Perhaps this was JP Hanson's flagship at Wolf 359 and the stardrive section survived, it was towed to a scrapyard, and Geordi found it while antiquing.
PIC S3 Ships & Tech
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Perhaps this was JP Hanson's flagship at Wolf 359 and the stardrive section survived, it was towed to a scrapyard, and Geordi found it while antiquing.
My issue with this is that there’s no inherent reason why Starfleet needs to ‘go retro.’ A starship isn’t meant to evoke nostalgia or have some sort of superficial look based on the designers’ personal tastes. It’s meant to perform missions for the Federation, and its design should be based on technological advances, not ‘nostalgia.’ For example, every other Starfleet ship operating in 2401 has a design sense that seems to indicate the tapered saucer design is a technological advance for whatever reason. This is of course just my conjecture, but the visuals seem to support it.
Genuinely curious, are there any designs out there that you think would have made a good post-Galaxy-class Enterprise? Either of your own, or canon, or fan designs? I don't mind the Enterprise-E myself but it a kind of "pretty in a vacuous corporate soulless way", and I have always resented the way the D was killed off just to make way for it. I have never liked the Odyssey-class because it's just... weird-looking. It looks like a fat affronted duck. Pointy in the wrong places, curvy in the wrong places... it just doesn't work for me. And I have been pretty vocal about not caring for the Constitution-III/Shangri-La-II too.
Honestly, the only post-Galaxy-class design I've ever seen that immediately screams "ENTERPRISE" to me is Chris Madden's Dedication-class...
It’s funny you should post that design. It was one of the entries for STO’s ‘Design the Enterprise-F’ contest. And while I respect your opinion that you like it, to me it’s just an example of how derivative all the entries were in that contest. It’s a pretty ship to be sure, but it’s not remotely original.
Most designs I’ve seen over the years, whether fan-made, official, from a video game, etc., that try to interpret a ‘new’ design for the Enterprise all seem to suffer from this derivativeness and lack of originality. They feel the need to use the Enterprise-E as a starting point, and the finished product is usually just a similar ship with superficial changes (which is exactly how I feel about the Odyssey class.)
If I were to design the next Enterprise, I would make it look nothing like the ship that preceded it. I would do away with the classic saucer/nacelle configuration in an effort to show a technological advance past what we’ve been shown for the last 50 years. And I would certainly not feel the need to design it to look like it came from 150 years before.
Maybe only humans have the desire to introduce retro designs?
That's fair
And I certainly concede that it is in many ways a conservative design; even someone with only a vague knowledge of Star Trek could look at the Dedication-class and think "that's the Enterprise".What do you think about the Frontier-class? I believe that was also in the STO "Design the Enterprise-F" competition. Its overall aesthetics might not be entirely to my taste but I do appreciate that it tries to do something a little bit new with the conventional saucer-secondary-nacelles arrangement:
That's an interesting thought. Something like the Altair?:
...Or perhaps something even more different? I have to admit I really would like to see a "modern" starship design using a ring warp engine. What would Federation starships look like after 250 years of refinement if the XCV-330 had been the breakthrough warp testbed instead of the NX-01...
Or even "if we were starting Star Trek over today, with none of the existing design aesthetics from the last fifty-plus years of the show, what would the Enterprise look like". There was a thread about this in the Art sub-forum a while ago. These are fun thought experiments
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With the 250th anniversary of the NX-01's launch and 250th anniversary of the founding of the Federation coming only 10 years later, I could see someone in Starfleet procurement deciding they wanted to produce a small run of retro starships for good interstellar public relations. The Construction III-class would have come out around the 150th anniversary of the launch of the original Constitution-class USS Enterprise.
I just took this one - and it didn't help me at all
Dave tweeted a Starfleet scale chart but then deleted it. I guess there was an error on it
Yeah, I remember Fuzzy Modem's design. I think it was even #1 in the popular vote (which ended up meaning nothing, with that FUBAR contest.) I always liked his design, but again, as a generic Starfleet ship, not as an Enterprise.
I appreciate what Drexler was doing with the Altair, and it looks sufficiently spindly and organic as an outside-the-box design. I can see why it was the basis for the Enterprise-J.
Yeah, one of the reasons I don't care for the Odyssey-class beyond its general aesthetics is that it didn't win the popular vote and
As an American this is a familiar sensation
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Normally, I’m all about “art, not the artist”, but in this case, FUCK NO!
Jesus H Christ! If I'd known that earlier I'd certainly have not brought him up
In fact I'm going to go back and edit my posts to remove any references to his name.
Holy crap. I didn’t know any of this either.
I think it's a fair place to dwell on it just long enough for it to be better known. I had no idea, and am glad to have been educated.
What a piece of shit. (And on top of the ongoing disgusting crimes he was guilty of, he thinks he bettered the life of his victim by sharing his wisdom, and at his sentencing he asked the judge if he had had a chance to see his demo reel. He is unhinged.)
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