for me it has to be the the Mighty 'D'. Although there is something oddly pleasing about the NX01. I could see it , if equipped right, being a bad*** warship. Looks mean and could have vicious teeth.
Original Timeline's NCC-1701 & NCC-1701-A!! I grew up on TOS. I am also quite fond of the Ambassador-class & the NCC-1701-C!
The SNW version gets an honorable mention, the Kelvin Timeline's 2009 NCC-1701rocks as the 366-meter beauty she was designed to be. jjidiot fanboys of the inconsistently 700-1,500 meter Enterprise STAR DESTROYER can GET OFF MY SPACE-LAWN!
*pew!-pew!!
I don't hate the NX-class of the ENT-DSC-PIC TL, i just happen to Like the USS Enterprise (XCV 330) ring ship & the Daedalus-class more!
The SNW version gets an honorable mention, the Kelvin Timeline's 2009 NCC-1701rocks as the 366-meter beauty she was designed to be. jjidiot fanboys of the inconsistently 700-1,500 meter Enterprise STAR DESTROYER can GET OFF MY SPACE-LAWN!
*pew!-pew!!
I don't hate the NX-class of the ENT-DSC-PIC TL, i just happen to Like the USS Enterprise (XCV 330) ring ship & the Daedalus-class more!
I'm with you on the 366 meter size of the Kelvin Connie.
And I think the XCV-330 is still canon. Also if you consider Star Trek Legacy, the Daedalus class was one of the new designs after the NX and took part in the Earth-Romulan War, so she's still around too. Also IMO the Daedalus looks pretty good with ENT asthetics.
XCV-330 must have existed - the shows have models and pictures. No idea of whether it was officially named Enterprise, though. (The design makes a certain amount of sense in retrospect, as it seems likely the first warp-drive ships built on Earth probably used Vulcan designs as a basis.)
Voyager was my first Star Trek series, after that came Enterprise. There's something about the ship that gives it a very nice... Atmosphere? It doesn't have the weird colour schemes of the D for example, with its vague yellowish and pinkish hues. Instead, its interior is more industrial, firmer.
It's not necessarily a better looking interior as in that it is a more cozy place to live (those walls, beds and floors seemed rather rough) - but it is what one would expect from a starship interior.
Besides, interiors can be too cozy - when I see the aforementioned colour schemes of the D, I somehow imagine that it must smell like a drugstore, with its typical smell of skin ointments if that's the right word for it.
Voyager's interior seemed to crammed and dark most of the times. In those regards, the NX-01 is also better designed, being somewhere between Voyager and the D.
The Enterprise-E is a close second though, as it is the best looking ship if judged by the exterior. I'm not sure I'd want to live or serve on it though, with hundreds or even thousands of crewmen (depending on the source - in Armada it had 700 crew, but of course that's assuming that Picard doesn't get his helmsmen killed all the time). I'd prefer being with around 85 people.
I haven't had a detailed look at the newer Enterprises from the shows yet. Personally I don't really care for the older stuff (even if it's in a new series like SNW). The Constitution III looks very good in-game, but again, I haven't watched Picard's third season yet so I don't know what it looks like on a tv-screen. Based on some small parts of video's I've seen, the interior is too dark for my liking anyway.
As with many modern tv shows, I might add - directors seem to think nowadays that it makes sense to have viewers watch something that's barely visible - and as a result, barely watchable. The NX-01 and Enterprise's set were certainly preferable in that sense.
0
rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,444Community Moderator
I still put the Kelvin Connie at 366 Meters and not 700+.
I was critical of the new design when I first saw her. Didn't really like it. But then I saw the movie and saw her pop up out of Titan and I was sold. She earned her place. Now the refit they did in Beyond that was destroyed... THAT one is bad. Made her spindly as all hell on purpose to highlight her weaknesses. In game if I wanna use any of the Beyond Refit parts, I avoid the neck and pylons entirely. The saucer looks fine on the 2009 neck.
Voyager was my first Star Trek series, after that came Enterprise. There's something about the ship that gives it a very nice... Atmosphere? It doesn't have the weird colour schemes of the D for example, with its vague yellowish and pinkish hues. Instead, its interior is more industrial, firmer.
It's not necessarily a better looking interior as in that it is a more cozy place to live (those walls, beds and floors seemed rather rough) - but it is what one would expect from a starship interior.
Besides, interiors can be too cozy - when I see the aforementioned colour schemes of the D, I somehow imagine that it must smell like a drugstore, with its typical smell of skin ointments if that's the right word for it.
Voyager's interior seemed to crammed and dark most of the times. In those regards, the NX-01 is also better designed, being somewhere between Voyager and the D.
The Enterprise-E is a close second though, as it is the best looking ship if judged by the exterior. I'm not sure I'd want to live or serve on it though, with hundreds or even thousands of crewmen (depending on the source - in Armada it had 700 crew, but of course that's assuming that Picard doesn't get his helmsmen killed all the time). I'd prefer being with around 85 people.
I haven't had a detailed look at the newer Enterprises from the shows yet. Personally I don't really care for the older stuff (even if it's in a new series like SNW). The Constitution III looks very good in-game, but again, I haven't watched Picard's third season yet so I don't know what it looks like on a tv-screen. Based on some small parts of video's I've seen, the interior is too dark for my liking anyway.
As with many modern tv shows, I might add - directors seem to think nowadays that it makes sense to have viewers watch something that's barely visible - and as a result, barely watchable. The NX-01 and Enterprise's set were certainly preferable in that sense.
The way they differentiated the look of the various eras/shows and the reasons behind the differences are rather interesting.
In ENT they deliberately went for what Roddenberry called the "submarine look" of bare metal and exposed conduits and whatnot (which he was trying to avoid with TOS and TNG) to underline the fact that it was generations earlier than the TOS Enterprise and that UESPA was a lot lower tech than the 2250s-60s Federation. It makes sense in the context of ENT before UESPA's Starfleet discovered how hard such an environment was on the mental health of the crew after months trapped in a metal can in space (which the real-world US Navy submarine service already knew about back in the 1960s and tried to fix on their subs).
That fix is what the odd colors on the TOS Enterprise was all about, Roddenberry applied the same chromotherapy theories the navy was experimenting with at the time, though exaggerated a bit because of the low quality of color response in TVs of the time (modern TV with its much better chroma response makes it really scream, it did not look quite that odd back in the day). Eventually, the navy discovered the theory to be almost useless, but it became an important part of the Trek look by then. The TNG color scheme is just a very toned-down version of that same chronotherapy idea.
Voyager was a special case. The sets were built and lit for the original concept of the show where the ship was an extremely high performance mainly-torpedo-armed destroyer (Berman literally called it "the Starfleet equivalent of the Arleigh-Burke missile destroyer" in the runup hype for the show) meant for relatively short deployments, so being out of Federation territory was a very serious hardship. Also, the two crews abord made things a bit crowded because the casualties both ships suffered in the transit did not quite lower the combined total to where an Intrepid class destroyer's normal complement would be.
The high-performance engines could not take a steady diet of the kind of rotgut fuel the scoops provided so they were supposed to be constantly low on power to save their refined fuel so among other things they lowered the lighting (though Paramount execs complained until they raised it a bit from what they intended). Also, the ship was supposed to look a bit raw inside since it was rushed out of the yards (its limpet scoutship was not even functional when they left) and more importantly the crew was feverishly working to convert it from a short-deployment destroyer into a long-range light cruiser (and on the fly yet) in order to make it home.
Unfortunately, the Paramount execs (and Berman) were not comfortable with straying quite so far from the successful TNG formula and demanded that they drop or tone down most of those features of the show and make it more TNG like, (which did not do the show any favors) though you can see vestiges of a few of them in the series pilot (like for instance the available torpedo count).
1701 - D. She's beautiful, capable and has the best crew in Starfleet for her time. Except for that one time they let Deanna drive. Granted, she was doing so under extreme pressure within a limited timeframe with limited goals. But you'd think after seven years together, somebody would have scheduled some driver training for her on the Holodeck. But I digress...
I actually like 'em all. But 1701 - D is the G.O.A.T.
A six year old boy and his starship. Living the dream.
Hello ,
My Favorite is Pikes Enterprise , close 2nd is the Enterprise C , Captain Garret and crew knew that they could not win against 4 Romulan ships at the battle of Narendra III , but as usual with starfleet they went where they needed and died with honor .
Voyager was my first Star Trek series, after that came Enterprise. There's something about the ship that gives it a very nice... Atmosphere? It doesn't have the weird colour schemes of the D for example, with its vague yellowish and pinkish hues. Instead, its interior is more industrial, firmer.
It's not necessarily a better looking interior as in that it is a more cozy place to live (those walls, beds and floors seemed rather rough) - but it is what one would expect from a starship interior.
Besides, interiors can be too cozy - when I see the aforementioned colour schemes of the D, I somehow imagine that it must smell like a drugstore, with its typical smell of skin ointments if that's the right word for it.
Voyager's interior seemed to crammed and dark most of the times. In those regards, the NX-01 is also better designed, being somewhere between Voyager and the D.
The Enterprise-E is a close second though, as it is the best looking ship if judged by the exterior. I'm not sure I'd want to live or serve on it though, with hundreds or even thousands of crewmen (depending on the source - in Armada it had 700 crew, but of course that's assuming that Picard doesn't get his helmsmen killed all the time). I'd prefer being with around 85 people.
I haven't had a detailed look at the newer Enterprises from the shows yet. Personally I don't really care for the older stuff (even if it's in a new series like SNW). The Constitution III looks very good in-game, but again, I haven't watched Picard's third season yet so I don't know what it looks like on a tv-screen. Based on some small parts of video's I've seen, the interior is too dark for my liking anyway.
As with many modern tv shows, I might add - directors seem to think nowadays that it makes sense to have viewers watch something that's barely visible - and as a result, barely watchable. The NX-01 and Enterprise's set were certainly preferable in that sense.
The way they differentiated the look of the various eras/shows and the reasons behind the differences are rather interesting.
In ENT they deliberately went for what Roddenberry called the "submarine look" of bare metal and exposed conduits and whatnot (which he was trying to avoid with TOS and TNG) to underline the fact that it was generations earlier than the TOS Enterprise and that UESPA was a lot lower tech than the 2250s-60s Federation. It makes sense in the context of ENT before UESPA's Starfleet discovered how hard such an environment was on the mental health of the crew after months trapped in a metal can in space (which the real-world US Navy submarine service already knew about back in the 1960s and tried to fix on their subs).
That fix is what the odd colors on the TOS Enterprise was all about, Roddenberry applied the same chromotherapy theories the navy was experimenting with at the time, though exaggerated a bit because of the low quality of color response in TVs of the time (modern TV with its much better chroma response makes it really scream, it did not look quite that odd back in the day). Eventually, the navy discovered the theory to be almost useless, but it became an important part of the Trek look by then. The TNG color scheme is just a very toned-down version of that same chronotherapy idea.
Voyager was a special case. The sets were built and lit for the original concept of the show where the ship was an extremely high performance mainly-torpedo-armed destroyer (Berman literally called it "the Starfleet equivalent of the Arleigh-Burke missile destroyer" in the runup hype for the show) meant for relatively short deployments, so being out of Federation territory was a very serious hardship. Also, the two crews abord made things a bit crowded because the casualties both ships suffered in the transit did not quite lower the combined total to where an Intrepid class destroyer's normal complement would be.
The high-performance engines could not take a steady diet of the kind of rotgut fuel the scoops provided so they were supposed to be constantly low on power to save their refined fuel so among other things they lowered the lighting (though Paramount execs complained until they raised it a bit from what they intended). Also, the ship was supposed to look a bit raw inside since it was rushed out of the yards (its limpet scoutship was not even functional when they left) and more importantly the crew was feverishly working to convert it from a short-deployment destroyer into a long-range light cruiser (and on the fly yet) in order to make it home.
Unfortunately, the Paramount execs (and Berman) were not comfortable with straying quite so far from the successful TNG formula and demanded that they drop or tone down most of those features of the show and make it more TNG like, (which did not do the show any favors) though you can see vestiges of a few of them in the series pilot (like for instance the available torpedo count).
As usual, a post full of interesting facts and background info. Thanks for another good read!
0
rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,444Community Moderator
1701 - D. She's beautiful, capable and has the best crew in Starfleet for her time. Except for that one time they let Deanna drive. Granted, she was doing so under extreme pressure within a limited timeframe with limited goals. But you'd think after seven years together, somebody would have scheduled some driver training for her on the Holodeck. But I digress...
I actually like 'em all. But 1701 - D is the G.O.A.T.
I'm pretty sure Deanna's a decent pilot, but when Helm Control is knocked out there's nothing you can do but hold on. So its not Deanna's fault the Saucer crashed, but the damage the Saucer suffered from the attack and the destruction of the Stardrive Section. If we look at when, under orders, she rammed the Ent-E into the Scimitar... she nailed that thing square on the nose pretty much, and Scimitar was just starting to go evasive I believe. Hitting an object in space with another object isn't as easy as it looks.
1701 - D. She's beautiful, capable and has the best crew in Starfleet for her time. Except for that one time they let Deanna drive. Granted, she was doing so under extreme pressure within a limited timeframe with limited goals. But you'd think after seven years together, somebody would have scheduled some driver training for her on the Holodeck. But I digress...
I actually like 'em all. But 1701 - D is the G.O.A.T.
I'm pretty sure Deanna's a decent pilot, but when Helm Control is knocked out there's nothing you can do but hold on. So its not Deanna's fault the Saucer crashed, but the damage the Saucer suffered from the attack and the destruction of the Stardrive Section. If we look at when, under orders, she rammed the Ent-E into the Scimitar... she nailed that thing square on the nose pretty much, and Scimitar was just starting to go evasive I believe. Hitting an object in space with another object isn't as easy as it looks.
Actually, it is.
Perhaps if you maintained eye contact with the ball at the apex of its trajectory, your serve would be more effective.
~ Tuvok, who apparently also knew a thing or two about spaceballs
But yes, Deanna isn't as bad a pilot as she might seem.
There may actually be a third instance where her flying skills proved very effective. Or at least, that's what I'd like to believe.
I sometimes jokingly proclaim that 'Deanna has arrived' when the Voth city ship rams and destroys a big part of the Unimatrix in Borg Disconnected.
It may not have been her though, as the thing seemed to have steered off course a bit and only hit part of the Complex.
0
rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,444Community Moderator
Haven't seen SNW or the last two seasons of Picard yet.
I consider the NX- Enterprise quaint, but not without charm.
Enterprise A should be hauling garbage/be hauled away as garbage. That old joke aside, i cannot stand that design. It is as bad as Shatner's acting.
Enterprise B is not a love story, but i can appreciate the later TNG/Lakota refits of the basic excelsior design.
The Enterprise C, Ambassador Class, just ticks all the right boxes for me. Easily top of the list.
The Enterprise D is an appreciated design, but too bulky overall. As for the Galaxy-X variant (3rd nacelle + spinal lance) i like the idea, but not necessarily the design.
The Enterprise E and its post nemesis refit have gone overboard with size and sleekness. When you're going for a sleek design, keep the ship small like the Intrepid Class. I get why the designers wanted a break from the D, but they just missed all their pitches.
Same for Enterprise F, 3 strikes and out.
Are there any other designs?
This program, though reasonably normal at times, seems to have a strong affinity to classes belonging to the Cat 2.0 program. Questerius 2.7 will break down on occasion, resulting in garbage and nonsense messages whenever it occurs. Usually a hard reboot or pulling the plug solves the problem when that happens.
0
rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,444Community Moderator
You didn't mention the original TOS or the Kelvin Connie. Or the Ent-J.
And an Enterprise didn't appear in Picard until season 3.
It was my understanding that the Enterprise A was the TOS Constitution Class. I don't like the tubular hull and round warp Nacelles, nor the 1960's skin.
For the Kelvin Connie, the updated skin i can appreciate but the round warp nacelles are a deal breaker for me.
Isn't the Ent-J the pancake in game. Appreciate that design even less than the clunky 1960 TOS ones.
Ingame i have some very effective connies flying around, but going from the movies/series i simply don't like the direction of their design.
This program, though reasonably normal at times, seems to have a strong affinity to classes belonging to the Cat 2.0 program. Questerius 2.7 will break down on occasion, resulting in garbage and nonsense messages whenever it occurs. Usually a hard reboot or pulling the plug solves the problem when that happens.
NCC-1701-A was a Connie refit, commanded by Kirk at the end of ST IV: Save the Whales. Its design was first seen as the version of NCC-1701 in TMP. It's never stated explicitly, but producers have said that it was originally built as the new USS Lexington and was quickly rechristened Enterprise for the occasion.
NCC-1701-J is the Universe-class first seen in ENT at the Battle of Procyon V. Huge oval saucer, spindly nacelles barely connected to equally spindly pylons. Don't care for it myself, but I'll never get one, so it matters little.
NCC-1701-G was once USS Titan, NCC-80102-A, but was rechristened in honor of the ship that literally saved the Federation in Picard s3. I like it, but it's not my favorite particularly.
Yes, if you look at the aft part of the ship it seems like little thought was put into finishing the design properly. The nacelles look indeed like they're bound to the ship through a few pieces of rope or something like that.
But I like the concept, with the saucer being so prominent and mighty looking - and the saucer being built around the largest part of the hull.
Many other ships and especially the original Enterprise look like the designers couldn't decide on whether they wanted a flying tube or a flying saucer - and therefore chose to do both. Practically speaking, it seems kind of weird to have two totally different shapes, linked together by a neck that cannot have very much usable space on the inside.
In that sense, the J is more well-integrated and its design better suggests that usable space inside is being optimised.
0
rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,444Community Moderator
It was my understanding that the Enterprise A was the TOS Constitution Class. I don't like the tubular hull and round warp Nacelles, nor the 1960's skin.
While the Ent-A is a Constitution class, she's actually NOT the TOS Configuration. She's the TMP refit from ST 5 and 6, which was the same model introduced in TMP.
NCC-1701-A was a Connie refit, commanded by Kirk at the end of ST IV: Save the Whales. Its design was first seen as the version of NCC-1701 in TMP. It's never stated explicitly, but producers have said that it was originally built as the new USS Lexington and was quickly rechristened Enterprise for the occasion.
I always figured she used to be the Yorktown, which was a bit of a nod to Gene's original choice of ship name in TOS.
Yes, if you look at the aft part of the ship it seems like little thought was put into finishing the design properly. The nacelles look indeed like they're bound to the ship through a few pieces of rope or something like that.
But I like the concept, with the saucer being so prominent and mighty looking - and the saucer being built around the largest part of the hull.
According to the designer it was a case of simply not having enough time to finish it properly, the saucer was done and the nacelles were mostly done, but other areas like the struts were just the start of the shapes. For instance, the struts were supposed to be clipped at the ends and other details added but there was no time to do that so the nacelles look like hotdogs on a grilling fork the way the strut ends poke through.
Many other ships and especially the original Enterprise look like the designers couldn't decide on whether they wanted a flying tube or a flying saucer - and therefore chose to do both. Practically speaking, it seems kind of weird to have two totally different shapes, linked together by a neck that cannot have very much usable space on the inside.
In that sense, the J is more well-integrated and its design better suggests that usable space inside is being optimised.
The TOS Enterprise went through quite a few design changes in the early doodle stages. Roddenberry specified no rocket thruster bells or hokey fire jets, no fins (once it was decided the ship would not land on planets, anyway), and that it not be the stereotypical glowing flying saucer (probably trying to downplay the similarities to Forbidden Planet and The Day the Earth Stood Still which were used as touchstones in the development of Trek).
Originally the main hull was supposed to be a sphere (which is where the Daedalus comes from) but it was thought that it looked too much like NASA illustrations (and a particular cartoon series the early 1960s). Jefferies went back to the drawing board to come up with other designs and at one point he started doodling ducks or swans and put a sampan hat on one of them, which seems to have been the inspiration for what became the TOS Enterprise.
Back then the emergency drive (the impulse drive) was defined as a matter/antimatter rocket that used the same fuel as the warp drive in an inefficient but mostly foolproof way to enable the ship to limp away from something that prevented the complex but vastly superior main drive (the warp drive) from working or as a last resort when the main hull was detached to act as a lifeboat.
The important thing design-wise with a rocket, even if its main exhaust is invisible gamma rays (the red glow was supposed to be from heat from system inefficiencies) is that it has to be balanced so the length of the neck and struts were to put the impulse drive right at the centerline of balance (the nacelles were very dense and heavy compared to the mostly hollow hulls).
In TNG they retconned the impulse drive to be "gravity impulse" field effect drives (similar to the Kzinti drive from Niven's books) in order to stop the constant fan criticism that the impulse drive exhaust would be a disaster to anything behind the ship. But the fact remains that technically the "emergency rockets" Spock called for in The Cage were the same engines they later started calling impulse drives after the science advisor suggested that the term would sound less hokey than "emergency rockets" (and yes, in TOS the impulse drive was only used in emergencies like sabotage of the warp drives and housetraining barbarian princesses.
Also, the neck and struts were almost solid with only piping, wiring, (and in the case of the neck, turbolift tubes), and the minimum of crawlspaces to service the stuff that was there, so they are not the "weak points" they make fun of in Beyond.
I always figured she used to be the Yorktown, which was a bit of a nod to Gene's original choice of ship name in TOS.
I have heard it both ways, though personally I think Yorktown would be especially appropriate considering the WWII Enterprise was a Yorktown class carrier. On the other hand, one of the ways that the Constellation conundrum can be solved is if it was from an earlier class using the same hull configuration as the Constitution class before being updated to Constitution standards, and that earlier class could have been the Yorktown class and it is unlikely that they would do that level of major rebuilding twice on a ship that predated the connies.
Since the original name was never given in canon, it can be the Yorktown. No problem
Cannon to right of them, Cannon to left of them...
Canon to right of them,
Canon to left of them,
Canon in front of them
Volley’d and contradict’d;
Storm’d at with nitpick shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Story,
Into the mouth of "Well..."
Rode the six hundred.
- from "Charge of the Fandom Brigade", Alfred Lord Tennis, Anyone?
Comments
The SNW version gets an honorable mention, the Kelvin Timeline's 2009 NCC-1701rocks as the 366-meter beauty she was designed to be. jjidiot fanboys of the inconsistently 700-1,500 meter Enterprise STAR DESTROYER can GET OFF MY SPACE-LAWN!
*pew!-pew!!
I don't hate the NX-class of the ENT-DSC-PIC TL, i just happen to Like the USS Enterprise (XCV 330) ring ship & the Daedalus-class more!
The Borg Assimilator
Live Long and Prosper.🖖[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
I am with Scotty on this one
I'm with you on the 366 meter size of the Kelvin Connie.
And I think the XCV-330 is still canon. Also if you consider Star Trek Legacy, the Daedalus class was one of the new designs after the NX and took part in the Earth-Romulan War, so she's still around too. Also IMO the Daedalus looks pretty good with ENT asthetics.
Voyager was my first Star Trek series, after that came Enterprise. There's something about the ship that gives it a very nice... Atmosphere? It doesn't have the weird colour schemes of the D for example, with its vague yellowish and pinkish hues. Instead, its interior is more industrial, firmer.
It's not necessarily a better looking interior as in that it is a more cozy place to live (those walls, beds and floors seemed rather rough) - but it is what one would expect from a starship interior.
Besides, interiors can be too cozy - when I see the aforementioned colour schemes of the D, I somehow imagine that it must smell like a drugstore, with its typical smell of skin ointments if that's the right word for it.
Voyager's interior seemed to crammed and dark most of the times. In those regards, the NX-01 is also better designed, being somewhere between Voyager and the D.
The Enterprise-E is a close second though, as it is the best looking ship if judged by the exterior. I'm not sure I'd want to live or serve on it though, with hundreds or even thousands of crewmen (depending on the source - in Armada it had 700 crew, but of course that's assuming that Picard doesn't get his helmsmen killed all the time). I'd prefer being with around 85 people.
I haven't had a detailed look at the newer Enterprises from the shows yet. Personally I don't really care for the older stuff (even if it's in a new series like SNW). The Constitution III looks very good in-game, but again, I haven't watched Picard's third season yet so I don't know what it looks like on a tv-screen. Based on some small parts of video's I've seen, the interior is too dark for my liking anyway.
As with many modern tv shows, I might add - directors seem to think nowadays that it makes sense to have viewers watch something that's barely visible - and as a result, barely watchable. The NX-01 and Enterprise's set were certainly preferable in that sense.
I was critical of the new design when I first saw her. Didn't really like it. But then I saw the movie and saw her pop up out of Titan and I was sold. She earned her place. Now the refit they did in Beyond that was destroyed... THAT one is bad. Made her spindly as all hell on purpose to highlight her weaknesses. In game if I wanna use any of the Beyond Refit parts, I avoid the neck and pylons entirely. The saucer looks fine on the 2009 neck.
The way they differentiated the look of the various eras/shows and the reasons behind the differences are rather interesting.
In ENT they deliberately went for what Roddenberry called the "submarine look" of bare metal and exposed conduits and whatnot (which he was trying to avoid with TOS and TNG) to underline the fact that it was generations earlier than the TOS Enterprise and that UESPA was a lot lower tech than the 2250s-60s Federation. It makes sense in the context of ENT before UESPA's Starfleet discovered how hard such an environment was on the mental health of the crew after months trapped in a metal can in space (which the real-world US Navy submarine service already knew about back in the 1960s and tried to fix on their subs).
That fix is what the odd colors on the TOS Enterprise was all about, Roddenberry applied the same chromotherapy theories the navy was experimenting with at the time, though exaggerated a bit because of the low quality of color response in TVs of the time (modern TV with its much better chroma response makes it really scream, it did not look quite that odd back in the day). Eventually, the navy discovered the theory to be almost useless, but it became an important part of the Trek look by then. The TNG color scheme is just a very toned-down version of that same chronotherapy idea.
Voyager was a special case. The sets were built and lit for the original concept of the show where the ship was an extremely high performance mainly-torpedo-armed destroyer (Berman literally called it "the Starfleet equivalent of the Arleigh-Burke missile destroyer" in the runup hype for the show) meant for relatively short deployments, so being out of Federation territory was a very serious hardship. Also, the two crews abord made things a bit crowded because the casualties both ships suffered in the transit did not quite lower the combined total to where an Intrepid class destroyer's normal complement would be.
The high-performance engines could not take a steady diet of the kind of rotgut fuel the scoops provided so they were supposed to be constantly low on power to save their refined fuel so among other things they lowered the lighting (though Paramount execs complained until they raised it a bit from what they intended). Also, the ship was supposed to look a bit raw inside since it was rushed out of the yards (its limpet scoutship was not even functional when they left) and more importantly the crew was feverishly working to convert it from a short-deployment destroyer into a long-range light cruiser (and on the fly yet) in order to make it home.
Unfortunately, the Paramount execs (and Berman) were not comfortable with straying quite so far from the successful TNG formula and demanded that they drop or tone down most of those features of the show and make it more TNG like, (which did not do the show any favors) though you can see vestiges of a few of them in the series pilot (like for instance the available torpedo count).
I actually like 'em all. But 1701 - D is the G.O.A.T.
My Favorite is Pikes Enterprise , close 2nd is the Enterprise C , Captain Garret and crew knew that they could not win against 4 Romulan ships at the battle of Narendra III , but as usual with starfleet they went where they needed and died with honor .
As usual, a post full of interesting facts and background info. Thanks for another good read!
I'm pretty sure Deanna's a decent pilot, but when Helm Control is knocked out there's nothing you can do but hold on. So its not Deanna's fault the Saucer crashed, but the damage the Saucer suffered from the attack and the destruction of the Stardrive Section. If we look at when, under orders, she rammed the Ent-E into the Scimitar... she nailed that thing square on the nose pretty much, and Scimitar was just starting to go evasive I believe. Hitting an object in space with another object isn't as easy as it looks.
Actually, it is.
Perhaps if you maintained eye contact with the ball at the apex of its trajectory, your serve would be more effective.
~ Tuvok, who apparently also knew a thing or two about spaceballs
There may actually be a third instance where her flying skills proved very effective. Or at least, that's what I'd like to believe.
I sometimes jokingly proclaim that 'Deanna has arrived' when the Voth city ship rams and destroys a big part of the Unimatrix in Borg Disconnected.
It may not have been her though, as the thing seemed to have steered off course a bit and only hit part of the Complex.
I consider the NX- Enterprise quaint, but not without charm.
Enterprise A should be hauling garbage/be hauled away as garbage. That old joke aside, i cannot stand that design. It is as bad as Shatner's acting.
Enterprise B is not a love story, but i can appreciate the later TNG/Lakota refits of the basic excelsior design.
The Enterprise C, Ambassador Class, just ticks all the right boxes for me. Easily top of the list.
The Enterprise D is an appreciated design, but too bulky overall. As for the Galaxy-X variant (3rd nacelle + spinal lance) i like the idea, but not necessarily the design.
The Enterprise E and its post nemesis refit have gone overboard with size and sleekness. When you're going for a sleek design, keep the ship small like the Intrepid Class. I get why the designers wanted a break from the D, but they just missed all their pitches.
Same for Enterprise F, 3 strikes and out.
Are there any other designs?
You didn't mention the original TOS or the Kelvin Connie. Or the Ent-J.
And an Enterprise didn't appear in Picard until season 3.
It was my understanding that the Enterprise A was the TOS Constitution Class. I don't like the tubular hull and round warp Nacelles, nor the 1960's skin.
For the Kelvin Connie, the updated skin i can appreciate but the round warp nacelles are a deal breaker for me.
Isn't the Ent-J the pancake in game. Appreciate that design even less than the clunky 1960 TOS ones.
Ingame i have some very effective connies flying around, but going from the movies/series i simply don't like the direction of their design.
NCC-1701-J is the Universe-class first seen in ENT at the Battle of Procyon V. Huge oval saucer, spindly nacelles barely connected to equally spindly pylons. Don't care for it myself, but I'll never get one, so it matters little.
NCC-1701-G was once USS Titan, NCC-80102-A, but was rechristened in honor of the ship that literally saved the Federation in Picard s3. I like it, but it's not my favorite particularly.
Yes, if you look at the aft part of the ship it seems like little thought was put into finishing the design properly. The nacelles look indeed like they're bound to the ship through a few pieces of rope or something like that.
But I like the concept, with the saucer being so prominent and mighty looking - and the saucer being built around the largest part of the hull.
Many other ships and especially the original Enterprise look like the designers couldn't decide on whether they wanted a flying tube or a flying saucer - and therefore chose to do both. Practically speaking, it seems kind of weird to have two totally different shapes, linked together by a neck that cannot have very much usable space on the inside.
In that sense, the J is more well-integrated and its design better suggests that usable space inside is being optimised.
While the Ent-A is a Constitution class, she's actually NOT the TOS Configuration. She's the TMP refit from ST 5 and 6, which was the same model introduced in TMP.
I always figured she used to be the Yorktown, which was a bit of a nod to Gene's original choice of ship name in TOS.
According to the designer it was a case of simply not having enough time to finish it properly, the saucer was done and the nacelles were mostly done, but other areas like the struts were just the start of the shapes. For instance, the struts were supposed to be clipped at the ends and other details added but there was no time to do that so the nacelles look like hotdogs on a grilling fork the way the strut ends poke through.
The TOS Enterprise went through quite a few design changes in the early doodle stages. Roddenberry specified no rocket thruster bells or hokey fire jets, no fins (once it was decided the ship would not land on planets, anyway), and that it not be the stereotypical glowing flying saucer (probably trying to downplay the similarities to Forbidden Planet and The Day the Earth Stood Still which were used as touchstones in the development of Trek).
Originally the main hull was supposed to be a sphere (which is where the Daedalus comes from) but it was thought that it looked too much like NASA illustrations (and a particular cartoon series the early 1960s). Jefferies went back to the drawing board to come up with other designs and at one point he started doodling ducks or swans and put a sampan hat on one of them, which seems to have been the inspiration for what became the TOS Enterprise.
Back then the emergency drive (the impulse drive) was defined as a matter/antimatter rocket that used the same fuel as the warp drive in an inefficient but mostly foolproof way to enable the ship to limp away from something that prevented the complex but vastly superior main drive (the warp drive) from working or as a last resort when the main hull was detached to act as a lifeboat.
The important thing design-wise with a rocket, even if its main exhaust is invisible gamma rays (the red glow was supposed to be from heat from system inefficiencies) is that it has to be balanced so the length of the neck and struts were to put the impulse drive right at the centerline of balance (the nacelles were very dense and heavy compared to the mostly hollow hulls).
In TNG they retconned the impulse drive to be "gravity impulse" field effect drives (similar to the Kzinti drive from Niven's books) in order to stop the constant fan criticism that the impulse drive exhaust would be a disaster to anything behind the ship. But the fact remains that technically the "emergency rockets" Spock called for in The Cage were the same engines they later started calling impulse drives after the science advisor suggested that the term would sound less hokey than "emergency rockets" (and yes, in TOS the impulse drive was only used in emergencies like sabotage of the warp drives and housetraining barbarian princesses.
Also, the neck and struts were almost solid with only piping, wiring, (and in the case of the neck, turbolift tubes), and the minimum of crawlspaces to service the stuff that was there, so they are not the "weak points" they make fun of in Beyond.
I have heard it both ways, though personally I think Yorktown would be especially appropriate considering the WWII Enterprise was a Yorktown class carrier. On the other hand, one of the ways that the Constellation conundrum can be solved is if it was from an earlier class using the same hull configuration as the Constitution class before being updated to Constitution standards, and that earlier class could have been the Yorktown class and it is unlikely that they would do that level of major rebuilding twice on a ship that predated the connies.
Cannon to right of them, Cannon to left of them...
Canon to left of them,
Canon in front of them
Volley’d and contradict’d;
Storm’d at with nitpick shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Story,
Into the mouth of "Well..."
Rode the six hundred.
- from "Charge of the Fandom Brigade", Alfred Lord Tennis, Anyone?
then this one
then this one