I have been watching Season 5 and Season 6 of STAR TREK VOYAGER, and I noticed that on the last episode of season 5, that the USS EQUINOX looks very similar to the USS ENTERPRISE-E NCC1701-E. Does anybody else think this was a pre-draft to Enterprise-E used in the TNG movies?
From memory, I think the Equinox was an old design dusted off, but it was for what eventually became the Defiant. Edit: Thanks to Memory Alpha: "I was searching through piles of drawings for little ships just to get some inspiration and I came across a sketch that I had done for the Deep Space Nine Tech Manual of the original design for the USS Defiant before... [it] was given all of its armor and upgraded weapons, what we call the Pathfinder vehicle... and I thought, 'Well, we haven't seen this one yet, so maybe this design could turn into the Equinox and the drawing was approved and we fleshed out the Equinox for the two-parter." -- Rick Sternbach
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In the TNG Technical Manual, they had concept drawings for "The Road to the Enterprise-E" or some wording similar to that. They referred to them as early designs for a Nova Class Starship (Which the Equinox was). One of them looked somewhat similar to the Equinox.
Here's the image LeadHead is referring to, courtesy of Memory Beta. I think the original concept from the Tech Manual was that "Nova Class" was planned to be the successor to the Galaxy Class. Obviously what we eventually got as the Nova Class didn't really fit the same role. Of course, IMHO, none of these designs were that great, anyway. I think the bottom left is my favourite, although I'm not sure what's up with the nacelle struts extending so far past the nacelles. Maybe try again? The results I got back just using the search string "uss equinox" seemed to include some really nice-looking images.
Years ago when I still found these things funny, my cousin had a T-Shirt with an angry soaking kangaroo on the front between the text legend "I'd rather be pissed off than pissed on."
The Nova class does seem to share a few design similarities with the Sovereign. The Nacelles, the pylons and secondary hull curvatures look pretty much similar... but then again, this seems to be a trait shared by many newer SF ships.