Ghost ship - My DY-1000 Bonaventure

[Wingsley]

I hope nobody dies of laughter from this...

I started digging through my old papers this evening, looking for some of my drawings from 15 years ago. Back in the early 1990s, I was corresponding with Mike Alexander of Solaris Designs in California, as well as many others, about STAR TREK. We were watching TNG, which was alone at that time as the only live-action TREK to ever be shown on TV.

There was talk of the Starship Essex, mentioned in TNG, and what early starships would look like. I talked with Mike Alexander via phone and snail mail (this was still an era, for us, where we did not even dream about message boards like this) and we tossed around what the Bonaventure from TAS' "Time Trap" would "really" look like. We didn't like the fanon-published Bonnie from the "U.S.S. Enterprise Officer's Manual", or the TAS drawing.

So I started drawing my own. IIRC, I drew several versions, all very different from one another. The common theme in all of them was how the TOS-style of starship design evolved from earlier generations. One common style I chose was to base the ship's secondary hull on the DY-series of pre-warp starships. I called this design the "DYellow Submarine" because it always seemed funny to me that Khan's sleeper ship looked like a "flying sub". The "conning tower" fin of the "sub" would become the early connecting neck to the saucer.

Of all the crude pencil drawings I made back then, (I am not a draftsman, much less a computer artist) I have so far only been able to find one set of drawings, which I believe were made around 1992-94.

Here's my first drawing:

And here's another, companion page, I made at the same time:

So far, I cannot find any of my other drawings. This was an era long before I had a scanner or enough hard drive space to store any of this kind of thing.

One feature missing from these DY-1000 drawings was the notion that the the navigational deflector dish was built into the "nose" of the "sub".

I was inspired by Sean McCormick and Captain Robert April, among others, to revisit this old design. Looking at these drawings, I have to say the misshapen nacelles and the connecting tubes to the saucer are a real hoot. I guess I'm going to have to start drawing again. Like CRA, I'm looking at ENT and getting some ideas. The weird thing is, Sean M is also reminding me of some of my own as well.

 

[Sean_McCormick]

Interesting design! I think i see, how the thing develops. It probably starts with a "star destroyer" style command deck on the conning tower that gets enlarged from one design generation to the next untill it arrives at a full blown saucer.

The nacelles shape remind me of the Durance (http://www.cygnus-x1.net/links/lcars/uss-durance-class-cargo-tug.php)

 

[Kaiser]

Cool Design

Hope you post more of your ships

 

[AmbassadorKosh]

Nice, I like where this design came from and is going. The use of a DY for the secondary hull is a great touch, shows that earth reused and upgraded even in the early days of warp travel. Another good design "feature" is the large amount of space, in the secondary hull, given to fuel storage for the fusion reactors, very realistic touch. Hope you plan on working more with this design, love to see it cleaned-up, smoothed-out and rendered Vance style.

 

[Patrickivan]

I like it too... Has an Oberth Class feel about it.

I was doing the same thing when I was a kid. I was attaching the saucer to everything from the DY100 to contemporary aircraft fuselages and ship hulls.

But unfortunately, from a practical point of view, perhaps the designs of some vessels aren't meant to be so radically modified.

It's fun to do though.

 

[Wingsley]

Wasn't there a DY class in fanon drawings that evolved into an early warp ship? Of course the remastered version of "The Ultimate Computer" seems to have "re-imagined" the automated freighter Woden to look like the TAS-era robot ships, so it has been un-DY'd. Still, it would seem that the Mariposa could not have gotten very far if it were strictly a sublight ship, and the Woden would not have been a very effective frieghter if it were sublight-only. For years, I've assumed that the DY ship line evolved to have limited warp capability, and may have been the backbone of the SS Valiant that was launched 200 years before TOS. (Both the Mariposa and the Valiant were launched after Zephrem Cochrane's warp flight.)


So far, I have not found any other drawings of early warp ships that I made 15 years ago. I fear I may never find them.

I do not plan to develop or continue drawing this specific design. I do plan to do my own take on post-ENT starships, including the Bonaventure and possibly the Daedalus. Sean McCormick's recent drawings of 22nd-century space vessels has provided me with some fresh inspiration. There is a strong DY style in several of Sean's designs.

If anyone else wants to draw, develop or otherwise extrapolate on this DY-1000 design, you are welcome to do so. By all means, have at it!

 

[Wingsley]

Some additional comments:

About the conning tower... I didn't think it out quite the way it was discussed here. I recall thinking that the connecting neck between the Connie's saucer and secondary hull may have evolved from somewhere; it wasn't just something that was fitted in with that design. I got the idea that the secondary hull evolved from the DY family of space vessels, and the neck was simply a conning tower where the bridge used to be.

When I saw ENT in reruns (I never got to see it first-run) it all made sense; the saucer evolved separately as part of the NX-class design, and Bonaventure was a post-NX era design that married the DY legacy with the NX innovations. So it all came full circle.

 

[Ptrope]

Not based on your design, but nevertheless based upon Matt Jefferies's original work (he designed the Leif Ericson upon which this is based), this is my own effort at a replacement for Bonaventure, for my Star Trek:Reanimated: http://64.225.237.28/Star_Trek_Reanimated/images/BONAVENTURE8_001.jpg

Jefferies definitely used many DY elements in Leif Ericson's design - the conning tower, particularly. I liked this as the basis for my Bonaventure because it kept the design heritage, and gave (to me) more of an impression of retrofitting the "new" warp drive to an existing class of ship.

 

[Wingsley]

The strange thing I encountered when I was doing these drawings 15 years ago was that not all of the drawings were of the Bonaventure (or the Bonaventure's class of ships), but rather an evolution of ship designs and ideas of how the design could have looked 100-200 years before TOS.

Of course, the weird thing about the "Time Trap" Bonaventure was Scotty's exclamation that she was the first starship to have warp drive installed, yet she didn't seem as old as the Valiant (200 years) whose recorder pod was seen in "Where No Man Has Gone Before". Stranger still, "These Are the Voyages..." seemed to open the Bonaventure door open a crack by suggesting that the newly formed Coalition of Planets would also give rise to new Warp 7 technology; since the NX-class' propulsion was always referred to as a "warp 5 engine", never "warp drive", maybe the advent of Warp 7 technology formed the basis for "warp drive", which was installed on the prototype Bonaventure.

I've been thinking about starting a thread devoted to deconstructing the "Time Trap" Bonaventure, but it would follow some of the same approach Warped 9 took with the re-imagination of the shuttlecraft designs. When I get something on paper, I'll have to scan it in and post it.

Your Bonnie is still very intriguing, though. Can it land on a planet surface and take off again?

 

[Kaiser]

Not based on your design, but nevertheless based upon Matt Jefferies's original work (he designed the Leif Ericson upon which this is based), this is my own effort at a replacement for Bonaventure, for my Star Trek:Reanimated: http://64.225.237.28/Star_Trek_Reanimated/images/BONAVENTURE8_001.jpg

Jefferies definitely used many DY elements in Leif Ericson's design - the conning tower, particularly. I liked this as the basis for my Bonaventure because it kept the design heritage, and gave (to me) more of an impression of retrofitting the "new" warp drive to an existing class of ship.

Now that design looks awsome

 

[Ptrope]

Your Bonnie is still very intriguing, though. Can it land on a planet surface and take off again?

Thanks, Wingsley; I used the basic fuselage of the original, but got rid of the engines (which looked surprisingly reminiscent of Defiant's engines, from DS9!), modified the 'wings' and added the nacelles, and changed the nose from a cone to the deflector dish. There is a great site dedicated to the original ship and its variants (including mine ) at Project Rho; on this page, one of the CGI artists has depicted the ship on the ground (offloading a Land Master, oddly enough, seen in the movie Damnation Alley).