelle on the Enterprise D to make it look better. Oh Wait.