Weldon Chen's Starship Gallery

Weldon's Starship Gallery

Once, in 1987, I got my first copy of Autocad.
I've been using this godly series of
Computer Aided Design (CAD) programs ever since.
Here, I give you a small gallery of the things
I've constructed over the years.

As you can see, I built up quite a few of these ships.

For fun, it started out with this, ship, the BlackFire. It was made using Autocad 9, and my first ship. I created in while in high school.
The next ship was the start of Project: Starship while I was in college. I bought an old Ertl model of the USS Enterprise for $20 and measured out the space with a ruler, working on the saucer and the warp engines first. I then used Autocad 10, with an easier interface and better color.

After the saucer section,, I turned toward the secondary hull. I started by placing the model part on a piece of grid paper and drew out the general shape. With an idea of the hull's shape, the hull was fleshed out.
Finally, I used those same parts to draft my dreadnought class starship. I added a third warp drive since it looked cool.

I'm rather proud of this one. Instead of a movie edition scout starship, I worked on this for a full month. The hardest part were the warp engines. Unlike the warp engines of the original TV episode, these warp engines aren't giant cylinders. But once I had those, the other ships in this gallery were easy. Again, I used an Ertl model and measured it out.
At this point, I discovered there were things called digitizers. DAMN. Made my close contact with my ruler, and painstaking mental plotting kinda obsolete. Oh well. I took parts from the Enterprise and created the scout.

This was my next project, of which, I thank my friend, particularly a Mel Tsen, in Project: Starship, and Project: Starwars. At this time my ships were being produced on 3DS 2. A friend had made a primitive version, and I worked on my own version with more faces.
This is my second favorite ship. You can probably tell that Star Trek II is my favorite Startrek film. The tough part was literally watching the movie about 100 times and grabbing a ruler and measuring out the sizes of things on the TV screen. :-)

This was pretty much the next ship. It was fun, but it very little to take parts from the Enterprise.
At this point, a friend introduced me to FASA miniatures. You don't know the masochism needed to take a ruler to this dinky one inch pewter miniature. Failing that, I turned to photographing the thing and blowing up the image about a hundred times and THEN pulling out the ruler.

This is a model that I almost literally in a day. You can kind of tell that this was done fast. Note that the newer sections of this ship are less detailed.
This is yet another ship I finished recently. Just like the model makers of real life, it's taken from parts of the Enterprise D.

This is U.S.S. Excelsior. I like this ship over the Enterprise B. How some reason, this ship looks sleek to me.
This is my final picture so far. Next, I should do something simple, like the Enterprise B and the Enterprise from "All Good Things..."

It's quite humbling to see how everything about CAD starships. Fortunately, there's quite a number of people out there who are doing work far better than mine.

When I first started out, I created an internet group called Project Starship. This was during the era of 386 computers and we stored our public domain ships on a government site called chinalake.navy.mil or something like that. That was nearly 10 years ago. Since then there have been "generations" of new people who have taken the latest computer tech to make better and better meshes. I find that now, my work is, sadly, as out-of-date as the 386 I had. Sigh. Almost makes me feel old, or maybe a pioneer who's no longer needed. :-)

So, to learn more about designing cool-looking CAD starships,
here are links to Wolf 359, Sci-Fi Art, 3d Gladiators and many other people who have followed in my footsteps.
http://members.aol.com/wolfpak359/
http://trekmeshes.starfleet.ch/
http://v2.scifi-art.com/asp/home.asp/
http://gladiators.3dworlds.org/site/asp/home.asp

Check out the other hobbies I have.

The Dragon's Claw: 3D graphics and draconian animation page.
Draconians: Here's my Dragonlance homepage.
Manami-chan!: Here's my dream girl.
Cal-animage Alpha: Check out some anime!

Weldon's Homepage (granakrs@mindspring.com)

For fun, it started out with this, ship, the BlackFire. It was made using Autocad 9, and my first ship. I created in while in high school.	The next ship was the start of Project: Starship while I was in college. I bought an old Ertl model of the USS Enterprise for $20 and measured out the space with a ruler, working on the saucer and the warp engines first. I then used Autocad 10, with an easier interface and better color.
After the saucer section,, I turned toward the secondary hull. I started by placing the model part on a piece of grid paper and drew out the general shape. With an idea of the hull's shape, the hull was fleshed out.	Finally, I used those same parts to draft my dreadnought class starship. I added a third warp drive since it looked cool.
I'm rather proud of this one. Instead of a movie edition scout starship, I worked on this for a full month. The hardest part were the warp engines. Unlike the warp engines of the original TV episode, these warp engines aren't giant cylinders. But once I had those, the other ships in this gallery were easy. Again, I used an Ertl model and measured it out.	At this point, I discovered there were things called digitizers. DAMN. Made my close contact with my ruler, and painstaking mental plotting kinda obsolete. Oh well. I took parts from the Enterprise and created the scout.
This was my next project, of which, I thank my friend, particularly a Mel Tsen, in Project: Starship, and Project: Starwars. At this time my ships were being produced on 3DS 2. A friend had made a primitive version, and I worked on my own version with more faces.	This is my second favorite ship. You can probably tell that Star Trek II is my favorite Startrek film. The tough part was literally watching the movie about 100 times and grabbing a ruler and measuring out the sizes of things on the TV screen. :-)
This was pretty much the next ship. It was fun, but it very little to take parts from the Enterprise.	At this point, a friend introduced me to FASA miniatures. You don't know the masochism needed to take a ruler to this dinky one inch pewter miniature. Failing that, I turned to photographing the thing and blowing up the image about a hundred times and THEN pulling out the ruler.
This is a model that I almost literally in a day. You can kind of tell that this was done fast. Note that the newer sections of this ship are less detailed.	This is yet another ship I finished recently. Just like the model makers of real life, it's taken from parts of the Enterprise D.
This is U.S.S. Excelsior. I like this ship over the Enterprise B. How some reason, this ship looks sleek to me.	This is my final picture so far. Next, I should do something simple, like the Enterprise B and the Enterprise from "All Good Things..."