Excelsior Class: Star Trek starship parts kit expansion #10

[Note: This kit is also available on my Google Drive archive.]

Note: I’ve created a Patreon to support my modelling projects. If you’ve found my work useful, have the means, and would like to support my efforts, please give it a look. I will continue to release my designs for free on Cults 3D and Thingiverse, but Patreon members will get early access and in progress updates on my new projects, and it will serve as a central location for announcements. Thanks for reading!

This is the tenth expansion parts kit meant to complement my original Star Trek Constitution Class Parts Kit, providing parts and ship models to support the Excelsior class starship as seen in the Star Trek Movies and The Next Generation. It also contains support for the controversial Excelsior-based kitbashes seen in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

See my Cults 3d profile for the full list of parts kits I’ve released so far. All parts are meant to be cross-compatible between kits.

Update 2024-08-21: I’ve remastered all models in this kit, featuring higher mesh quality, accuracy fixes, and added details like windows. I’ve also added several new variant models, for instance covering all of the kitbashes seen on Deep Space Nine. The previous version of this kit can be found at my Google Drive mirror.

I’ve based these designs on Mark Breuer’s excellent reference plans. Marks advice from his years of studying the original studio model has drastically improved the quality of these models. In addition, Red General’s Physical Models Archive was a massive help in finding previously unseen details on the Excelsior variants and the related kitbashes built by the show production teams.

Note: The standard versions of the Excelsior contain several details that may make printing at small scale difficult. The saucer shield grid, ruffled neck and nacelles, and, probably most importantly, the cavernous cargo bay on the bottom of the secondary hull are likely to cause the most problems. To alleviate this issue, I’m including both “lower-detail” versions of the ship and part files that remove shield grids and windows, and “shallow cargo bay” versions that fill in most of the cargo bay. Hopefully these versions will be easier to print if you’re having problems with the standard versions.

This kit supports the following ship variants:

Excelsior Mk I

The NX 2000 as seen in Star Trek III.

Excelsior Mk II

The NCC 2000 as seen under Sulu’s command in Star Trek VI. This is the version used through most of the later Trek television productions.

Excelsior Mk III

This is the refit design that was used as the Enterprise NCC 1701-B in Star Trek Generations.

Centaur type

Kitbash ship seen in the DS9 episode Sacrifice of Angels. The Centaur uses parts reused from my earlier Miranda class parts kit.

Resolute type

The Resolute is an upgraded Centaur as seen in the video game Star Trek: Resurgence.

Curry type

The Curry was a kitbash seen in background shots on episodes of Deep Space Nine. Notorious for the ugly arrangement of parts and use of out of scale Constitution refit nacelles.

Raging Queen type

Very similar to the Curry type, the Raging Queen was also used for background shots on Deep Space Nine.

Helios type

Aside from a photo on the very useful Red General’s Frogland archive of Trek filming miniatures, I can’t find any reference to this design. I’ve included it mostly as an illustrative example of what a Curry type would look like if it used scale appropriate Constitution refit nacelles.

Hutzel type

Another kitbash built for Deep Space Nine (although ultimately never seen on screen), the Hutzel is a bizarre three-nacelle design featuring a vertically symmetrical saucer.

Note: Given the saucer symmetry and the fact that this ship was never actually seen on screen, there is debate over which side is the “top”. Obviously you’re free to interpret how you like, but I’ve decided since the large impulse engines are on the dorsal side of the MK3’s saucer, that that indicates the top on this monster as well.

Notes on scaling and working with Blender

My target scale for all source files and output STL files is 1:1000. Although these files have not been extensively tested through printing, they are intended to be resized to match common modelling and miniatures scales.

Note: Because the Centaur type uses different scale parts from both the Miranda and Excelsior classes, there is debate over its actual intended size. If scaled to the Excelsior saucer, it should be \~380m long. If the Miranda parts, only 210m long. I have scaled the model to the larger size. If you’d like to print the smaller version, use the scaling guide above and multiply that value by 0.55.

Ex Astris Scientia discusses the issues and evidence on this debate.

Blender

Blender is free, which to be honest was the primary factor in my decision to learn it. There are many fine video and text tutorials available online if you're interested in learning more. For a basic tutorial on moving and joining objects in Blender(which should be the minimum you need to know when working with these parts), see this instructables tutorial.

You can use File -\> Import -\> Stl (.stl) and File -\> Export -\> Stl (.stl) to load or save STL files in blender.

Note: These kits were built using Blender 3.5.

Post-processing STL output

Although all of the STL files included have been tested as valid watertight meshes, joining the parts together and exporting new STL files can introduce small errors that may cause issues with slicing programs. I recommend any STL files you create are checked using a program like Netfabb Basic free edition. Doing a simple "Close All Holes" repair has fixed most of the issues I've run into so far. If you do run into issues with mesh quality, please let me know.

Parts list

The zip file excelsiorV2-parts-stls.zip contains all of the ship and part STL model files listed below.

Parts

Combined ship STLs

These files provide sample ships generated using the parts included in this kit.

Due to the large number of ship files in this kit, I’ve added the standard versions to the project, and included the varient files in two zip files:

• excelsiorV2-ship-stls_lower-detail.zip – Contains versions of all ships without shield grids or windows.
• excelsiorV2-ship-stls_shallow-cargo-bay.zip – Contains versions of ships with a shallow cargo bay to simplify printing.

Blender files

The following zip files contain a parts file, containing the STL parts arranged as used in the sample ship designs, and a parts source file, containing the raw blender objects used to create the parts:

• excelsiorV2-blender-files.zip – contains the Blender files for the three Excelsior variants.
• excelsiorV2-centaur-resolute-kitbash-blender-files.zip – contains the Blender files for the the Centaur and Resolute variants.
• excelsiorV2-ds9-kitbash-blender-files.zip – contains the Blender files for the DS9 kitbashes, including the Curry, Raging Queen, Helios, and Hutzel.

License

I'm releasing this under the Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike license. You're free to distribute and modify these files (even for commercial use), provided you attribute the creator and distribute your contributions under the same license.