That's what a 22nd-century Earth ship should have looked like.
It's funny. Hollywood is always trying to up the "sex appeal" of things with bigger weapons and engines and so on, and although the 22nd century would not have been the time to retain the 23rd/24th era esthetics, it
would have been a time to up the sizes of those "sexy" components, showing them in their earlier, pre-refined/miniaturized, states. They could have had huge laser canons, nuclear torpedo ports, massive warp engines, separate Bussard Collectors...
The large impulse engines on the E-E make no sense to me. These are chemical exhaust engines, right? (Yet, where they're placed, they blow directly into the Bussard Collectors, which should sheer off half the ship.) More to the point I really want to stress, they're entirely the wrong size. Maximum impulse is .25 c. If the D could reach that speed for a much larger ship with smaller exhaust ports, the E's could have been even sleeker still. Hell, the TOS-E's weren't nearly as big. Yet in the 22nd century, you could have truly massive first-generation impulse engines on a
Saturn V scale, if you wanted.
Ditto the deflector dish, with its eye-dazzling glow-y parts, and maybe the same for the shield grid and the artificial gravity network -- both could have been more greeble-y and/or glow-y. The matter and antimatter storage tanks and the engine core itself could also have been impressively distinct as well. Even different kinds of sensors (active, passive, long-range, short-range, sublight, tachyon, planetary, life-sign) could have been distinct new greebles...telescopes, dishes, strips, lights, and whatnot.
