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Your favorite Enterprise....
jake477
Member Posts: 526 Arc User
in Ten Forward
With Star Trek Picard fast approaching and the potential of seeing up to 3 Enterprises (D-F). What is your favorite Enterprise from the franchise (this includes any alternate universe Enterprises). Each ship that has carried the name is just as much a character herself as any actor.
My personal favorite Enterprise is the NX-01. A gorgeous design for 22nd Century Starfleet, she stands out in the crowd. The first ship to carry the name and the first ship to literally lived up to the motto that Star Trek was made famous for. This ship may not have been as flashy or as powerful but I would argue she has to be one the toughest ships ever created. Enterprise fought in 2 major conflicts against two very overpowered species. (Romulans and Xindi) Made First Contact with the founding members of the future Federation. Encountered the Borg, Elachi and many of the species Starfleet of the 23rd and 24th Century see on a daily basis. The NX class helped make Earth stand out and be independent from her allies all at the same time. The NX is so timeless she was the basis of creating the modern Akira Class in the 24th Century.
Sure the others have the fancy holodecks, quantum torpedoes, and saucer separation, but none of them can say they were first. In Starfleet, being first in exploration is more prized than even the Big Chair.
My personal favorite Enterprise is the NX-01. A gorgeous design for 22nd Century Starfleet, she stands out in the crowd. The first ship to carry the name and the first ship to literally lived up to the motto that Star Trek was made famous for. This ship may not have been as flashy or as powerful but I would argue she has to be one the toughest ships ever created. Enterprise fought in 2 major conflicts against two very overpowered species. (Romulans and Xindi) Made First Contact with the founding members of the future Federation. Encountered the Borg, Elachi and many of the species Starfleet of the 23rd and 24th Century see on a daily basis. The NX class helped make Earth stand out and be independent from her allies all at the same time. The NX is so timeless she was the basis of creating the modern Akira Class in the 24th Century.
Sure the others have the fancy holodecks, quantum torpedoes, and saucer separation, but none of them can say they were first. In Starfleet, being first in exploration is more prized than even the Big Chair.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC] "This planet smells, it must be the Klingons"
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The first time i watched the next gen episode encounter at farpoint back in 87, i said to myself, now thats one hell of a starship..
Loved the sovereign class as well as the Enterprise A.
But the D gets my vote of all time personal favorite.
Second this. He's correct here. As per usual.
Yes I know, I'll show myself out.
Like this Enterprise. lol
Anyways... I've always been partial to the A, even though I grew up with the D. Also really love the E and the DSC Connie.
Let us explore it... together. Each man hides a secret pain. It must be exposed and reckoned with. It must be dragged from the darkness and forced into the light. Share your pain. Share your pain with me... and gain strength from the sharing.
Ironically that's the USS Ranger (CV-61), USS Enterprise (CVN-65) was not available and the Ranger looked "close enough" to be used as stand in. Though obviously in story it's the CVN-65 they raid (starting with the fact that Ranger was non-nuclear carrier).
They wanted to use the actual USS Enterprise, but it was on deployment at the time of shooting so that wasn't possible.
And I'm afraid they'd have been disappointed if they'd filmed aboard the actual Enterprise - access to the reactor rooms is tightly controlled, and there's pretty much no way they'd have gotten clearance for an entire film crew. They'd still have had to build a reactor-room set. (My brother was a nuke operator in the Navy, and tells me that the real reactor rooms also look more like a power switching station than what we see in the movie anyway - there's no direct access to the reactor chamber, for instance, because why would there be?)
Well she is the personification of the ship that truly fits the quote "Let's make sure history never forgets the name...Enterprise."
Aside from the one that shouldn't have sent to the scrappers, the TMP Connie, the B, E, and the F are probably my favorites
Well Enterprise in Azur Lane isn't CVN-65. She's CV-6. And I've heard that some parts of CV-6 were used in CVN-65, which in turn are being used for CVN-80. it would have been nice if the Grey Ghost was preserved though due to her historical significance.
After thinking about this question for a few minutes, I decided to do a full tier list 🤣
The TOS Connie is ugly and lacking any detail, the Discovery and SNW Enterprise is a vast improvement.
I like detail and the TOS Connie is my worst Enterprise on any list for the lack of any detail on the hull and it's ugly design.
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
But I'd say the original but with its Donnie appearance is slightly higher than the rest for almost all criteria, especially being the very first and all the efforts to make her a character by herself, with the D and NX right behind.
The NX for the whole "first and experimenting with everything possible as time goes" and the D for the memorable encounters it was part of and its actions in
It is funny how people look for different things when judging stuff like this. I prefer the TOS connie for pretty much the same reasons you dislike it. I look at it from a practical engineering standpoint and the TOS Enterprise makes the most sense, and what you call "ugly and lacking any detail" I call "sleek".
Like Matt Jefferies pointed out, the ship was heavily armored and it does not make sense to have a bunch of stuff stuck out on the surface of that armor. The "boring white" color as some call it wasn't even paint, it was a tough ceramic coating to help keep micrometeoroid wear on the hull to a minimum. The only bare parts were the gold-colored ones that were supposed to be bare for signal-propagation reasons like the deflector dish/choke ring antenna assembly on the front of the secondary hull and the armored baffles protecting the plasma conduits (the things that have to be able to "see" each other according to Rodenberry's rules) on the inboard sides of the warp nacelles.
While a bit of subtle azteching is not a bad thing it would not have been visible on 1960s TV and in fact the big model had greenish grunge streaks, little numbers and other cryptic markings, details that never showed up no matter how close the camera got or how they tried to light it so they would show.
If you look at the interior sets you can see that what so many people think are windows actually are not, with one exception there is no sign whatsoever of windows (even ones with armored covers shut) on the inside of the places were those lights are on the outside. In fact, behind the scenes they were simply called "window-like lights", and in convention panels they were said to be sensor emplacements like the two big square ones on the dorsal side of the saucer. In fact, in The Conscience of the King Kirk mentions to Lenore that they were standing in the only place on the ship that you can look out on the stars directly (they were on one of the shuttlebay catwalks).
Personally, I like the googie style of the TOS ship a lot better than the art deco of the later ships. I understand that a lot of people are put off by the euler spiral curves and golden ratio angles and proportions of the ship (probably since those are organic visual cues on a machine) but they are a refreshing change of pace from the industrial art deco aesthetic that most Hollywood sci-fi uses.
It's the neck that spoils it, the angle could be a lot better like the on the Reimagined Connie from Discovery and SNW.
The neck's odd angle just puts me off. I've always liked ships with that more industrial look to them on the detail.
From an engineering viewpoint, I prefer the E because that vulnerable neck has been eliminated entirely and the E is sleeker in appearance while being a very capable design.
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
The illusion of fragileness and a sense of amazement that the (often soaring and graceful) structure does not collapse under its own weight is a big part of the googie aesthetic. The reality is that most of the time buildings and bridges and whatnot are really held up by spindly looking steel beams, but they put fake stone cylinders or concrete around the beams to look like stone columns or whatever to make them look more massive.
Googie style usually leaves the false plumping out of the structural members (and often adds lightweight false bulk with metal sheeting or the like in unexpected non-structural parts further up in the structure, or by cantilevering sections in unexpected ways), so despite the illusion, the buildings and bridges and whatnot made in the style are as safe as other, chunkier and squatter, styles but look like there is nothing much holding them up.
Jefferies himself said in numerous interviews and panels that the neck is a lot tougher than it looks and it would actually be easier to cut off a section of the saucer than it would be to slice through the neck. There are no walk-around decks in the neck, it is all armor, structural elements, turbolift shafts, piping and wiring, with only maintenance tubes and crawlspaces to service them. It is a lot denser than anything except other cramped engineering-only spaces like the nacelles and struts.
A bit of trivia, in Journey to Babel the jefferies tube that Gav was found hanging out of was one that went up the neck according to the script.
As for the angle (and partly the length) of the neck, googie often uses organic curves and angles instead of mechanistic ones and Jefferies used that to give the ship a slightly 'alien' and futuristic look. The result just looks wrong if you are expecting the usual industrial angles, and that is what gives it that unique, faintly disturbing, slightly alien-yet-familiar feel.
The length of the neck is part of the golden ratio proportions of the design, along with bringing the impulse engines into the center-of-balance line of the ship (the nacelles are supposed to be massively heavy despite their size compared to the hull) and adds to the overall feel of the look described above. Personally, I like the look, but everyone's tastes are different.
Personally I prefer the TMP or DSC variant of the Connie, but we wouldn't be here discussing any of this without the original.
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I've always been more streamlined in my tastes. While the E would not be possible without the original, she's aerodynamic and that profile is more efficient for faster warp travel.
End of the day, it's each to their own on taste.
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius