Traveller - Tigress-class Dreadnought

The happy fun ball of death - the Tigress-class dreadnought is one of the largest and most feared warships in the Imperial fleet. At 500,000 displacement-tons, these 7 million cubic-meter spherical monsters were deployed to the Spinward Marches to deter Zhodani incursions and other alien threats. The class is only rivaled by larger planetoid warships – (essentially hollowed-out asteroids fitted with drive engines at one end and scattered weapon emplacements on the surface). At least four were constructed, the Tigress, (the namesake of the class was the prototype), with the Lioness, Pantheress and Lioness II, (I guess they ran out of names or the first one was destroyed).

The ship's main armament is a tech level 15 (TL15) spinal mount meson gun, a massive weapon the entire ship is built around. The Imperium technology standard is TL12, but the increased damage output of the weapon is the result of more advanced research and development over the conventional meson weapon. In Traveller, meson weapons fire a barrage of short-lived subatomic particles that quickly decay to radiation. Since the particles are so small, they pass right though even the thickest armor. With precise timing, the particle beam can be targeted so that decay initiates inside the target vessel. This creates a burst of intense radiation that not only vaporizes the crew but turns the target into molten slag from the inside out. The only defense against a meson blast are meson screens, an advancement of the nuclear dampening field that prevents atomic decay.

The meson weapon is protected by a retractable mouth-like hatch. When the weapon is about to fired, the hatch opens to reveal the weapon which is made up of a diamond-shaped grid of particle accelerators and focusing elements. I call it the "waffle iron".

The Tigress is bristling with hundreds of other smaller weapon systems, (far to many to actually model), there are over 60 lower-yield meson gun turrets, 60 particle accelerator turrets, 60 fusion gun turrets (essentially a plasma weapon), some 20,000 missiles deployed from a 1000 launch bays, about 300 star fighters and other auxiliary support ships, a few hundred laser point defense turrets, and of course it's one big ball of bonded-superdense armor. The decks are perpendicular to the spine of the ship with gravity usually created by a constant 1G thrust forward, or when the craft is slowing down it flips over and thrusts backward at 1G.

I created this model mainly as an experiment/practice in UV texture mapping. Although modeled in SketchUp, the spherical parts of the hull, including the trench were exported to Blender 3d where I applied UV texture maps, the textures were edited in Photoshop, and then re-imported back into SketchUp. Needless to say the operation was somewhat unsuccessful as one texture map exploded the polygons all over the place (if you download the file and have a look at the textures window you might see what I'm talking about). I attempted to make a texture map where all the polygons were seamlessly unwrapped out but that's not what happened. I think I screwed up the seam procedure. Anyway I managed to create some nice textures regardless mainly through simple UV projections.

Original Concept art:
www.projectrho.com/public_html… (scroll to the bottom of the page)

I modified the design quite a bit which was originally designed in 1981 by Paul Jaquays, (who is now known as Jennell Jaquays), for the Classic Traveller Supplement #9: Fighting Ships. I made the X-shaped trench more aligned with the "mouth" otherwise to me it looked kind of goofy, plus it was easier to model that way. The drive engines were supposed to be on the sides of the super structure and the launch bays toward the back, but I switch that around. The Tigress is also extensively detailed in the GURPS Traveller-Starships supplement. My design looks more like the one in that book with rear-facing maneuver drives. 

By the way, that link above is a great analysis on developing a space fleet for any sci-fi setting.

Game stats for the Tigress can be found in the Mongoose Traveller Supplement #3: Fighting Ships, where its few dozen page deck plans literally take up the last quarter of the book! 
Supplement 3 @ RPG Now:
www.rpgnow.com/product/62181/S…

Download the SketchUp model here: 3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/model…

COPYRIGHT NOTICE AND CREATIVE COMMONS SHARE-ALIKE
The Tigress-class Dreadnought is ©1981 Far Future Enterprises. All rights reserved

This image and the 3d model were created as fan art which is ©2015 JayThurman. This means I own the copyright to this derivative work. However, I have released it under the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial Share Alike 3.0 License which means you can use the 3d model for whatever you want, even modify it, or print a 3d model of it, as long as it's for personal use and you do not sell it for profit in any manner. If you publicly share a derivative work made using this image and/or the 3d model, you agree to release it under this same license and give me, JayThurman, written credit for the work I did somewhere within a description plus a URL link back to this webpage. If you do not do these simple things I will consider it theft of my artwork and will take legal action if necessary.