Flipped ship?

You know how once upon a time, you'd see a picture of the Enterprise in a magazine or tv guide or something, printed upside-down?



Maybe that look could have worked. With some minor changes, such as flipping over the secondary hull for instance, this orientation seems to showcase the different shapes better. Sometimes the secondary "cigar-shaped" hull seems to get lost beneath the girth of the saucer. And maybe it's just my up/down gravity 'bias', but even the engine struts seem sturdier, somehow...

 

I recall a story about an early prototype model of the Enterprise being initially hung "upside down" with the engineering section on top and saucer on the bottom, perhaps it was in The Making of Star Trek?

 

That makes the warp nacelles look like pontoons!

 

^ I think that's where the story originates. After building the AMT model, it sort of made sense, since it feels like it wants to be upside down anyway when holding it.

 

Some of Matt Jefferies' early concept sketches had the ship "upside down."

 

One thing Star Trek never conveyed is the lack of "up and down" in space. The camera was always oriented to match the Enterprise's internal gravity. Every ship we caught sight of was oriented to match us. And when we visited Earth, the planet was seen with north pointing up.

I think this was done instinctively, but it served two valid purposes. It kept new viewers from getting confused, and it created a memorable "branding" image of the Enterprise.

Regarding the latter: modern corporations (and I work for one) are very strict about maintaining the uniform appearance of their logo. It has to be just so, in shape, orientation, and color, everywhere it is seen. This gives the impression of a reliable identity; it implies the promise of consistent quality and service.

Getting people to remember the consistent, highly recognizable shape of the Enterprise served that purpose for Star Trek, whether intentionally or not.

 

The upside down version of the Enterprise does not look all that bad. But I think the way we see the Big E onscreen will always be the way we were meant to see her. I prefer seeing her the way that we have seen her for the last 48 years.

 

I've always thought of warp engines as a sort of pontoons. If pontoons are meant to help a ship keep itself afloat on water, then nacelles would help a starship keep itself within or "on" subspace.

 

The saucer and nacelles above is counter to the way things are built on Earth an contribute a lot to the feel that this is space vehicle. Also, objects always look bigger when you look up at them since we perceive things big enough to look up at as huge.

 

It looks like the Kelvin, with two engines.

 

Try Starscape's remarkable Starship Spitfire out: here, here, here and here!

 

wonder if this is where the reliant concept was born many years later?

kind of looks similar to a miranda class

 

The story about the Reliant is that it was flipped so audiences could easily distinguish it from the Enterprise.

Neil

 

The Reliant was designed nacelles up, and Harve Bennett approved the sketch upside down, hence it got flipped, or so various sources have said.

 

Star Trek II. The Enterprise goes down vertical and then comes up behind the Reliant, taking advantage of Khan's 2D thinking.

In TNG's "All Good Things...," the alternate future Enterprise-D came up vertically to engage Klingon warships.

And we could be at any angle, though. If we go by the various course headings given in various episodes and movies, ships move at different azimuth and elevation angles all the time.

Which could be a deliberate conceit even from an "in-universe" perspective. To coordinate the traffic of numerous ships and platforms around Earth, they might all be aligned a certain away parallel to the planet (in Earth orbit, "up" is always towards the North Pole).

Basically. But "up" and "down" in space is always relevant to something anyway. It may be a commonly accepted (but not really necessary) practice throughout the Galaxy for two or more ships to match orientations. Such a practice could be simply customary or a courtesy. The blinking navigation lights on the hulls of most starships may also be transmitting their respective orientations to others.

 

In real life, I think spaceships wouldn't bother rotating to match orientations unless they were docking. But astronauts in a zero-G space station probably orient together when they're talking.

If starships do align themselves for some reason, esthetics I guess, I'll bet the smaller guy will be the one that's supposed to adjust. The big ship will sit there, seeming to say "It's my way or the Milky Way." And thus pride will mean that Klingon battle cruisers always face us at crazy angles.

 

That's funny. I've seen the same story reported for the Enterprise (except for the nacelles being down instead of up) but with Roddenberry instead of Bennett.

I can't remember where I've seen it though?

 

That basic story was always about Matt Jeffries showing a study model to Gene Roddenberry, who turned it upside down and liked it that way. I've never heard that a similar event befell the Reliant.

 

You can apply that same idea to starships in Trek. As I said earlier, matching orientations is something that likely isn't necessary, but more customary and probably only because it doesn't really take much for the futuristic Trek ships to do so (it may only require the push of a single button on the helm).

 

This reminds me of how fleeting and tenuous a thing reality is: one little change of decision on someone's part, and suddenly we'd have been looking at a different ship all these years!

Great collection of flipped-over ships from back in the day!
You would think that the above example wouldn't exactly be a credibility booster for Ballantine Books, though!
Makes me wonder if there was a commonality among paste-up artists, that they never have even seen Star Trek. How odd...

These are pretty nice! I'd say it only has one "weakness' design-wise, and that would be this angle:



Again, it may be the bias of familiarity, but that saucer neck part just doesn't look right. But of course if the "upside down" design had been used, I'm sure that what we've become so familiar with wouldn't look right, either!