The Enterprise-E is so ugly

[austen_pierce]

On the topic of E-E vs. E-D, I did some photomanips a few years back replacing the E with the D in First Contact. I for one prefer the D.

All that would have been better, no question.

These are very, very well done. The way you've managed to color and light the E-D makes me want to see this film. I never would have thought that.

 

[Mytran]

Y'know, there is something viscerally right about seeing the D going up against the Borg again. Seems like it would be good for fleet morale...it's the ship that beat them before!

I always thought the Defiant looked way too small-scale in that shot, though....

Agreed, these are gorgeous images to behold!

Regarding the Defiant, this was something that was done (I suspect) on purpose by the film-makers in order to emphasise the enormous girth and length of the Enterprise-E as it penetrated the Borg's defences.

On this scale, the Defiant would be not much more than a single deck - which is perhaps what was on the mind of the artist who drew this pre-movie poster:

What surprises me is how well a lot of the rooms seem to fit into this design, especially the Bridge into the "nose" section. I also like the 2 lifeboats at the fore of the ship - excellent rationalisation of those odd triangular panels.

It's well documented that the Defiant was designed without a particular scale in mind, so I think this poster has to at last have a mention in the "How Many Decks?" debate (which I'm not going to derail the current thread with here). However, in my mind it's clear that Worf took the Defiant Junior to fight the Borg. Maybe DS9's main cast were in the bigger Defiant, elsewhere in the battle?

 

[Robert Comsol]

^^ This is a very interesting and cool cutaway. The location of the engine room looks just perfect and relocating the Bridge to the bow is an interesting paradigm shift. This illustration feels right, but there are probably issues once put under closer scrutiny?

Bob

 

[RoJoHen]

This illustration feels right, but there are probably issues once put under closer scrutiny?

Bob

The deflector dish is the big one for me, considering how much space those things usually take up on other ships.

 

[Mytran]

It would certainly be an interesting side project to see what would fit and where. One change I might make is that the starboard life boat appears to be accessed through through someone's toilet!

 

[Robert Comsol]

^^ Computer Voice "WARNING. There are no toilet facilities aboard the life boats. Please relieve yourself prior to entering life boats. Toilet facilities for male personnel are located on the port side, facilities for female personnel on the starboard side"

Well, it looks like you could fold up the lifeboats and then you'd have at last a kind of docking tube.

Looks to me that the artist really put some thought into it, I love it when that happens.

Bob

P.S. Maybe it's not a toilet but a space suit locker room. At least the location there would make perfect sense, IMHO.

 

[Mytran]

Accessible through someone's cabin though? Actually, not the daftest idea I've ever heard. It would only be in emergencies after all and would reinforce the "cramped" idea that the Defiant was supposed to be. It seemed rather roomy in some episodes!

 

[Grendelsbayne]

Well, to discuss your latter point (and not just because I'm one of those posters you're talking about!), I bring up the Stargazer as an example. I *think* within the show the Constellation is regarded as a non-too-elegant design, and even Picard confesses that the class and the Stargazer itself are not sleek, efficient, even favorable designs anyway. But Picard told Scotty that sometimes, if he could, he'd trade the E-D for the Stargazer because of that sentimental value. There's no accounting for taste, but it can be separate from personal preference of ship. Indeed, Scotty clearly much preferred the TOS bridge rather than its arguably more streamlined, uniformed, and more advanced movie incarnations. The Stargazer and the TOS Enterprise were the ships where Picard and Scotty cut their teeth with, much in the same way that a viewer connects with a particular ship if they watch for a long period of time.

Saying the design isn't 'sleek' isn't necessarily a value judgement - it's just a description. It's just as easy to value 'non-sleekness' as it is to value 'sleekness'. Saying it's inefficient is an in-universe judgement of its effectiveness at doing what it was designed for - something a man who captained it for decades would have to be honest about. Neither is really very connected to the question of what type of design someone prefers aesthetically. (I really have no idea what is mean by a 'favorable' design)

Ultimately, though, my point wasn't about people having personal preferences for one ship over another. Certainly, that's true, but I was talking about the fact that people have personal preferences for certain styles of design over others. That's all these posts about 'character' and 'soul' are - one person just doesn't like a particular type of design and so, even on first glance before the show has had any chance to build up the ship as a character, feels like that design has no 'soul' or 'character'. If the show is particularly effective at making people feel for the crew and making the crew feel for the ship, then many people eventually get over it. If not, you're left with two groups divided solely over the fact that they just like different styles.

People are fine for liking what they like.

Of course they are. They're just not fine for pretending that that's anything more than their opinion and acting like there's some ironclad rule of how to design starships which the designs they don't personally like clearly must have violated.

I personally think it's absolutely retarded to destroy the design of a ship than is an integral part of a series, and replace it with this unknown bastard thing.

It might have been easier to swallow if the new design was good.

If some people liked the E more than the D, I guess they benefited then.

I'd be more impressed with that argument if it in any way felt to me like that was what happened, but for my part, I see TNG and the TNG movies as largely separate, so I never felt like they switched anything out midstream.

I'd also be more impressed with that argument if I honestly thought the E was somehow extraordinarily ugly (but I don't) or that the D was extraordinarily beautiful (which I also don't).

 

[Viper78]

On the topic of E-E vs. E-D, I did some photomanips a few years back replacing the E with the D in First Contact. I for one prefer the D.

This looks amazing! As much as I like FC it could have been so much better seeing the Borg taking over the Ent-D.

 

[Robert Comsol]

Just another thought for the discussion: If we were to assume that the "D" and the "E" merely share the same ancestor (the Excelsior Class), wouldn't the "E" look more palatable as the next generation of the Excelsior Starship Class?

I think this side-by-side comparison could justify such an idea, plus some other elements the Sovereign Class shares with Excelsior's (like the thick dorsal that almost asks to be merged with saucer).

Bob

 

[Viper78]

Just another thought for the discussion: If we were to assume that the "D" and the "E" merely share the same ancestor (the Excelsior Class), wouldn't the "E" look more palatable as the next generation of the Excelsior Starship Class?

I think this side-by-side comparison could justify such an idea, plus some other elements the Sovereign Class shares with Excelsior's (like the thick dorsal that almost asks to be merged with saucer).

Bob

The Enterprise-C looks like a return to the constitution design with the D being an evolution of the C. If anything it looks like the Excelsior class is the odd one out.

The Sovereign class is the 3rd largest behind the Galaxy and the Ambassador classes.

 

[Ithekro]

It is possible, perhaps even logical, that Starfleet has alternating exploration/heavy cruiser designs every 20 years or so. While we have not real full lineage, we can make some assumptions.

Constitution class was the premier heavy cruiser of the 2240s.
We cas assume there was a design made or at least planned for the 2260s. It may have been cancelled, or it may have evolved into the refit of USS Enterprise. It was the foundation for the Constellation-class.

The Excelsior-class was the premier heavy cruiser/battleship of the 2280s. It lasts a extremely long time.

The Ambassador-class seems to be a design of the 2320s, so one can assume there was a design for the 2300s, though that might have been the Enterprise-B design, or an improvement on the Constellation-class.

My assumption is that there was a split in the 2340s. One path was heading for the Probert-C design and the other became the Galaxy-class. The Probert-C looks to me like progression from the Ambassador-class towards the Galaxy-class. Even more so than from the Excelsior-class to the Galaxy-class. So I'd rate it as having a small production run in the 2340s before being cancelled in favor of the Galaxy-class in the 2350s.

The Galaxy-class being the premier ship if the 2360s as aside from USS Galaxy, they pretty much came out in the 60s.

The Sovereign-class is the premier ship of the 2370s by way of being designed as a heavy cruiser instead of as an explorer like the Ambassador-class and Galaxy-class. I suppose Starfleet realized in following the early comflicts with the Cardassians in the 2350s, he return of the Romulans, and the discovery of the Borg, that they needed less of an Explorer and more a heavy cruiser like the Constitutions and Excelsiors were a century earlier. Taking advancements from the Galaxy Project made it easier as all they needed to do was design a new ship without having to spend a decade making the technology work. The design was delayed to incorperate newly developed weapons and other technologies from other projects (Defiant-class and Intrepid-class Projects) as well as the Warp Subspace issue in the late 2360s would cause a resign based on the Intrepid design. But that didn't take long as Starfleet got Sovereign out before 2372. Assuming of course that they didn't rename it just before launch as the USS Enterprise-E.

 

[Robert Comsol]

The Enterprise-C looks like a return to the constitution design with the D being an evolution of the C. If anything it looks like the Excelsior class is the odd one out.

I made this schematic to visualize what I think you are talking about (please focus entirely on the side view of the three ships).

The Sovereign class is the 3rd largest behind the Galaxy and the Ambassador classes.

But it doesn't necessarily follow that the next starship has to be bigger than the previous one.

The DS9 Defiant was a much smaller ship than the TOS Defiant, but apparently it's successor (of course, NCC-1764-A would have been cool).

My assumption is that there was a split in the 2340s. One path was heading for the Probert-C design and the other became the Galaxy-class. The Probert-C looks to me like progression from the Ambassador-class towards the Galaxy-class. Even more so than from the Excelsior-class to the Galaxy-class. So I'd rate it as having a small production run in the 2340s before being cancelled in favor of the Galaxy-class in the 2350s.

This sounds like an idea worthwhile to have it illustrated. Of course, in real life the Probert-C came as result of Andrew Probert melding the silhouettes of the Excelsior and the Galaxy Class.

Bob

 

[Ithekro]

I see the Ambassador-class as a progression of the Constitution and Excelsior lines of thinking. Especially with the round saucer section. This would make some sense if that was Starfleet engineering's first venture into a larger ship with new style engines. The Probert-C (does it have a class name other than that or Ambassador-class?) looks like a step up from that design as it starts to add the curves and the oval saucers onto the larger Ambassador sized frame. Taking the experiance of the Ambassador-class and refining it with better knowledge of how the new engine nacelle style works with the revamped warp scale and warp dynamics. This leading into the Galaxy-class.

The Sovereign coming from a different school of though as engineers try to reduce the Z-axis profile of the starships as seen in the Intrepid, Defiant, Akira, and other designs without necks. Also the 90 degree rotation of the oval saucer for reasons perhaps related to the subspace polution issue of the late 2360s.

 

[Robert Comsol]

The Probert-C (does it have a class name other than that or Ambassador-class?)

It's a somewhat complicated issue.

When Andrew Probert designed his Enterprise-C he coined the term "Ambassador Class".
When Rick Sternbach designed his Enterprise-C it became an Ambassador Class starship, too.

Ever since, “Ambassador Class” has been in use as being synonymous with Rick’s design, but understandably Andrew claims that name for his design because he proposed it first.

Regarding Andrew Probert’s design I always felt it had a touch a class, a touch of Probert class, it could be the Probert Class (maybe named after that Commodore Probert mentioned in the Epsilon Nine subspace chatter in TMP?). That would perfectly work for me to help distinguish both and different designs in discussions such as here at the BBS.

Bob

 

[trevanian]

Probert designated the refit as Enterprise-class, but except for me and a handful of others, that just hasn't flown here at all.

 

[Ithekro]

Doesn't the Probert-C show up, slightly modifed, in the Ships of the Line calendar series.

 

[mos6507]

I hate the E because it's fugly. The nacelles look like something out of Voltron.

You've got a right to your opinion, but your hate for the E is kind of over-the-top and seems to ignore similar design cues that the E shares with older ships, like the refit. I can see an attempt on the part of the designers to go for an art-deco thing with the E. The overdesigned aspect with all of the notches and layers is part of it, and if you look closely at the Refit, there's a lot of that etching and striping going on as well. It's just that we've had six movies and 35 years of history to get used to the refit, and the E only had a few movies, most of them not very well received.

The other thing about the E is that it is absolutely a masculine design. The D, on the other hand, with all of its rounded edges and wide saucer, is a very feminine design. While the D could kick ass, it didn't do it with appropriately macho style. It looked like a mother hen trying to chase off a fox or something. While I think they went overboard in trying to bling and Rambo-up the E, I think there definitely was a need to give the crew a new ship that was more ballsy than the D.

 

[Viper78]

The Enterprise-C looks like a return to the constitution design with the D being an evolution of the C. If anything it looks like the Excelsior class is the odd one out.

I made this schematic to visualize what I think you are talking about (please focus entirely on the side view of the three ships).

The Sovereign class is the 3rd largest behind the Galaxy and the Ambassador classes.

But it doesn't necessarily follow that the next starship has to be bigger than the previous one.

The DS9 Defiant was a much smaller ship than the TOS Defiant, but apparently it's successor (of course, NCC-1764-A would have been cool).

My assumption is that there was a split in the 2340s. One path was heading for the Probert-C design and the other became the Galaxy-class. The Probert-C looks to me like progression from the Ambassador-class towards the Galaxy-class. Even more so than from the Excelsior-class to the Galaxy-class. So I'd rate it as having a small production run in the 2340s before being cancelled in favor of the Galaxy-class in the 2350s.

This sounds like an idea worthwhile to have it illustrated. Of course, in real life the Probert-C came as result of Andrew Probert melding the silhouettes of the Excelsior and the Galaxy Class.

Bob

Great schematic, your absolutely right about the successor not having to be a bigger ship.

As I've said in previous posts I beleive the Sovereign class is a replacement for the ageing Excelsior rather than a replacement for the flagship Galaxy class. As already stated with the Sovereign's newer tech more suited to the uncertain times the federation were facing.

 

[Ithekro]

The Enterprise-D was definately designed as a long duration explorer. Families and more power to science labs and sensor arrays than anything else but the warp drive. The pity about TNG is that it didn't actually perform that duty. USS Enterprise spent much of its time going from one edge of Federation space to the other, and spending time of one border or another as flagship of the Federation. The real calling of such a design and with the familes onboard in luxury would be to leave Federation space and just keep going for years at a time. A five or more year mission were they never go into Federation space. To push past the frontier and may a new one beyond it. The saucer seperation ability allows them to fight far beyond Federation space to defend the families (one assumes they could maintian the warp field with the double impulse units and "subspace drift" back to Federation space if the Stardrive gets destroyed).

The Sovereign-class is built as a heavy cruiser. It does not seem to be fitted for families or even long term missions beyond the classical five-year mission setup of the Constitutions. She's designed to be in and around Federation space, bith exploring the frontier and defending it, while being close enough to be assigned to the borders to defend the Federation if needed.

And what about a compromise name: The Ambassador A. Probert-class