USS Reliant (TOS)

made this because the other day i saw a design for a "TOS-Styled" Miranda-class starship, that was apparently used in a set of fanfilms (sometimes i feel like i'm a bad fan for not ever watching any of these things, but there's so much *official* trek stuff...), that had a whole secondary hull attached to the rollbar in place of the torpedo pod, and the rear extension of the saucer and superstructure having been sliced up a bit but otherwise there, and i thought it was a very odd choice.

putting aside that i don't think it's necessary for there to have *been* a "TOS" Miranda, they could have been built as shown as part of a new batch of ship designs incorporating the technology that would be used in the Enterprise's refit and new builds of the Constitution class.

-While the Constitution class was considered an almost unqualified success, despite signifigant losses, several of the other classes born of the same design studies were considered lacking, if effective. The Ptolemys, in fact, were considered overbuilt for their role. However, the Saladins and Apollos, while technically capable of fulfilling similar mission profiles ass the Constitutions, and able to be constructed and launched more quickly and thus more numerous, the Federation was in a period of expansion, and that, plus rising tensions with the Klingons, led to a reevaluation of design policy. Since the Constitution saucer spaceframe, systems, and accomodations had proven so robust, it was decided to continue with adapting it. the new considerations called for keeping them all intact, however, with none of the compromises made for the Saladins, Apollos, and other similar classes; and to integrate the systems normally found in the secondary hull of more traditional stafleet designs into a more compact shape without compromisingany of the saucer's systems; and for redundancy in shuttle operations, since despite the transporter taking over many mundane transportation tasks, it had severe limitations, and the starship serving as host to a fleet of smaller craft of varying types allowed it to spread it's duties over a large area (this philosophy would continue in the later Excelsior class and it's successors).

while showing great promise, the development of a radical new MA/AM reactor and power distribution system as well as new variations on the Cochrane coils and formulas resulted in no ships actually being built to these plans, as they were radically changed and expanded to meet the new paradigm, alongside a drastic refit program for other ships in the fleet.

not really happy about the deflector pods, given that there are plenty of designs, official and not, that just omit visible main deflectors, but they also tie in to my ideas in my previous about the evolution and updates to that model of warp engine - the "original pilot" version with bussard spikes and grill back end being the oldest, with the primary deflectors being built into the bussards, and represented by the spikes - and there is a structure in an analogous place on the actual mirandas that is sometimes referred to as sensors and others as deflectors. there was a weird thing where i duplicated the shuttle bay internals and moved it to the starbooard side, and the light blocks outside the doors stopped doing that surface lighting, like they stopped emitting light despite appearing normal in that regard themselves, which is the sort of thing that sometimes happens when i use symmetry or arrays, but i didn't this time; which was solved by just making new ones. just strange... wasn't originally going to extend the superstructure to the sides of the shuttlebays, but i did it as part of an experiment whilst fixing the angles and alignment of the saucer extension and liked it.