Ajax Class by Fireball

Description
You may not be aware of it, especially if you've only spent time strictly in the canon of Star Trek, but there is a whole wealth of starship design that goes on without the television show. Before there was Enterprise (the series), there was the Starfleet Museum, the pre-original-series designs of many fans, but perhaps most memorably, Franz Joseph Schnaubelt's original --and, to many, canon-- Star Fleet Technical Manual, the book that really started it all in starship design. The SFTM led to the creation of the Star Fleet Battles games; they in turn continued to spawn new expressions of fandom back and forth through the timelines after the Motion Picture and the Wrath of Khan came out. All of this took place before the Next Generation, before DS9, before the Internet.... before some of us were even born.

One of the best sources on the Internet is Bernd Schneider's incomparable Ex Astris Scientia. Among the hundreds and hundreds of fan-designed starships hosted there is the Ajax class destroyer, which we've previously seen in A2 in a model made by Terradyhne. Now, it's Fireball's turn to make this model for A2, and his effort looks absolutely fantastic. The design fits in between the Daedalus and the Constitution class starships, as a sort of forerunner to the Miranda class design. The mod includes everything you'd expect --all the nitpicks and more-- in stunning detail. There's even new weapons sounds based on (and modified from) recordings from the original series, and new emitters for damage etc., so be sure to follow the readme closely.

Note for those with smaller computers: while the poly count is okay for this model, the problem you'll most likely experience with this model will stem from the massive texture sizes. They look truly brilliant if you've got a top-end computer. They'll give you massive lag and horrible gameplay if you build more than a few while playing A2 on just about anything else.

Definitely worth a download.

:cool: