Chiroptera Class

NOTE:  You can click on most pictures to get a larger view of them.

Sometime you see a design that someone has built and think, "Hey, that would be cool to build."  But as you start gathering parts and start dry fitting the model together, it goes in a completely different direction.  

This is one of those builds.

USS Noctule (NX-1971)

Chiroptera Class

1:2500 Scale AMT Kitbash

 

 

 

 

In Universe Story:

The ship name comes from the Greater Noctule Bat of Europe, West Asia, and North Africa. The ship classification name comes from the order classification of a bat.

Although the ship has a Starfleet registry, it is in fact a privately owned vessel that is supposed to do the occasional covert mission for Starfleet.

After the destruction of the USS Dougherty (NCC-7448) [Constitution Class Refit], Admiral Dougherty retired from Starfleet and dedicated his time to running his family business, the Triple “D” Shipbuilding Company. However, Starfleet kept bringing him back for special missions. He began to formulate a plan to disappear and retire for good. However, he needed to wait for the right time, and the right parts to build a ship to assist with this plan.

When the Klingons approached his company to assist in the building of a secret prototype ship, he saw his chance. He negotiated some trades with the Klingons for parts and services and acquired the remaining pieces for his new “flagship”. Using the remains of an older Miranda class ship, and the warp nacelles, and warp core and cloaking device from a Klingon C-8 Dreadnought, he was able to construct the Noctule. 

In another secret trade he acquired a new material that absorbed sensor readings and embedded that into the hull of the ship. This new material acted a lot like the 20th century equivalent of stealth fighter technology, except it worked on most modern day sensors. The material isn't 100% full-proof, hence the reason for the cloaking device. Because the ship was personally owned, it did not break any of the current treaties regarding cloaking devices.

He added additional thrusters and a increased structural integrity on the original nacelle struts and made the ship capable of landing on a planet.

One of the imagined roles for this ship was that it could enter a planet’s atmosphere, fly in undetected and allow troops to jump from the hanger bays and parachute into an area as the ship did a fly over. 

The ship was also built with an experimental 3rd generation AI that the admiral had been designing. This AI was tied into all of the ships systems and could in essence fly the ship on its own.


After the IKS Gre'thor incident, Admiral Dougherty felt guilty as he had helped in building and designing that ship.   You can read more about this incident at THIS LINK.

Without saying a word to anyone, he packed his bags and set off in his new ship.

Real Universe Notes:

After seeing Robert DeVoe' ISS Relient build on the Star Trek Modelers Group, and checking with him, I decided to try to make a similar ship. 

I've been wanting to build some sort of covert operations ship for quite some time. I also wanted to design her to be capable of planetary landings, hence the struts off the bottom of the ship.

Initially I was going to use 1:2500 nacelles from a Klingon ship, but they just seemed too small. I remembered having a slightly larger ship in a parts box so I used those nacelles with the idea that they were taken from a C-8 dreadnought and were then re-purposed for this ship.

Sadly, I didn't get a lot of Work In Progress pictures of the build for this model.

As always, I hope you found this article useful and informative.  If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please feel free to comment below.

So for now, "Live long and prosper!!!"

Additional Links To Photos Of My Collection:

The Model   Work In Progress