well... I'm not sooooo skilled at starship texturing, tbh. so I thought of directly modeling the armor.
it's not that there will be a lot of armor, tho.
as for the deck count,... the lower levels below the bridge are, at most, 2 decks high. so the rest of the ship won't be bigger that 15 decks.
it's an overall small vessel. for the measure I took, it's just a bit bigger than the saucer of an Akira class.