Here's a little update. I picked up the project again after having some free time...

Here is an external shot of the decks I have done...

The second picture I have here is an x-ray view. I try my best to get the windows to line up with the rooms below. You can actually stand in the room and look out through the glass.

Here is the control tower inside Hangar Bay 1. I still have to make a floor for deck 4, but you can see it's a neat looking structure we never saw in the show.

These windows are going to be the death of me...

One of the more irritating bugs I've found with Sketchup is that when I hide a layer, the program still interacts with the hidden geometry. I guess that there is supposed to be some kind of philosophy behind it, but it doesn't make much sense to me. The idea is that when I'm hiding the geometry I'm hiding it for a reason.

Let me give you an simple example...

Here a building I have created that is bisected in the middle...

Now for my next trick, I make two layers... "Floor 1" and "Floor 2" and I send the bottom geometry to "Floor 1"

I now move My top geometry to "Floor 2" and this is where it starts to get wierd. I want to to notice that there are 3 types of selectoids in the layer dialog box (Radio button, check box, and highlight) ... I will get back to that later...

Now the problem. When I try and draw geometry on the second floor, the first floor is interfering with it after I explicitly hit it.

This causes all kinds of problems such as edges migrating to hidden layers, the eraser tool "picking up" on hidden edges, and my inability to make surfaces as parts were "hidden". What irks me the most is the edge that this program is complaining about is actually on Floor 2. I can see it's right there! That's broken...

Also, why does the layer dialog have three selectors? The highlight selector serves no purpose other than not allowing me to delete layer 0 (for some odd reason). I can't tell you how many times I've done a floor, only to find that I was drawing the level in the wrong layer and now I have to move the whole thing (of course the lines that are "hidden" or "smoothed" don't go, and I have to show hidden geometry to get those too! You would think selecting something would also select the hidden geometry too on the same layer.

Here is a proper Layer dialog box

Here the highlight is what you are drawing on, eyeball is what you see. It's pretty straightforward. I can also make layers opaque, would would be awesome too.

I guess the upshot is how do you guys get around the whole layer thing. Not using the layer system is completely impracticable for me because my object I'm building is huge. I'm only on floor 3 out of 24 if I turn on more than two floors at a time, my system screeches to a halt and updates the screen about once every three seconds. (Heaven forbid I accidentally select "select all connected", which also, strangely jumps layers too

That's my rant I guess... Go head and flame away

The problem is when I got it to scale, that's when everything got touchy. When I was just on the 1st Deck, it was awesome, but I have templates for the whole ship now and it's huge. I'm thinking that's it.

I may just keep the doors open. When I'm done I want to export this so anyone can turn the model into anything they want. If you have dynamic objects they wont work if you convert it to, say, a half life map file. (You will have to delete and recreate several thousand doors. Right now for some reason you can't even walk around properly because the "walk" camera is so touchy. I wish there was an option to turn that down, or to add WASD keys to move.

Each is a comp onto themselves. I'm endlessly tweaking them. There are the "rough drafts", but the cool thing is that when of mess with one, you mess with all of them. When they are placed and fitted, I'll get all the sides right (Messing with one causes all of them to change) A good example is the "door" comp that is just an open hole. I can add the two sides and every doorway gets the upgrade.

Ugh! I'm grinding now. There are a lot of comps to make.

More misc comps, I need these to start building the rooms. The furniture comps are next but I'll just probably nick those from the warehouse.

More comps, I'm calling it a night tonight.

There is an issue where I'm running into scale problems. The actual lifeboat is 4 meters wide, and matches the plans I have, however, with the room it sits in, there is a bit of a clearance issue as they don't fit in a deck! However, the original model shows a bit of relief for the lifeboat hatches and so I'm chalking it up to "close enough".

Awww, I'm trying to be lazy about it. When you have ~400 components on a level, replacing all the text can be kind of a chore. I'll just plop them down after I do the mirror function.