Manticore-Class Heavy Destroyer

The Manticore-class Heavy Destroyer is a starship created for Star Trek Online's most loyal players. This "T6" version of the game's "Veteran Destroyer" is an upgrade of the Chimera-class Heavy Destroyer that preceded it. Back in 2015 I designed the Manticore as an iteration/subtle evolution of the Chimera, which was one of my favorite STO featured starship designs.

In 2023, the model of the Chimera was looking a bit long in the tooth. Since becoming Art Director on Star Trek Online, I've had the opportunity to hire a few 3D artists whose work I've always admired, and I have also been slowly working with internal and external artists to bring some of our older but popular ships to an improved visual detail level. I worked with our X-Dev director to reach out to the Chimera's original creator, Jason Lee, and asked him to create a new model of the ship for us. Jason designed the Chimera originally as the Magellanic-class U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-F for STO's "Design the Next Enterprise" contest. While Jason's design didn't win the contest, the STO team loved his ship and would later incorporate it into the game as the Chimera-class Veteran Destroyer. The original Chimera was released in 2012, and so it was finally time for us to bring the Chimera's model up to STO's 2023 standard of visual fidelity.

Jason did a fantastic job rebuilding the model, and was able to also incorporate some changes he had always wanted to make to his original design. Once that task was done, I set about remastering its T6 descendant, the Manticore. I used Jason's fantastic remastered Chimera as a starting point, and rebuilt the Manticore-specific pieces in STO's modern T6 styling, also iterating a bit on my original design.

Special thanks to Jason Lee for collaborating with us and making such a wonderful model to build off of.