Hey guys 'n gals, long time no see! The BorgMan's not sitting still, however, as I've been drawing and modelling quite a lot but wanted to wait with posting it in here until I had progressed a bit. The ship I'm working on at the moment is affiliated with the
Starfleet Centre for Stellar Cartagrophy (or SCē). SCē has 6 ships assigned to it which sole purpose is to map the stars. I've started designing them and kind of was wondering what everyone thinks of it
These ships usually venture off of known shippinglanes, tend to avoid making first contacts as much as possible (leaving it to a ship of the line), and are fast. Their sensor-packed pods are directly connected to the nacelles and as a result feed off of them. The ships are not unarmed but if they ever find themselves in a fight their main rescue is their sheer speed. They are as fast as an Intrepid class, but use a bigger core to gain that speed. The pods create a considerable subspace drag but Starfleet Command found the design elegant and small enough to justify this.
Outside of the shippinglanes things can get a little rough, especially when there are people operating there who don't want others to know what they're up to. Data collection is the most important task these ships have and they intend to return that precious data back to the Fedration; they return to a data station, where they transfer off the collected data and where it gets transmitted using a highly encrypted subspace link. The ships themselves don't have that capability as it would make them even more vulnurable than they already are, which justifies the Qtorp launcher and ablative armor generators. The ship is post-nemesis.
So... What do you guys think?