The Excelsior - uncovering the design

Discussion in 'Trek Tech' started by yotsuya, Mar 28, 2021.

  1. yotsuya

    yotsuya Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    It seems I have to admit my mistake. I asked around and confirmed that Greg Jein built two models and that Ent C is untouched and in private hands. Well, not entirely untouched. The lights have been replaced. So the Zhukov/Yamaguchi is a completely different model. My guess is the Excelsior hanger under the main hanger is from Jein's Excelsior. The scale would be right. I even have a picture of Ent C on a table being examined (by the person who confirmed this), complete with battle damage.
     
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  2. Dukhat

    Dukhat Admiral Admiral

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    It's ok; even I had to be convinced that there were two different models as the prevailing thought at the time was that it was just one model refurbished, until I saw the photos. As for the Zhukov/Excalibur/Yamaguchi's underslung shuttlebay, it can't be from Jein's Excelsior, as he made that model for VOY's "Flashback" in 1996. "Data's Day" and "Redemption" were in 1991, and "Emissary" was in 1993.

    @Unicron : I'll ask the member if he's ok with me sharing the photos with you. Now I have to try and find them :D

    For the record, I also prefer to think that they're both the same class, akin to the differences between the original Excelsior, the upgraded version from TUC, and the refit from GEN. But mostly because I think the Rigel class, being from the 'new' age period of starship design as outlined in my previous post, should look more like the BoBW kitbashes rather than an Ambassador class variant.
     
    Last edited: Jun 23, 2021
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  3. Unicron

    Unicron Boss Monster Mod Moderator

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    That's cool. I've assumed it was a refurbished Ent-C myself until just now, but since this discussion came up I'm interested in learning more. :rommie:
     
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  4. Mytran

    Mytran Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    I agree that it's not exact (TOS doesn't really do technobabble) but it is consistent with a "reactors in the nacelle" model.
    Spock says they can "can drain it from the ship's engines and transport it to the planet surface in a magnetic vacuum field" which doesn't specify a particular location but does use the plural of engines (maybe AKA reactors?). It also doesn't sound like a common procedure so perhaps a trip up the nacelles is in order...:shrug:
    Here's an example from The Doomsday Machine regarding antimatter storage and the mixing process:
    WASHBURN: As far as we can tell, something crashed through the deflectors and knocked out the generators. Somehow the antimatter in the warp drive pods has been deactivated.​
    (Evidence of antimatter in the warp drive pods aka nacelles)
    SPOCK: I would say none, Captain. The energy generated by our power nacelles seems to attracts it. I doubt we could manoeuvre close enough without drawing a direct attack upon ourselves. ​
    (Since the nacelles generate energy then it's a good chance they have a m/am reactor in them)
    I don't think we're going to agree on the specificity of the technical terms used in TOS but that's OK ;)
    As we all know, TOS took pains to avoid weighing down their episodes with excessive explanations which allows for various interpretations (especially when you discard incompatible references).
    That would depend on whether you consider the Secondary Hull part of the "main section" or not. :biggrin:
    However since Kirk's goal was to lighten the mass of the ship in order to facilitate an escape, I would tend to agree. I posted that dialogue to show that ejection systems were already in place, regardless of what Scotty said in TWS.
    The stronger dialogue is in The Savage Curtain:
    SCOTT: I can't explain it, sir, but the matter and antimatter are in red zone proximity.
    KIRK: What caused that?
    SCOTT: There's no knowing and there's no stopping it either. The shielding is breaking down. I estimate four hours before it goes completely. Four hours before the ship blows up.
    ...
    KIRK: Scotty, inform Starfleet Command. Disengage nacelles, Jettison if possible. ​
    So the shielding between the matter and antimatter is breaking down and Kirk's solution is to first disengage the nacelles? Odd behaviour if the fuel is stored in the secondary hull, even if "jettison the nacelles" is shorthand for "discard the secondary hull"
    As already mentioned by yotsuya the notion of the secondary hull being a nacelle is uncertain at best, especially with the earlier draft referencing nacelles (plural). And even if that were the case it wouldn't be possible to jettison just ONE because the other two are attached to it!
    I don't recall any time in the final TOS episodes where the secondary hull is referred to as a nacelle - that term is always used in the plural and used to refer to the twin engine pods.
    I like the idea of Spock having a backup plan but it's not really supported by the dialogue - there's only one button on the Bridge and if it doesn't jettison the area which Scott is in then anything else is useless since the ship would already be in pieces once the magnetic containment field failed! :eek:
    If the engines (fuel and reactor) are in the nacelles then why would they both be running out of control? Only one integrator was fused and running wild - the one that Scott was trying to fix. The other nacelle was probably just matching speed in order to avoid turning the ship into a spinning top, no doubt an automated integral feature to all paired nacelles.
     
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  5. yotsuya

    yotsuya Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    Discarding incompatible references is what I'm doing. On screen we see everything there in engineering. There is a lot of dialog that is full of inconsistencies. But the visuals are a lot more consistent.

    The dialog should refer to warp pods/nacelles/engines not anti-matter pods. The secondary hull is not a nacelle, it is part of the ship. When you consider where the franchise settled on things. Everything starts to make sense. As long as you ignore the TOS technobabble, which is horrible and inconsistent.

    So all the stuff you are posting from the scripts is, to me, irrelevant. Only the final cut of the episode matters. And when you throw out what doesn't fit, it boils down to a simple system that fits the franchise technology standards.
     
  6. Mres_was_framed!

    Mres_was_framed! Captain Captain

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    i think that you make great points and it is interesting to see that someone else has tried to match these class names up. I actually would like to hear more of your reasoning, but I have also mentioned some key points here to try to not take up too much space.

    I tried to take this into account when I did my list. The unseen Wambundu class Drake, I believe, is called a cargo carrier while another ship of the class is called a cruiser, if I recall correctly. So cruisers becoming cargo carriers would seem to be a possibility. Or maybe it's just that "cargo carriers" can be used as cruisers or frigates when they have to be, which is the explanation I like for this.

    Until this thread, this was not known to me, as I had only ever heard NCC as being NC from noncombatant American planes, being combined with CCC from Russian military vessels. Can you tell me where this info comes from?

    This one was NOT my idea. I favor an updated Saladin-type ship for Apollo, like is shown in video games, or like the USS Jupp model. At the time I came up with this, Memory-Alpha claimed that a ship referred to as Apollo class was this model. I don't remember how that worked.

    I actually like the idea that NCC numbers are largely serial. The reason that I used the assumptions I did id that it allowed me to suggest what class a ship would based on the NCC number, and so some inferred data was better that no data. For a totally off-the-cuff example example, if NCC-45678 was a known Excelsior-class, then this system let me suggest that NCC-45700 or NCC-4599 might either be Excelsior class or one of the derivative classes. Not perfect, but it would let a person put a class, and model to almost every ship listed on the NCC chart at Memeory Alpha at that time.

    This is where I got the idea that the Rigel-class was an Ambassador variant, which is a conclusion that I really like think should be canon for reasons given below. I wanted to suggest that the "real" Ambassador class was Probert's version, and that the Enterprise-C was a variant or was refit at some point to a newer version of the class. However, given the new information that the Zhukov is a different model, then its version of the Ambassador should be the Rigel-class.

    Using an "error" to suggest that Rigel and Ambassador are related, rather than have to have one class be the error, is another example me trying use inferred data instead of no data.

    This is a shock, honestly. I'd love to see pictures.

    Also, the use of the Renaissance-class for the Enterprise-B/Lakota is ad admittedly a stretch, but if I recall correctly, some ships were listed as Renaissance-class and later shown as regular Excelsiors, so I was assuming that (unlike in the real world), the Enterprise-B updates were "undo-able." The NCC numbers were close in my interpretation, but there was another reason.
    In DS9 "Homefront" and "Paradise Lost", the Lakota is the result of Starfleet trying to cram new-age-tech like quantum torpedoes into a ship of an older class: this would have been a "rebirth" (meaning of "renassiance") for the Excelsior if Sisko had not recommended to nix the idea. It is also never stated in dialogue what the class of the Lakota is, just that the new tech makes it outperform the rest of it class. We see the Enterprise-B model that we know from off-screen is a modified Excelsior, but it could have another class name.

    This has given me more to think about, since the secondary hull could be a "glorified nacelle."

    I agree with that last quote. It seems like too many retcons to accept at this point if they were the same universe. The way things are going, a year from now they could claim that Starfleet never really used antimatter and it was all a cover-up, and then all our discussion now would make no sense ;)
     
  7. Mytran

    Mytran Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    I believe I have shown that TOS dialogue is fairly consistent with itself, although I don't deny it represents a different form of engineering compared to what came in later series.
    I'm a little confused as the dialog DOES refer to warp pods/nacelles/engines not anti-matter pods (except in circumstances where they are explicitly referring to the outboard engine thingies as "antimatter nacelles" etc)
    So you're going just on what appeared on screen, regardless of what was said in dialogue? If that's the case then I really have nothing to counter! :techman:
     
  8. Dukhat

    Dukhat Admiral Admiral

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    The Drake was referred to as a light cruiser, and the Fleming was a medical transport. Obviously the light cruiser description would be correct for both ships, but ‘medical transport’ is more of a mission, not necessarily the ship’s primary function.

    The one ship that IMHO the Apollo class should NOT be is the T’pau-type Vulcan freighter that both the Encyclopedia and Memory Alpha tag it as. My personal preference for the class would be an Ambassador class variant akin to the Miranda and Nebula classes.

    Even though I was the one who brought up the Zhukov’s registry issue, I’m with @Peregrinus that the design is too old to be a ship from the new-age era, as Ambassadors came from the mid-age (using my chart). I would prefer the Rigel class to be from the Galaxy family of ship designs rather than the Ambassador or Excelsior.

    I don’t think there were any ships originally listed as Renaissance class that were later shown to be Excelsiors. I think the only time that happened was with the Melbourne and the Crazy Horse (the latter listed as a Cheyenne class ship in the Encyclopedia with a 5XXXX registry only to be shown later with stock footage of the Repulse, but the registry wasn’t changed in the ‘pedia to something lower.)
     
  9. RichT

    RichT Guest

    I always took this to be a figure of speech. They'd know which nacelle Scotty was crawling around in and was currently malfunctioning, and not need to specify beyond that.
     
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  10. RichT

    RichT Guest

    Per the Ambassador class variants page on Ex Astris Scientia:

    "For many years, it was assumed that there was only one physical studio miniature of the Ambassador class that was used for the all the above appearances and that was heavily modified after "Yesterday's Enterprise" when presumably not only the battle damage was painted over but also hull modifications took place. This never happened. Actually, a second model was built, one that appeared as Zhukov, Excalibur and Yamaguchi. The original Enterprise-C studio model still exists, complete with the painted on battle damage!"
     
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  11. Dukhat

    Dukhat Admiral Admiral

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    Yes, I was the one who gave Bernd that info ;)
     
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  12. Mytran

    Mytran Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Agreed. This is similar to how the crew would always refer to THE transporter room, even though there were several different ones depicted throughout the series. Precisely which one would always be known to the characters in question
     
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  13. Tim Walker

    Tim Walker Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    Seem like every 40 years or so Starfleet will seek to build a new class of Large Explorers, the premier ship of Starfleet and one of the most prestigious ships in the Federation.

    But first test the new technologies in smaller ships. Then test the Explorers components in a utility vehicle, a Work Elephant. (an Indian elephant being an analogy). If the work elephant is successful, then use components to construct a new exploration vessel.

    So Apollo utility ships are assembled first. Successful enough that a decision is made to go ahead with the Ambassador class.

    Decades late the Nebula class is constructed, and then the Galaxy class.

    I expect that only a handful of each class would be constructed.
     
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  14. Mres_was_framed!

    Mres_was_framed! Captain Captain

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    I don't know when that change was made, but the last time I viewed that page, it still implied that there was only one Ambassador Class model.

    The page also says, "The book erroneously describes this painting as an early design stage of the Enterprise-D." So that explains that confusion. The painting is of the Ambassador class, but a print source was the first to mistake that painting for the older 1980 one that was an early version of what would become the Galaxy class.

    Would this not mean that the guy in the 2006 Christie's Auction show on the History Channel, who claims to have bought the Enterprise-C (the believing that it was the Enterprise-C model, with different a name and number from its later uses) is now finding out that he was wrong, and paid money for something different than he thought he was getting?

    Can we get a picture of the real, still-damaged, Enterprise-C next to a 2021 calendar or something ;)
     
  15. F. King Daniel

    F. King Daniel Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Next to today's newspaper, like a hostage Starship
     
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  16. Dukhat

    Dukhat Admiral Admiral

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    I’m not sure the Yamaguchi model was ever advertised in the auction as being the Enterprise-C. Or if it was, it was changed later according to the listing for it.
     
  17. yotsuya

    yotsuya Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    Most of the people who bought the models from Christies don't have them any longer. I think they found them hard to display and in need of a lot of work. Bezos hasn't done anything with the refit except display it. Thank goodness they built it with a very sturdy frame. I don't know who has most of the models, but I know who has Ent C and who has Ent E and some of these collectors have more than one. The person who has/had the Lakota loaned it to a museum in France for quite a few years, but it is no longer there last I heard. Now that is the model I would really want to make friends with the owner of.
     
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  18. David cgc

    David cgc Admiral Premium Member

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    It's still listed as the Enterprise-C on the Christies's web-catalog, and the description repeats the misinformation that there was just one model used from "Yesterday's Enterprise" up to "Emissary." It looks like the later Propstore auction has an accurate description that it's not the same model that was used in YE (or, rather, it doesn't mention YE at all).
     
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  19. Dukhat

    Dukhat Admiral Admiral

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  20. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Lieutenant Junior Grade Red Shirt

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    Leaving out how the JJ-verse and Disco are blatantly not the original Trek universe... Enterprise just doesn't fit what we knew of the era from TOS and the like: First contact with the Klingons. Andorians with ears. Starfleet having phasers, photon torpedoes, and transporters some seventy-five to ninety-five years early. The size of the ship vis-a-vis the TOS Enterprise. After Cochrane broke the warp barrier in 2063, the Earth colonies didn't combine their system-defense fleets into a unified Starfleet until the 2130s -- Enterprise is decently on track with that, but I feel it works better to have the Romulan Wars be what spurs that (dialogue refers to the conflict being between Romulans and Earth, not Humans), and that snowballs into the formation of the Federation a few years later. If Enterprise had had the ship smaller and named something else, if it started in the Romulan Wars and ended with the founding of the Federation and the dream of a warp-5 ship, that woulda been great. Oh -- and also no frikkin' Temporal Cold War (in addition to no phasers, photon torpedoes, or transporters). As it was, it would have worked great with a slight redress as the early voyages of NCC-1701 under Robert April. Bonus points if they'd adapted the story from Diane Carey's "Final Frontier" for the pilot.

    As for Picard... None of the characters feel right. Seven is suddenly bi or gay, despite zero evidence of this on Voyager. They didn't get the actors back to play Maddox or Icheb, despite both being AAA (alive, active, and available). I am pretty sure Icheb being tortured to death would get Q Junior's attention, since he's the latter's best friend and Q Junior was ready to die to save Icheb before. The warp drive (and starships) look way, way off from what we previously saw of the era. Which, speaking of, we're solidly in the middle of the "All Good Things..."/"Endgame"/"The Visitor" time period, and zero sign of those uniforms so previously used so consistently. And a Starfleet Admiral dropping the F-bomb is disgustingly unprofessional for the Star Trek setting. A sotto voce "merde" from Picard is about the strongest we got, apart from Data's "oh, shit". The setting and situation didn't call for that. That was edgy for edgy's sake.

    Both shows have a lot of good moments, and I like both more than Disco, but they just don't fit the previously-established canon. *shrug*
    I jave a certain rough threshold of variance before it's a new class. "The Cage" to production? Still Constitution class. Production to TMP? Enterprise class. Completely new warp engines, main sensor, navigational deflectors, lower sensor platform, bridge superstructure, impulse engines, photon torpedo deck, warp nacelle pylons, and 6% increase in overall size? Yeah, that counts. Enterprise-C to Zhukov? Same class. Both of those to Andy's "Encounter at Farpoint" matte painting? Could that be the Rigel class? I have zero problem with that, but what we see in the TNG era is less acknowledgement of subclasses and variants. No matter how altered, I feel Starfleet would still just consider that Ambassador class -- just a later version of it.

    Maybe start with the off-round/shallow ellipse of the Niagara class, slap on some elongated Galaxy nacelles a la the New Orleans class, and there's your Rigel?
    I can grudgingly accept this. I snipped most of that post. You raised some good points and I will have to think further. I'm back around to where I was a couple years ago, where antimatter aboard starships was a newish thing with the class and, along with Duotronics making possible FTL navigation and sensing, allowed the higher warp velocities to make longer-range exploration possible (the "Time Barrier" Tyler spoke of in "The Cage"). If the antimatter is stored up in the engine pods, possibly with replenishment piping up from the ship if they have spin-reversal tech aboard (to explain "Obsession"), maybe the matter stores are in both primary and secondary hulls, near their respective engineering facilities. For the saucer, there are fusion reactors providing impulse power, and for the secondary, maybe that's a fusion reactor farm aft of Main Engineering to power the ship. Don't ask me to explain the dilithium in that setup -- I only just started mentally re-tackling this...
    I have also looked at class names with no models and models with no class names to see what I could do. I still like the Qualor II Planet of the Titans study model for the Apollo class. I added bussard collectors to the fronts of the nacelles, reworked the secondary hull slightly in the areas we can't see, and added some Excelsior-Ambassador mixed detailing to show it as an intermediate design. I go with the Excelsior study model with the two small Grissom style engines for the Merced class (remember Data's commentary about a ship of this class being able to catch the Enterprise as "too small, too slow"). And so on.
    The problem there is that I've read so many bits and pieces quoted here and there, and the rare full interview, that all of Jefferies' ruminations have just sort of formed a rudimentary timeline in my head. He came up with 'NCC' based on the Civil Aviation code of "NC" for US-flagged civilian craft. He tacked a second "C" on because it sounded good and gave it a bit of a remove from reality. He learned later that the Soviet Union's Civil Aviation code at the time was "CC", and liked the symbolism of these two superpowers who were adversaries in the 20th century "melding together" to peacefully explore the galaxy in the remove of the 23rd.

    At the time he did the "Court Martial" wall chart, he had already decided that Starships/Heavy Cruisers had "NCC" prefixes, while other vessel types had other prefixes. This is why the chart headed "STAR SHIP STATUS" has no "NCC" before the hull numbers. This is informed conjecture. He'd already noodled after coming up with the registry prior to the first pilot what the numbers indicated (17th Cruiser design, 01st production hull), and had, between then and "Court Martial" run across the US Navy hull number prefixes, so I figure that's when he speculated about at least Destroyers (Kirk's never-screened backstory included commanding a Destroyer prior to the Enterprise). The only other clear thing I know is that, when doing prelim work for Phase 2, he came up with "1701A [note no hyphen] - first moderize [sic]/refit". The Powers That Be obviously noted that, even if they didn't use it as he intended in TVH.

    I'll go back through all my books and magazines again at some point to be able to cite references, but I specifically remember him noting "CC" for wet navy cruisers, and saying he'd speculated on other double letters for other ship types, like "DD" for Destroyers (almost certainly prompted by conversations with Gene where the latter mentioned his new Captain had previously commanded one).
    I do like it, and wish it worked as well as Jefferies' TOS era production blocks. I've done my best with the scant "Lost Era" detail we have. Here's a biggie. "Dark Page" establishes Lwaxana and Ian Troi married proximal to stardate 30000. After about a year of entries, there's a seven-year gap in Lwaxana's journal -- that she started that year, ending a few months after Deanna was born. Per the show lore, Kestra was born in 2330 and Deanna in 2336. So Lwaxana's journal, started on stardate 30620, was started in 2329. Counting back at a thousand stardate units a year, 30620 should be about halfway through 2353, though. After the TOS Five-Year Mission, the stardates, that had been moving steadily at about 1,200 units a year, stalled out between series and films. Two-and-a-half years and the stardate was about the same. Stardates were completely borked through TWOK, TSFS, and TVH, too. I have not yet come up with a rationalization for this. At the TOS rate, stardates would have hit TNG timeframes (41000+) around 2300. Counting back from TNG first season at a thousand a year, they zero out in 2323. So something's going on there between 2272 and 2364.

    In the same vein, registries post 2285/NCC-2500 steadily go up, but not at a logarithmic rate. The Ambassador, at NX-10521 was ordered circa 2305. I don't know if some pre-registry-revamp NDD ships got carried over with new registry numbers, but I like that explanation rather than an explosion of some 7,500 new ships built in twenty years (or 375 per year, steady rate). I know Starfleet shipbuilding capacity has been expanding, but that much, that fast? That also makes a nice cutoff : Four-digit registry? Late 23rd century. Five-digit registry? 24th century.

    However, again, they made it through nearly 60,000 in forty years (from NX-10521 ordered in 2305 to NX-70637 ordered in 2343). That's nearly 1,600 ships a year, steady rate. So there's a lot to sort out, there. Has capacity just increased that much? Did they build a bunch of drydocks to crank out Excelsiors after the Tomed Incident, but then didn't have to fight the Romulans, after all? Were ships ordered but then not built when tensions waned? If Mike had talked to Matt about registry meanings in 1986, maybe he would've carried the block model forward. It'd certainly be less unwieldy.
    If you're a Star Trek writer who doesn't know how the ship works, you might think the important stuff is all in the saucer and the secondary hull is just shuttlebay and cargo bays. Certainly, in "Day of the Dove", Main Engineering was on "number six deck" in the saucer and the entity had sealed the accesses through the interconnecting neck "trapping nearly four hundred crewmen belowdecks". Despite the VFX then showing the entity leaving the ship from the secondary hull. *shrug* But yeah, I can see many instances where the writers seemed to regard the saucer as the main part of the ship, and the whole secondary-hull-plus-warp-engines assembly as one dacelle depending from that main hull, like the engine pod of a 747 hanging off the airplane's wing.

    The writing is too vague and intermittently-consistent to get clear on much. Matt Jeffries' set model did clarify one thing for me, though. Main Engineering, the set, is only the starboard half of Main Engineering, the shipboard facility -- the ceiling braces all curve down from port to starboard. Scotty's office on the upper level is straddling the two sides. Whether it's symmetrical, I don't know. Whether the room is all we see and there's some other vital systemry just to port, necessitating moving the facility off the centerline, I don't know. But it's all too big to fit in the saucer. I need to go back through the entire series and note all references to the ship's structure and layout. It's been too long. But my sense is too many of the writers did think of the secondary hull as a "glorified nacelle" with sticky-off bits to make the ship go.
    Since we saw the Nebula-Melbourne in both "Best of Both Worlds" and "Emissary", I stick with that over the Excelsior, regardless of which is clearer. And in my lists, the Crazy Horse is still a Cheyenne.
    I like to think they rotate transporter rooms with each duty shift, so everyone knows which one is the active one. This lets maintenance happen. They talked about that a bit more in TNG -- where O'Brien acknowledged the one that was his favorite.
    They take their time on the linchpin classes, as they intend them to be in service for as long as possible, which is automatically limited for classes that need to be and stay on the bleeding edge of technology for as long as possible, when it's always moving forward. Over the twenty years of the development cycle, ships sporting the features of the class under development will start showing up. The Cheyenne and Springfield had underscaled Galaxy saucers. By New Orleans, they had early Galaxy style warp engines. Challenger had full-size Galaxy engines. Nebula was the first to feature the full size saucer and engines.

    I'm more interested, currently, in the post-rollout progression. The Constitution class in 2245 was arguably smaller and more primitive than what we saw twenty years on in TOS, by which point the Miranda class was in service, and that saucer is much more different yet. The span from 2245 to 2285 fascinates me -- the overlap of the ultimate evolution of the Constutution superimposed with the advent of Excelsior-family designs. Then again from 2285 to 2323, when the Ambassador was launched. We know between Ambassador and Galaxy, there were in-between designs with less-elliptical saucers and other engines besides the ones from those two classes.
    I caught so many errors in those BTS books. The Star Trek Sketchbook by Herb and Yvonne Solow has a frontpiece the caption says was the start of it all -- Jefferies' first drawing of the Enterprise. It's not wrong. Sorta. It's the first drawing Jefferies did for Phase 2. The actual three-view he did in pastels on black boardstock isn't even in that book -- it's over in "The Art of Star Trek".

    This is the proto-Enterprise-D:

    [​IMG]

    Andy went to that when he got the job to design the new ship for TNG and came up with this:

    [​IMG]

    But this was designed to be the class between Excelsior and Galaxy from the get-go, and included on the conference room wall display as the Enterprise-C. This was never a direction Andy was going for the TNG hero ship:

    [​IMG]