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Originally Posted by bernard guignard William Buck Krause you old starfleet dog How are you? I remember you from my early years in Starfleet international and ordering a copy of the USS Lagrange Blueprints and being a long distance member of the Lagrange back in the early Nineties when Adm Tim was Co of the Lagrange. Nice to see you around. |
Hi Bernard! Yes, I thought I saw a familiar name here. I do recall your distant correspondence and interest in the Big L designs from back in the day. I remember when the chapter started in '82 she began life as a TOS era transport and we were faced with the task of upgrading along the basis of an inspired WOK Reliant platform which served us well for years.
By 1990, a little reverse engineering of the Lagrange Class transport provided us with a development chart of the transport series from Ptolemy, Keppler, Doppler to finally the Dolland class Heavy Transport of which the original Lagrange belonged. Pat Lichty and I produced a full set of the Dolland plans before forging ahead with a TNG era Lagrange transport in '93.
This seemed to be a class of starship ignored by just about everybody. For years, Lagrange was the only transport in all of Starfleet (international) so we felt quite at liberty to explore and design our own lineage, taking natural cues from contemporary vessels as we saw them without getting too unrealistic.
The Macpherson class was of course inspired from the Nebula class as evident from its large AWACs deuterium tank above the hull but it also took a nod from its predecessor in its stepped 'poop' deck and swept nacelle pylons. It was decided to keep the tow pad in the same size/configuration of the Galaxy's separation footprint to maintain a universality in possible tow packages whether in pods or stranded secondary hulls. It can be noted that this lead vessel and subsequent others were named in recognition of famous Victoria Secret and Sports Illustrated models of the early '90s ie: Hunter, Ireland, Crawford, Porizkova, Seymour, Everhart... The cutaway deck by deck also contains the usual hidden gems such as the Mach 5, cheese, mice, dogs, rabbits, seals, Concorde, dolphins, Chim-Chim and the all-important BoskoTron 4000. Well, we thought it was funny at the time.
The pods were not overly developed, but more as a last minute addition to illustrate a possible design configuration. The Lagrange class, however, had several liners, a medical ship and shuttlecarrier.
~Buck