Since we've got a good couple people who like designing ships, I thought I'd pass this on. Being the sci fi bookworm that I am, I recently finished reading the new book ST Titan: Taking Wing. As you may have infered from the title, the book follows the USS Titan, Riker's first command. The book is actulaay quite interesting, it follows the ships maiden voyage which has it escorting a humantarian aid convoy to Romulus to aid in the stabalazation of the rapidly fragmenting Star Empire in the immediate wake of the events in ST Nemesis. Lots of Romulan politics, treachery, and even some ship combat. Those old TOS era Rom Birds of Prey even make an appearance. But thats beside the point.

The reason I made this thread is that (at least acording to this book) the Titan is a new class of vessel, the Luna class. While, like all new fderation vessels, this class of ship is definately capable of defending herself in a fight, it is a class of vessel designed to be a scientific/deep space exploration vessel. Since it is a new vessel, the authors, or whomever have opened up a contest for a fan to design the new type of vessel. The vessel is supposed to be about 450 meters long(longer than Intrepid calss, shorter than Galaxy), and should follow Fed design lineage. Theres many more details, if you want to look, check here.

http://www.startrekbooks.com/titancontest

I dont know if theres any real cash prize, but your design will make it onto the cover of one of the upcomming ST Titan books. It would be cool if one of you guys on the site won. BTW, sorry guys across the Atlantic, apparently the contest is only open to the US and Canada, for whatever reason.

Trust me to be on the wrong side of the Atlantic!

Doesn't matter, I couldn't even draw a stick person if I tried! (Just remember the penmanship of my big picture, Rigel!

I always thought the Titan was an Akira class ship though. It's cool that they want to make a whole new design, but I really did think it was an Akira...

Oh, I remember. It surely was the crappiest of all big crappy pictures.

Dont know why, but before I read the book I always thought the Titan would be a Soverign, or perhaps an Intrepid. But I think I like the new design idea better. It's definately an interesting ship. It's the most biologically diverse ship in Starfleet history, with humans making up only about 15% or its crew. If you ask me, I dont know why we dont see more ships like this (Other than the fact that it would have been probably too costly or timeconsuming to do this on most of the Trek series).

Yeah, that would have been cool. There really is no dearth of imagination of what non-humanoid races in Trek might look like, just read the books. It's a real pity some of those ideas don't get on screen. I understand why, but still...

The design contest looks cool, I'll have to read more about it. I really liked the book, at least most of it. The work with the characters was pretty good, at least in my opinion.