[MOC] Star Trek Federation Oberth class

[Tomsche]

Ever since the ill-fated USS Grissom graced our screens in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, I have been a fan of this little ship.

Back then, and in hindsight, still, the design was a radical departure from how Federation ships looked, with the small main section tucked in between it`s small warp nacelles on this dozen crew members vessel.

These vessels of the Oberth class are dedicated science ships, and fragile as hell as they often served as wrecks of "rescued ship of the week" in further series, but as it showed up in The Next Generation, they do have a long service term.

By the time of Voyager, they where being replaced by the Nova class (Equinox was one of this class for example) who where sturdier and better defended (and another design I adore), but they kept showing up time to time.

Needless to say, I wanted one in Lego, and I found an LDD file one. This was modified to my tastes extensively, but the thing about LDD is that you can generate the part list for the elements you used, and that`s handy for looking in your collection for the needed bricks.

Now, Star Trek vessels aren`t that simple to recreate, as they have very streamlined and rounded forms compared to other franchise vessels like Star Wars, Stargate or Battlestar Galactica, the main section of a Federation vessel being often saucer shaped, so they tend to turn out more angular as a result then the originals.

My end result had about 160 elements, and it`s a decent sized ship, about 20 cm's in length and not to heavy so I could support it on two of the black minifigure bases and keep it stable.

This one is definitly coming along to the next sci-fi convention the LUG will be displaying on, StarCom on the 10th of July.

For reference, poor Grissom in the movie:

[M2m]

Really excellent interpretation of they small little ship !

[HawkLord]

That's a pretty cool little ship. Very close to the source material.

[Krikkit]

Wasn't the Hood an oberth? Might have been an excelsior class though..

Edited June 26, 2016 by Krikkit

[Tomsche]

Hood was an Excelsior class, it was the Tsjaikovsky early in TNG (with the fever illness that caused to open all the airlocks into space for cooldown) that was also an Oberth

[Ceir]

Neatly done - movie-era Feds are some of my favourite designs, and any Star Trek ship build deserves a few accolades regardless. I've always found Trekverse ships so hard to do in Lego because the majority of them are of the 'rounded parts on sticks' style.

Re. the Oberth in TNG, yeah, it was kind of the designated victim-of-the-week ship...