The Design:

This is a shuttle I designed in 2000 based on a couple of lines from the Genesis Wave novels by Pocket Books. The shuttle Balboa was described as being wedge shaped and was flown by Cmdr. Data. These first few pictures show how my drawing and photoshopping skills were at the time. I quite like the design, but the pictures make me cringe.

I made a few designs for the shuttle, just mucking about, so the drawings were pretty rough. Star Trek: Insurrection had recently come out in the cinema, so I was influenced by the new shuttle designs seen in that film.

Coloured in a graphics program with lights and insignias added. I later mocked up a scene of it leaving the Enterprise-E's(my ERTL model) shuttlebay. The on-screen version doesn't have the large registry near the shuttlebay, but I always liked it on the predessessor so I added it.

The Model:

I originally tried to make this in Blender, but I found the program really confusing and couldn't work out how to use it, so I eventually gave up. Then someone in the art forum over on TBBS suggested Anim8or. It's a free 3-D modelling program which can produce pretty good results. This is the first proper model I've made with it. It doesn't look amazing, but it's not bad for a first try.

It's a pretty large shuttle aimed at filling the role of a runabout for smaller ships that don't have enough room in their shuttlebays for the Danube Class.

The basic shape is fairly simple and was made using the box modelling technique which I read about on the Anim8ot website. I know this isn't half as good as most of this sort of stuff you see online, but I happy just to have gotten this far with it, I really didn't think I'd be able to do this much when I started.

Realising I could make the windows transparent, I thought it'd be fun to make an interior as well. This turned out better than I expected. I made some seats and a front console which I'm really pleased with and a bench at the back. Oh and I also made a door that can open which is useful if I want to have it landing on a planet.

I also made the internal components of the warp nacelles. I did that so that the blue grills wouldn't just be a flat colour and also because it means I can do some cool shots of the shuttle crashed or damaged by weapons fire with all the insides exposed. I wasn't sure what to put in there besides the warp coils so I just made stuff up from how I remembered cutaway drawings looking. I like how it turned out although it'd be nice if it showed up more from the outside.

Textures:

This is the front control console. It has navigational controls, a course plotter and a side diagram of the shuttle. It's my first go at doing a texture, so I like how it turned out.

I also added side pennants, registry, transporter array wotsits, a replicator and information panel inside and a texture for the door, although that isn't too noticeable. All of them were made in Photoshop since I wanted this to be all my own work.

The information display reads:

Type-17 Shuttle
Medium-range shuttle introduced in 2374 as a step between the smaller personnel shuttles and the large Danube class runabouts. Designed to have the flexibility and power of runabouts while taking up much less space in the shuttlebays of smaller starships. Despite this, the shuttle is often among the complement of larger vessels, including Sovereign class ships such as the USS Enterprise. The Type-17, which can carry up to 12 people(two pilots, eight seated and two more standing) proved particularly useful for the Flagship during the Genesis Wave crisis, when several of these shuttles were used during planetary evacuations. Maximum safe speed is warp 3.5, although faster speeds have been recorded in emergencies. The shuttle has a total of four phaser banks- one Type-V phaser strip on each of the two nacelle pylons and two more emitters at the front of the craft, these can be swapped for micro torpedo launchers if necessary.

Renders: