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I think there is an impression of fragility or vulnerability to typical Federation designs, even if it's just a cosmetic impression. The various components seem set out on comparatively thin-looking struts or connectors and relatively far away from any sort of central mass. This visual impression is remedied somewhat in things like the Miranda or Nebula, but it's obvious even subconsciously that such designs are simple rearrangements of other ships' components. The Akira, Saber, and Steamrunner are new designs which mitigate that impression.

So this is the first fan design ship I saw covered by Trekyards. It's an interesting design, pitched somewhere after the NX-01 but before TOS. There are things I really like about it... most especially the attention to detail about a lot of the functionality. But I gotta say, I'm not a great fan of the overall design. Those two nacelles are waaaay too close together, for one thing, and the saucer just looks oddly proportioned, both in terms of diameter to thickness and size of the saucer to the rest of the ship.

What say you?

Really clunky and fugly. However it's one of those fugly things where is has character.

There's a follow on with the designer of the ship that details a lot of the thinking behind it :





I especially like the automated shuttle magazine idea. Not dissimilar from some of those car parks you see now with the huge mobile platforms to carry the cars around. One of my bugbears is sci-fi that shows ships doing stuff in very old fashioned ways (cargo carried around in crates, rather than standardised cargo containers!), so using that kind of approach to shuttles appeals to me.