Am I the only one who dislikes the Enterprise-E?

I personally like the Enterprise-E, but there were some other designs for it proposed that I thought were a little bit better. I would've actually preferred that they used the design with the pivoting nacelles that still had the neck, but the E-E wasn't that bad really.

 

Thanks to nx1701g's Avatar, I have another impression of her design: she appears to be partially at Warp, even as she cruises. Peach Wookie said, "stretchy".

But, I have to confess, I am a D-ciple!

 

Not all Federation ships have quantum torpedoes and ablative armor either, so, not all Federation ships were designed to fight the Borg....considering that they had not encountered the Borg so frequently before stardate 42.... whatever.

 

The E-D was outright destroyed by a tiny BoP in its first movie appearance, so...

 

Yeah, I thought that too, and that's one of a number of reasons I've started to think that the Enterprise E looks to much like a "baddie ship".

Your Avatar looks like a better design to me. One of the biggest problems for me is the E-E's nacelles. They look like a little "borg-ified"; like they've been ripped out of unimatrix 01 then repainted and relit to fit Federation design and function.

 

It's one of those things I never really noticed until I read about it online. I do remember seeing Nemesis for the first time and thinking, "Wow I wonder why it looks so much better suddenly?" (and this from a guy who liked it to begin with) - and all they did was slightly raise the nacelles.

 

I think the poor old E suffers from the poor CGI in Insurrection (basically a third of its total screentime), the ship's hull looks a very dull and exciting grey in that one. It looks much better in the two films either side of it.

 

Isn't that somewhat ridiculous?

If anything, it fought a Scimitar, the Borg and was outnumbered in INS...I'd say if anything it proved it is a very formiddable ship.

 

Indeed.
She crashed into another ship (one of oldTrek's highpoints, VFX-wise) and survived that.

 

I didn't dislike the Enterprise-E, but I wasn't in love with her either. She was just sort of there to me.

 

I guess this goes back to the original E, and the refit, and the JJ-E being a very simple designs.
John Eaves's E-E is a bit... over-design and just falls (literally) flat from certain angles.

 

Actually, I'm sorry to say, that's not the E-E in my avatar. That was a design I saw online that's a mix of the Galaxy and Sovereign Class.

Venture class Vessel USS Affirmation

 

I wasn't even talking about the actual design, but the ship as being something special. We had seven years to get to know the Enterprise-D as being something of a home for Picard's crew through thick and thin. Before that, there was nearly twenty years of Kirk and Scotty occasionally obsessing over the original Enterprise and regarding her as something to be treasured. In comparison, the Enterprise-E was merely...an object, a means to an end, and not really shown as anything more, IMO.

 

I love the -D, it always felt to me like it was just this grand, marvelous, gorgeous ship that was the epitome of Federation design and elegance. The crowning achievement of Starfleet and the Federation and the best ship to use to to find new races and show Starfleet and the Federation to be this peaceful organization of unity and exploration.

I agree it has some awkward-looking angles but, overall, I find it to be just a gorgeous, gorgeous ship. The interior of the ship also really felt like a place one could call home and wouldn't mind serving on for numerous years, if not decades.

The -E struck me as a giant step backwards from that. Much more of militaristic and aggressive design. Hard to look at that design and seas peace and exploration it just looks aggressive.

Being (volume-wise) smaller and the interior having a "colder" and less inviting look to it also sort of felt to me to be a step backwards. It felt less like a home, again our characters were supposedly on an unending or decades-long mission/assignment, and more like a place you work.

I can understand the sets and such for the show not being ideal for movies but they could have easily rebuilt the sets for movie quality. The model was supposedly cumbersome to work with, but the 6-footer was a gorgeous model with lots of detail to it. We didn't need to see it swooping around or doing anything elaborate so the practicality of filming the model seemed like a moot point. Even more so when they switched to using more CGI in the movies.

The -D felt like the pinnacle and achievement of Starfleet. The -E felt like another cog in the machine.

I could, maybe see some redesign on the ship (but not to the ridiculous levels of Dreadnought -D seen in AGT) but there was no need whatsoever to destroy her in such a manner, not to mention making her go down like a punk as she did. This was one of Starfleet's most powerful and advanced ships. Even with the shields down it's ridiculous she got so owned by the old BOP. Riker, lock everything you've got on that BOP and fire, fire, fire! This ship stood up against a Borg Cube, twice, where shields quickly became a non-factor and it lived to tell the tale. How did that crappy old BOP take her down?

A stupid and spiteful way to take her out.

Moreover the -D was part of the show, destroying her was like killing of one of the main characters and then unceremoniously replacing him/her with someone else in the next movie and that person being superficially younger and better looking and the characters pretty much telling us, "See! This person is better! You like him more!"

They never should have destroyed the -D. It would've be awesome to see our characters walking along the hull, dwarfed by her immense size and the size of the deflector dish, fighting the Borg, to see it.... doing whatever in Insurrection and finally going down in a true blaze of glory in Nemesis fighting the Scimitar. *Then* you destroy her, against a formidable opponent. And as true end to the TNG-era with Riker going of to his own ship and all.

Picard evacuates the saucer, save the bridge, separates and then rams the Scimitar with the saucer. Then tries to use the auto-destruct only for it to fail and for the two ships to disconnect from one another and everything happening more-or-less as we see it in the movie as-is. Only at the end the destroyed -D is retired and Picard given a new ship, more-or-less of-screen without revealing the -E.

Have the ship go DOWN doing something meaningful against a real opponent. Not written off lamely like a character whose actor bailed on a contract and you just want to screw them over.

 

Indeed. If it were designed to fight the Borg, they wouldn't have SENT IT AWAY as soon as the Borg started invading.

 

That's a very good point.

I always took it that, part of the design choices, weren't directly caused by the Borg but were a response to increased threats being experienced in the galaxy.

 

More like acromegaly: grown too big all aspects, but in some more than others.

The little pinprick windows made it look really huge, but it also seemed particularly top-heavy. I'd agree that this is not an issue in outer space, but somehow it seemed carved out of stone rather than crafted from metal.

Bizarre and unfriendly.

 

I could stop you right there.

The Enterprise E was commissioned one year before the Dominion War began... of course Starfleet was moving in a more militaristic direction, the Defiant class alone was evidence enough for that and remember even at that time the Prometheus class was only another year away as well.

To be honest I think Starfleet was way too reserved in it's production of battle ships, 2 Borg invasions, the Romulans nearly invading Vulcan, the Klingon civil War, The Klingon invasion of Cardassia and the subsequent liquidation of the Khitomer accords, the Cardassians themselves, The Maquis, the Dominion etc.

And Starfleet never seeing the need for a main battle fleet is beyond me.

 

It's due to the nature of Starfleet being a jack-of-all trades service with their ships capable of defending the Federation whenever called upon. In times of crisis, Starfleet seems to be easily able to mobilize their ships.

It was really only in TMP that we got the sense that Starfleet may be spread very thinly (or is really small) with the Enterprise being the only starship in range to intercept V'Ger. But then, TMP might have been going with the idea that "starship" was a term given to a special class of Starfleet vessel back in Kirk's day and wasn't as generic a term in Picard's day.

 

Still, to my eye, she looks like she is starting to go to warp, with the elongation...or, my eyes have been cheated by some spell!