S.S. Bonaventure - Exploring the ship from TAS

This week Saturday Morning Trek became Saturday Morning Trekyards as we explored the S.S. Bonaventure, the starship briefly seen in the TAS epsidoe "The Time Trap".

Trekyards contributor Lonnie McAfee and I built out a 3D version of the often derided "Bonnie", found a place in the Trek timeline where it fits, explored the real life history of ships named Bonaventure and I made a video version of our normally audio only podcast.

Hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed working on it!



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New Saturday Morning Trek!
“The Delta Triangle Flyer”
Exploring the SS Bonaventure.
(Includes a special video version!)

Seen in “The Time Trap,” the twelfth episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series, the SS Bonaventure was lost during her third voyage in an area that came to be known as the Delta Triangle.

In this special episode of Saturday Morning Trek—nearly a year in the making—host Aaron Harvey is joined by Lonnie McAfee to investigate this animated starship that features design elements that are a precursor to the famous Constitution class. We explore not only the ship itself, but the time period from which it may have come and the real-life history of vessels named Bonaventure.

And, because Star Trek fans like to go one step beyond, we’ve also built the starship! Well, not a physical ship, but a 3D model created with input from design greats such as Doug Drexler and Rick Sternbach, as well the original designer, Bob Kline.

So, buckle up and get ready to head back into the Delta Triangle!

Listen/subscribe to the podcast version via:

http://www.trek.fm/saturday-morning-trek/36
http://itunes.com/trekfm
http://saturdaymorningtrek.trekfm.libsynpro.com/rss

 

This is seriously cool.
Thank you for sharing it folks.
Seems to me like a natural roughly mid way point between Daedelus and Starship/Connie classes.

 

My favorite episode of TAS is "The Time Trap". This would have been a great Star Trek film like "Yesterday's Enterprise".

 

My theory is that is was the first purpose-built warp drive ship. Whereas other ships were just re-purposed sublight ships. The reason why it looks so much like the Constitution is because it's designer, an eccentric billionaire, was accidentally taken aboard a Constitution class ship which had been thrown back in time to the 2060s. He took what he had seen, and to the best of his recollection, and with the limits of existing technology, tried to reproduce the ship he had been taken aboard. Even at the time, the ship seemed anachronistic and thus the design was discontinued after a short time.

 

I don't need any explanation. I consider TOS apart from the rest of the franchise, so the Bonaventure fits fine in the timeline. Any one know if the ship or crew gets any time in the Alan Dean Foster novelization of the episode.

 

Nice rendering! Always loved this funny little design, myself.

I like to think she was the first Starfleet ship to be completed. Perhaps the first of those Neptune-class survey ships we heard about in "Singularity" (ENT), which had been around for "over a decade," or a precursor. That would roughly coincide with the period in which Starfleet seems to have been originally established (mid-2130s or so).

To be nitpicky, she wasn't called by an "S.S." prefix in the episode. Only "the old Bonaventure" (just as Starfleet ships of the ENT era mostly went without prefixes too, it so happens!)

-MMoM

 

They do not as far as I remember, But we will be reviewing the novelizations probably next month on Saturday Morning Trek so I will be reading it again shortly!

 

[QUOTE="The Mighty Monkey of Mim, post: 12294090, member: 743"
To be nitpicky, she wasn't called by an "S.S." prefix in the episode. Just "the old Bonaventure" (as Starfleet ships of the ENT era mostly were, it so happens!)

-MMoM[/QUOTE]

It's doubtful if you ran across the Titanic you'd say "It's the old RMS Titanic!" so even if it had the ship's prefix on the hull I don't think Scotty would have called it out.

While not in the script, Bob said they always called it the SS Bonaventure,
the Star Trek Star Charts has it as the SS Bonaventure:



This map (along with our model ) was created with the help of Doug Drexler & Larry Nemecek. The Enterprise NX-01 refit (which is in the same time period we placed the Bonnie) also carries the SS prefix.

This is also consistent with ships like the SS Valiant, Columbia, Conestoga, etc. AND SS was first used in a Star Trek production as early as "Where No Man Has Gone Before" (the SS Valiant), but was actually referenced in the Star Trek pitch for the main ship, the SS Yorktown.

So with all that background information we felt pretty good with calling her the S.S. Bonaventure!

 

To further nitpick, the ship seen in these images is unlikely to be the Bonaventure.

That is, the Bonaventure was identified by looks when she appeared on the Enterprise viewscreen. This happened several seconds before the ship depicted here appeared on said viewscreen...

To preserve the identity connection suggested here, we might have to assume that whoever operated the viewer controls did a slow pan, then reacted to Scotty's exclamation and quickly panned back, overshot and then again panned to bring the ship to the field of view - at which point the camera finally showed us the viewer and the ship therein.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Yeah...except that IS the Bonaventure because

1) The script describes it as:

ANGLE ON VIEW SCREEN
A ship something like the Enterprise, but smaller, not as graceful and
sleek •••• but clearly powerful.

2) The storyboard "Old ship similar to the Ent." shows a ship with a saucer and motion lines showing it moving right to left

3) The guy who designed it said it was the Bonaventure and it was approved by Gene Roddenberry and Dorothy Fontana

Remember this is 1973, there wasn't nearly the history, or continuity, of the Trek universe that we have today. That's why we had to work really hard to find a logical place for this design to fit and a way to make "first ship to have warp drive installed" work. The only way this works with no massaging is if the history of Star Trek is different than we know it to be today (which could be because of time travel) but I think the way we retconned it works for the most part. And having people like Larry Nemecek, Dayton Ward (who put his Bonnie in an earlier time), Mike Okuda & Rick Sternbach (who worked on the Bonaventure probe a pre-curor to the Phoenix from 1st contact) Doug Drexler, John Eaves and the original designer Bob Kline give it the the thumbs up--I feel pretty good about calling the 10281NCC the S.S. Bonaventure. :-)

 

Wasn't Scotty shown at the bridge engineering station a moment before, looking at a smaller monitor or one of those scanner thingees Spock often used? He got a preview of what was about to come into view on the main screen that way.

 

I feel the same way about ENT. The Bonnie (whatever class) could be a precurser to the ships in the Daedalus class. The Bonnie could be of the same class as the Valiant.

Or the warp driven ships prior to her were still considered to be spaceships.

She was the first of the "starships," a matter of semantics.

 

Neither of these fits particularly well with the actual line, though.

"She was the first ship to have warp drive installed."

On the other hand, mine makes sense, because she quite obviously has recognizable Starfleet markings, so that context would be perfectly clear to everyone present...



-MMoM

 

The Bonaventure looks WAY too much like the Enterprise to literally be the first ship with warp drive. So that line has to be interpreted some other way.

Most likely, the SS Valiant (from WNMHGB) was the first ship with warp drive (or possibly Zefram Cochrane's Phoenix, depending on whether you consider it a ship).

And there's no way the Bonnie is as old as the Valiant. It can't even be as old as the NX-01, which obviously has warp.

 

OKay ... how about this, she was the first warp ship, but prior to her there were warp spaceCRAFT.

 

The new CGI model breathes fresh life into this old gal. Your revised history seems plausible enough to me, too
BTW, there was definitely an Engine Room in the Enterprise secondary hull. In fact, there were probably several scattered around the ship, since they (IMO) mostly served the function of power control centres. The real business of matter-antimatter reactions took place in the nacelles, at least until the TMP era.

 

Exactly! Which is why we chose it as a Warp 7 ship (a 'modern' warp drive system similar to what the Enterprise is using some 90 years later). Visually it works. If you look at a battleship from 1917 its silhouette and main parts still look like a battleship from 2017 and since Doug Drexler looked at the Bonaventure from TAS when concepting the NX and NX refit it feels like a good era to place it. Purpose built for the Romulan war, but not finished in time because the war only lasted 4 years, it becomes the first of the Federation starships. And there were a lot of ships that vanished around that time period so it works in that respect too.

 

I miss those days.

 

Why not?

CRUSHER: Then the missile complex must be where Zefram Cochrane is building his warp ship!

[...]

COCHRANE: I didn't build this ship to usher in a new era for humanity.

 

@GeekFilter you did a good job. I don't care for the overall design, but that's not your fault. Your version looks better than the cartoon.