The Botany Bay Build
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This is my first project, the Botany Bay.

The Botany Bay was featured in the original Star Trek series. The episode is titled Space Seed and introduced Ricardo Montalban to us as Khan, who later returned in the movie The Wrath of Khan. The Botany Bay is a DY-100 series starship used primarily for long distance, pre-warp space travel. It has the capacity of holding up to 100 persons in separate hibernation chambers. It has length of 121.45 meters, a beam of 49.57 meters and a draft of 31.88 meters. There are 7 decks and the ship includes a small lander craft that is convertible between cargo and personal transport.

You can find the drawings I am have used at The Star Trek LCARS Blueprint Database

So, to the build itself. Normally I would have printed the drawings out so that I had an easy way to reference things as I go. But, given environmental concerns (and the fact that I do not have a printer), I decided to put the drawings on individual prims. I then realized that I can use these to create a template against which to build the ship.

But first, I needed a place where I can do the actual building. Its a good thing I own the region, isn't it? And so, since I am adding a landing port to DrakkonHolde, I decided to use one end of that.

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Yes, that's the Starbug in the background, from the BBC series Red Dwarf. No, it is not one of my builds.

And so, now with a work area cleared, it was time to begin laying out my template I did this by first setting out two prims, one to show the length and breadth, the other to show the length and height. On to those I placed and sized appropriate textures to fit those dimensions.

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So, now I had the start of my template. With these, I could resize the cross section textures to match the internal dimensions. What I did was to take each of the cross-section drawingss and positioned them appropriately. I then resized the prim until the texture matched with the base outline I had created.

First was the full cross-section along the length and height of the ship. I stretched it to match the length, then I placed it against the back diagram to get the proper height. once I had those, I simply moved the prim over to line up along the center of the bottom drawing.

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And now I had a spine for my ship. From here I did the same with the individual deck drawings and the cross sections. Stretching them to fit the base and back.

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I then removed the base prims leaving the completed template.

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Yes, it looks confusing, but what it does is tell me where things go and how they fit in relation to each other.

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