Starship- USS Strider, Ranger Class Scout
NCC – 7141
The Ranger class scout, USS Strider after a fairly dramatic overhaul.
Like most Federation scout vessels, Strider is smaller, faster, and more maneuverable than most Starfleet capital ships.
However, she is well armed for a craft of her size.
Her main forward phasers and torpedo launcher are in relative tight profile with her main forward deflectors, a combination that can help pack a punch.
In addition to her forward torpedo launcher, her aft launcher makes pursuing her of due consideration to any adversary.
She also sports remarkably powerful impulse engines for a such a low mass vessel.
In addition to aiding speed and maneuverability, this impulse system helps feed extra power to the ship’s defensive systems.
Though it is standard practice for starships to stand down primary engine functions during launch and recovery procedures of all auxiliary vehicles, it is even more imperative aboard the Strider.
Given her narrow vertical profile, her active propulsion systems are a direct obstacle to any incoming auxiliary craft.
Standard shuttlecraft barely squeeze into this vessel’s diminutive shuttlebays. This shuttle in bay 2 is her single largest.
With shuttles stowed away the ship can return to normal engine functions.
Proceeding on to routine patrol.
She’s small, but assertive and formidable.
From the old Star Trek: The Role Playing Game by FASA, this is my modeled version of the Ranger class scout, USS Strider as re-imagined by Brian Gillies and originally partially modeled by Kevin Riley some years ago.
As Kevin Riley intended, I also named her after the particular title ship portrayed in one of the game’s adventure supplements, The Strider Incident. While not eager to spoil too many plot points from that add on’s storyline, she is involved in serious battle action as the title would hint, if not betray. While distinct in her renovations, I like to think this newer style proceeds organically from her original FASA presentation, much like the Movie Enterprise evolved from her television predecessor. To further justify this, I conjectured the considerable damage Strider underwent in that adventure supplement might just qualify her for some amazing experimental upgrades that would dramatically alter her overall appearance and capabilities. Still, some might just chalk it up to the almighty power-of-reboot and call it a day.
As with most of my models, she remains a work in progress, but I felt I’d done enough decent renders for her to warrant her own dedicated page. Updates will continue to trickle into the edit page.
An alternate underbelly, with more stark lighting and no shuttlecraft.
Some long distance shot I might have originally intended as a backdrop for something else. Not sure.
Some newer, updated images of the model: I added a new pennant to the upper nacelle pylon and corrected some scale issues with the saucer’s main docking port. The renders are slighter higher quality, though the scenes are of a darker lighting since I was trying to highlight the new pennant.
New Pennant.
Docking port changes more apparent here.
Starstation Computer Art 
Very Impressive, I like this a lot and cannot wait to see more.
Thanks. There is definitely more to come I suspect. 😀
Hi Basill
its looking fantastic would be nice to see an upgraded set of orthographic shots 🙂
Thanks! Yeah, it might be about time for that. 🙂
This should totally replace the Miranda-class.
Were you planning on adding a torpedo pod rail on top?
Thanks,
Marty
No, not since the torpedo launcher is embedded in the impulse housing.
As to replacing the Miranda, this ship is considerably smaller than that class and would fail miserably if it tried. Both the Ranger and the Miranda exist contemporaneously, and they are very different ships for different tasks, so I think there is plenty of room for both in Starfleet. 😀
Simply sublime. You really need to do the Chandley Class Marine Carrier. Alongside the Ranger the most interesting vessel FASA designed. Never considered the Chandley a Cruiser in my old STRPG days back in the 80s. She was a specialist Marine Carrier with disaster relief capabilities.
Thanks! I’ve had some false starts with the Chandley class, but she’s not one of my high priorities. I like certain elements of the Chandley, but there are times when I just can’t get my head to wrap around it’s incredibly wide profile (that and it sort of reminds me of a cross between Klingon and Romulan ship designs). I’ve thought about doing a version with considerably shorter nacelle pylons, but I do indeed like the main hull and I’ve actually seen several different fan versions that impress me.
The Northampton is still my first FASA love, but so many people seem to hate her, I haven’t bothered returning to the model for a long time now.
Gorgeous work! The Rangers are an old favorite and you’ve breathed new life into them for me!
Thanks!
What are the dimensions of the Strider. Its a beautiful little ship.
Thanks! I’m pretty fond of her myself. 🙂 The fellas that designed her did a heck of a job.
I don’t actually have those dimension details on hand at the moment, but she’s definitely a smaller ship. The original FASA dimensions are approximately 285 ft in length by 187 ft wide, with a height of about 69 ft.
However, I’m pretty sure there are some discrepancies between the original and this refit version.
Would you mind posting standard ortho view, Please?
I have a few WIP versions posted back in June of 2013. Just use the Archive feature under the Pages menu and “Orthos” is in the post title. They are not the completed detail versions, but they are pretty far along, and the best I have at present.
I like to look of this Strider compared to the old FASA design. I am in the process of adapting the STRIDER INCIDENT to a story (and maybe a web movie). It’s design is more in keeping with Starfleet design theory. BTW, the Northampton is supposed to be designed by the Andorians, who also designed the popular Andor Class. I like the the aggresive design of it.. oh well, haters gonna hate. I love the Chandley design because it appears to take what worked for Klingon and Romulan designs and applied it to the Federation. Keep up the good work!!
Really enjoying perusing your site here. Not fond of FASA designs myself, but they do have couple of good ones amongst all the dross, and I quite like this little number. Though, I believe you are doing it far more justice than the original design. ;D
A few points, if I may?
1. You say the shuttle is going into Shuttlebay 2, on the starboard side. It looks like the mirror location on the port side is a docking ring — excellent idea, which I love, btw. So where’s Shuttlebay 1?
2. As a small scout ship should she be so heavily armed? The original Franz Joseph Star Fleet Technical Manual has the scout without heavy weapons.
3. Starfleet Scouts are not like wet navy ships; the smaller a starship is, usually the slower it is, because the smaller its warp reactor must be. This isn’t kust about mass, after all. Mover maneouvrable, faster to accelerate, and faster at impulse, yes. Higher max warp speed? Not so much, I think.
That all said, I still love the ship you’ve built. She’s a beaut. How long does it take you to put something together in sufficient quality that you’re rerady to share with the web?
Hey, thanks again. I pre-apologize for the length.
Any project can be an unpredictable mess of estimated completion times, which is why I rarely bother with such things. I know most of my ships have taken well over a year (or more) from start to not-so-finished before I’ve considered them “ready” in any reasonable manner. Some though, I’ve shared from their very beginnings; In fact, this Ranger class began as a WIP back in early 2013, and was covered by this very blog site. I was able to get much of it completed in six months’ time, but it left my brain fried for several months beyond that.
Other projects have previously started in explosive huffs but been quickly relegated to back burners for years at a time. Sometimes I’ve completed newer things unexpectedly faster because I actually had those previously incomplete models to source from. Example: My initiation of a Miranda class ship several years back has actually aided me in the near completion of 2 completely different vessels, while the original Miranda languishes on several hard drives, waiting for a fresh start. Now that I have the baseline of (what I perceive as) a fairly well constructed saucer hull and decent warp nacelle pairing, I’m getting a bit more bang for my buck these days.
Still, time is a very precious resource for me, and coordinating that with spontaneous creative impulses is an even greater rarity yet still.
Of course, even though this CGI Ranger class is my own build, this refit design itself belongs to a fellow named Kevin Riley, and he deserves tremendous credit for that. When his own awesome WIP images slowed from a trickle to a freeze, I decided only then that I would try and bring what he’d started to some realization, and flesh out those items he had yet to touch upon. A few other artists also supplied enormous directional design inspiration.
FASA: For me, FASA is feast or famine, and I don’t have the slightest guilt in cherry picking those designs which I think they nailed, especially since I never actually engaged in its RPG aspects of anyway.
Point responses:
1. Shuttlebay 1 is a port side mirror of bay 2 on the starboard side. I tried to be innovative with both the docking ring airlocks and the bay doors, by making them a unique blend of each other. Rather than being the simple collapsible/folding doors we are so familiar with, I chose to employ a more “mobile bulkhead” method. The bay doors have 3 components. The larger central section is thick and wide enough to maintain the entire ring dock mechanism, while the two outlying panels are each thin and narrow enough to allow for a complete recession of the bulkhead components. if you look at some of the other images where both bay doors are fully closed, you can see this.
2. Tell that to the Klingons. 😉 I tend to perceive “scout” as a mildly nebulous though acceptably umbrella term, for any vessel that primarily engages in such a characteristic activity. The methodologies involved probably provide the solid umbrella factor, while the ship’s form and ultimate mission aims are what turn up the blurry quotient when it comes to nebulous. The spectrum of a scout’s aims could range anywhere from pure scientific research (Grissom) to clandestine military intelligence (Klingon Bird-of-Prey). Two scouts: Who went kaboom?
This is of course the complete upgrade of a FASA design, that itself would have been chronologically placed post TOS era design firmament, including Franz Joseph’s contributions. Given that tensions between the Federation and the Klingon Empire continued to rise in that period between Organian intervention, seen in Errand of Mercy, and the breaking points depicted in The Undiscovered Country, Starfleet’s employment of greater armament on a vessel responsible for routine monitoring of clearly adversarial potentials might have seemed defensively wise at the time. That said, I’m not sure this ship is quite as heavily armed as she might initially appear. The few weapons she has however, are indeed more noticeably concentrated on her relatively tiny frame. But make no mistake, she aint no Grissom. 😉
3. Ummm… I’ve never shown you my warp reactor. 😉
All kidding aside, I’ve never specified the ultimate speed of this scout, so I’m not sure what relevance this has, but: Bigger is automatically better (i.e. faster)? This seems counter-intuitive to me. I can’t help but think total mass must play a significant role in the upper attainable warp velocities of a starship. Granted, I’m no subspace physicist, but from a formulaic perspective, something within tells me that maximum warp velocity would be directly related, not only to the reactor’s potential output, but to a ship’s total mass and the overall configuration of its warp nacelles, including; placement, type, and size (or perhaps more important- proportion). Simply put, attainable warp speeds would be interdependent on the given ratios of those specific factors and would fluctuate with any change there in. A more massive ship would almost certainly require more engine output to move significantly faster, and I suspect the converse would apply as well, so long as comparable ratios are met.
There is nothing specific in canon to make this necessarily true or false, but there is (at least) a single TOS episode (Journey To Babel) which indicates a ship could be stripped down to its bare necessities in order to increase its speed and maneuverability. Though the ship in question was that episode’s villain vessel, and thus non-Federation, the principle was an easy intuit for the Enterprise crew.
On the other hand, range limitations could just as easily suffer from a low mass ship, especially one incapable of carrying significant fuel reserves. This is something else Kirk and company grasped with ease in Journey to Babel, as they hypothesized that the stripping down of their attacking marauder had ultimately set it up for a one-way suicide mission. Similarly, Kirk’s futile attempt to catch a Spock-jacked Enterprise with a meager Starbase shuttlecraft in The Menagerie resulted in that small craft adrift in deep space with its fuel cells utterly depleted. I certainly wouldn’t argue a shuttlecraft could attain the incredibly high warp speeds of a capital starship like Enterprise, but even the attempt suggests it had the slimmest chance of keeping within range of his stolen ship for at least a time, as he continually begged it to turn around. Enterprise simply had an enormous head start and the ability to continue on for vastly greater stretches. Even though it is often suggested TOS shuttlecraft have NO warp capability, The Menagerie is one of those episodes which seems to suggest otherwise.
My ship is a scout, not a super long-range cruiser decked out for 5 year missions, and not a dinky shuttlecraft limited to hop-skip jumps to and from closely associated planetary bodies. She’s neither super fast just because she’s petite, nor ungodly slow because she can’t carry the behemoth warp reactor of a dreadnaught (I hate those btw). She probably could hold her own at speed, compared with any contemporary top-of-the-line starfleet vessel, but she’s likely to putter out far sooner than her bigger starship sisters. Still, her advantages and disadvantages will balance out given her overall mission parameters.
Ok… getting blustery, but I DO thank you for your compliments and thoughts on this ship build! I’ll try and respond to some of your other posts soon, but I’ve been busy of late. 🙂
God I love this thing, was looking at Miranda variants whenni stumbled across it… Do you have any plans to do an interior layout? Either in the model or just scetch it out? I really want to see this thing’s innards.
Not sure if my last post sent… So i’m reposting it. I love this ship to death and was wondering; is there any chance of you making deck plans for this thing? Either in 2d or 3d? I’m itching to see this thing’s innards.
Thanks. Comments made it, they just needed to be approved, and I don’t get online as often as I used to.
I have no definitive aim or goal to complete any specific deck plans for this ship at present, but I might try some more interiors in the future. My focus on the shuttle bays of this class’s two distinct versions came from that same “itching” to see some of those more obvious open spaces. The rest of the ship is probably pretty cramped though. 😉
Beautiful! I have always loved the Ranger. Thanks for sharing this new model. Now do deck plans! lol
Impressive work! Are any of your images for sale?
Not for sale. However, what is posted is free to use. 🙂
Any chance that you could post a fasa style 3 view (top, side, front) of the ship? I like what you’ve done in updating the ship and would love to do a fasa sheet update for it with your permission.
I posted a few orthographic POVs a few years ago, slightly before the completion/status quo, as it currently stands.
That’s as close as I ever got to FASA style. You can see if those come in handy. Sadly, I’ve been out of the loop for a bit now and haven’t had much time for modeling or rendering.
I didn’t personally upgrade the style myself, but I was so enamored by what artists Brian Gillies and Kevin Riley had imagined (and partially modeled), that I took it upon myself to build my own version (based on their precedent) as best I could. About the only thing I dared to improvise were the warp nacelles: Mostly because Kevin never modeled them, and the concept sketches by Brian Gillies were just rough enough that I felt I could try something on my own. Even still, the nacelles are themselves partially inspired by work from yet another brilliant CGI artist, mixed with a resemblance to my favorite Stanley utility knife design, one of which I’ve used regularly at work for some years now. I’ve always been especially fond of that little box cutter, since it has so often reminded me of a stubby little warp nacelle. 🙂
Just wanted to say that this is a lovely model, fantastic work. I’ve been toying with the idea of running a ST RPG game in the future, and was wondering what sort of smaller ships were out there. This one is just about perfect for a group of player characters, and the fact it has a pedigree from the old FASA game is just icing on the cake.