The recent new thread showing a possible movie image of the "new" STAR TREK's Starship Enterprise finally motivated me to post a couple of new drawings. This isn't much, but here goes: This is my idea of what the new/reboot Enterprise "could" look like. This simple pencil sketch shows my alternative to the new movie image. The secondary hull on my version of the "Enterprise" would have a shape similar to the classic TOS design, but would be much longer at the aft (hangar deck) end. This hull would remain cylindrical in shape. The interconnecting neck would be much thicker. Out of the sides would jut podlike tubes which would serve as the bases for the nacelle pylons. These tubes would house photon torpedo launchers. The next is an unrelated concept; something I've been kicking around for a long time... This is the Starship U.S.S. Herman: my answer to Franz Joseph's Class I destroyer/scout single-hulled starship. Named after the Hermes, this class of starship would have its origins in the "STAR TREK: ENTERPRISE" era (a descendant of the NX-Alpha Warp 5 prototype) as an Earth and/or Coalition class of warships, smaller than the NX-class, serving in the Earth-Romulan Conflict. The design was among the first to become part of the new Federation fleet a few years later. Refits over the years kept the design current through the TOS era. This particular drawing set is of a TOS-era version of the Herman design. The side-view is drawn with the nacelles deleted for clarity. The basis for this concept was my ages-old (lost in the mists of time) thread that asked "How would you re-imagine the NX-01 Enterprise?". This was one of many ideas I had in the back of my head. The concept was to continue the idea of the NX-01 based on a single hull, with design lineage ties to the TOS Enterprise, but far removed from the onscreen ENT that so many fans dislike. In my Herman, I came up with a way to "have your cake and eat it too". The ship is faithful to the TOS design convention of separating the engineering and hangar deck from the bridge/crew quarters section, yet all are part of one "hull". The solution is to base the ship on a single tube hull shape, and segment the various sections. The bridge and crew quarters are in a forward nose section. Warp Drive Engineering is in a larger mid-section, and the hangar and impulse engines are in the aft segment. Using a segmented single hull makes for a smaller, simpler-to-build ship. The forward "nose" section is actually a topside half of the tube with the underside half eliminated, forming a saucerette. The mid-section is more of a cylinder, like the forward half of the TOS E's secondary hull. This section houses the warp drive engine room, fuel storage, the navigational deflector, cargo holds, etc. The aft segment is more like the aft end of the TOS E's secondary hull (hangar deck) except the ship's impulse engines jut out from the sides of that section, forward of the hangar. Of course, as with the NX-Alpha and its great-granddaddy the Phoenix, the nacelles are rotated to oppose each other. The TOS-era version of the Herman uses nacelles that are supposed to be closely related to the nacelles used of the TOS E. (Roughly same overall dimensions.)
I like your Herman/Hermes design - a nice use of TOS ideas and shapes in an original way. Although, for some reason, I think it looks more like a tranport than a scout/destroyer. I guess the long, thin, modular look reminds me of some of the transport designs from the Wing Commander games. A couple of things I'd possibly change would be to make the main hull wider, so from the front view the cylinder appears oval and raise the nacelles up to the ship's centre-line or have the nacelle supports form an inverted "V". But that's just a personal preference, I guess.
Yes, I can see where you're coming from on the nacelles. I wanted to preserve the Phoenix/NX-Alpha "look", while keeping the nacelles and their wing-pylons low enough that they would not obstruct the side-views of the ship. It's kind of a built-in contradiction. My solution was to add a belly ridge on the bottom of the ship's mid-section and attach the pylons at this point. This allowed them to go straight out from the ship, preserving that "look". I wanted to repackage that "look" because it is consistent with the simplicity of the older designs. Where the Constitution-class vessels represent a more massive, sophisticated and elegant approach (and no doubt more difficult to design, build and maintain), Herman was meant to capture the Phoenix/NX-Alpha's easier-to-build, easier-to-maintain, more Spartan approach. Do you think there's a way to do what you're suggesting without moving away from that ideal?
I guess I just prefer to see the nacelle pylons attached to suomething that looks a little more substantial, although it did cross my mind that raising the nacelles to the centre-line would spoil a great position for a Starfleet pendant. Another possibility would be to stretch the connecting hull between the mid-section and hanger section and attach the pylons to that in an invert "V", that way the pylons wouldn't block the view of the main sections of the hull. You'd probably have to move the nacelles further to the rear to make it look right, but it would be more in keeping with the positioning of the nacelles on the nx-alpha/phoenix.
Okay, this Herman concept has captured my imagination. I can't let it go. So I've decided to inflict more lame artwork on all of you! This one is really really bad, so I apologize in advance. Laugh all you want... I must stress this sketch is very, very rough. It is not meant to be taken literally. The main change is that I started swinging the nacelles above the main hull of the ship instead of below. The pylons are derived from FJ's Federation-class and as such they rise at a very gentle angle from the engineering section. The "saucerette" nose is the roughest of all the parts. Keep in mind that Herman is supposed to be an all-encompassing (highly segmented) single-rough-tube-hull design, so the "saucerette" is supposed to blend in with the rest, as if it were simply the front segment of the tube.
Great work, Humbugsley. I don't think they're bad or horrible at all !? A picture is worth a thousand words. (in this forum anyway). I enjoy seeing concepts like these. I like your idea of using pods/fairings to connect to the pylons, and the second ship is very cool...like the blended saucer-hull design.
The Herman is one of my takes on Franz Joseph's Hermes. I originally was a big fan of FJ's "destroyer/scout" class starship concept when his Tech Manual came out in '75. As time went on, though, the one-nacelle design soured on me. While I really liked the idea of Kirk's Enterprise having "little sisterships" with a single fuselage design, I wanted to see them employ two nacelles. Two looked more balanced than one, and if the bulk of the ship's fuel is stored in the nacelles anyway, you can't have an oblong design like FJ's Hermes or the impulse engines would send the ship in fishtails while at sublight speed. As I recently posted in another thread, Herman is not my only attempt at a two-nacelled, single-hull "destroyer"/"frigate"/"surveyor" concept. Here is another variant I came up with on Christmas Eve: As you can see, I had better luck at Photoshopping this one together. I guess I'm at the limit of my digital arts skills at this point. Thank you for the comments.
I like the NCC-300 too... I think I know what you're going for there and a top view might help everyone else get the picture. Your destroyer is awesome too... I like to believe that FJ's design was just the basic template and that most of them actually did have a second nacelle.
Thanks, Praetor! Tip of the Romulan Ale bottle to you. Just to avoid any confusion, there's some crossover between a few threads I've either started or participated in, notably one of them being my recent "Starcraft Productions Blueprints of the Saladin/Hermes" thread, as well as the over-year-and-a-half-old "How would you re-imagine the NX-01 Enterprise?" thread. Hopefully the links herein will help clear things up. The revised Photoshopping cobble-bash I did of the NCC-300 Herman you see in this thread is essentially the same ship as my pencil drawing at the top of the thread, but with the nacelles and pylons reaching above the main fuselage of the ship instead of below, kinda like upswept wings of the K'Vort-class battlecruiser in TNG's "Yesterday's Enterprise". I'll see if I can pencil-draw the revised Herman soon. Both the Herman and my two-nacelled Hermes are basically conceptual sketches for different approaches to the same idea: this is my re-imagining of what FJ's Hermes could've looked like: Constitution's smaller stable-mate, using a single hull and two nacelles. FJ called his Hermes and Saladin a "destroyer/scout" class vessel. I would call my re-imagination something else; maybe "starfrigate" or "deep space surveyor" or the like. So I'm trying to assemble a list of possible candidates of what such a ship would look like in the TOS era, with possible roots back to the ENT era. Some of these ideas are my own, others originated from other participants in these forums. So far, I've identified several possibilities, including some I haven't tried to draw yet: HERMES - My two-nacelled kitbash revision of FJ's Saladin/Hermes, looking a little like Vance's Tokyo and/or Starscape/Snowscape's Diligent/Scorpion. HERMAN - As you see above, Herman is also a single-hulled, two-nacelle starship, but with the ship's main fuselage designed around distinct segments of a single, tubular hull. The front segment would look saucer-like (maybe a little like Icy_Penguigo's Texas, or maybe just a distorted top-slice of the tube, looking a little like a mini-version of Icy's Star Tiger), blending into an engineering mid-section where the warp nacelles are attached, and then an aft section for the side-mounted impulse engines and Connie-style shuttlecraft hangar. This ship could have its roots as an Earth/Coalition "destroyer" as far back as the Earth-Romulan Conflict. NX DESCENDANT - This one I have not drawn so far, but it would be a distant descendant of the old NX class of Earth starship. Gone would be the catamaran-style arrangement. The upper saucer buldge would be a single swoop from the bridge back to a saucer-mounted hangar deck (like Starscape/Snowscape's Meteor) with impulse engines to either side. The swoop would blend into a curvy neck that would lead down to an engineering pod (Again, like the Meteor). The nacelles would be attached to the pod via Connie-style pylons (very unlike the Meteor). So this class of ship, which I haven't named yet, would take on a TOS-ized NX look, which would be much more familiar. TEXARKANA - I have not drawn this one yet, and do not know how to approach it. Imagine the Starship Texas (Vance's drawing here, Adam Turner/Icy_Penguigo's 3D's here) but with smoother shapes and the nacelles more outboard like with my Herman concept. APEX - This is entirely someone else's creative brainstorming, but the concept has similarities to Herman above, so it appears to fit the bill perfectly: NCC-1701/Winter came up with a neat little Daedalus-derived single-hull starship called the Apex, which Starscape/Snowscape did an excellent job of developing in 3D. The challenge with this ship would be to use nacelles the same size as the TOS Enterprise, but with the main fuselage still much smaller than the Big E. That's all on my list for now. Any other ideas would be welcome.
Of all the strange things... I just recently stumbled upon Chris Martin's Evil Starship Factory 3D art blog while googling a different starship topic. What I found took me by surprise... Martin came up with an interesting TMP-era design he calls the U.S.S. Revere. It looks like a TMP-version of my NCC-300 Herman! The artwork is close enough that it has me wondering if maybe a TOS-era version of this same design could work after all. The only other thing that has me scratching my head is the lower crew complement. Revere is a very small-crewed starship. Comments, anyone?
The Revere is doing nothing for me, to be honest, I actually think the little pencil sketch had a more interesting front end to it. That rather thick saucer does not look very nice at all, I would think another shape would make more sense in terms of space and aesthetics.
My original thought on this (what became the Herman) was that the front part of the ship would loosely blend into the segments further aft. I was thinking along the lines of something like the bill of a goose, only thicker and wider. My biggest reservation with that would be that the curved, fairly eccentric shape would look too TNG/VOY-esque for a TOS-era vessel. So I moved to the idea of a saucerette, much like the Revere. I'd like to take this opportunity to point out another, loosely related topic in this forum that started in April of 2008. At that time, NCC-1701 (currently trick-or-treating as NCC-666) started a thread on a design concept called Apex. NCC-1701's Apex concept won praise from several participants in this forum; so much so, that other participants started derivative threads. The first was probably from Starscape, in May of 2008. thesovereignman came up with another take on this in December of 2009. I'm beginning to think that Herman / Revere could split off as a result of discussion here in this thread, as well as past discussions of Apex. While I do like what Chris Martin did with Revere, (Looks like a TMP-era ancestor to Voyager, only done right.) I'm beginning to wonder about a whole new shape for the front-end of Herman, maybe making that entire central hull look more missile- or aircraft-like. I was thinking about using two smaller deflector dishes, and mounting them on pods situated partways out on the nacelle wings.
USS Heracles. Hmmm... OK, I'll admit it: even though that artist's work is outstanding, the ship design itself is a dog. Am I a bad person because I can't stand the USS Stargazer design? I feel so guilty. But I can't help it! The Stargazer looks like... well... it looks too much like what it is: a kitbash of an old USS Enterprise model kit made when Star Trek: TNG was on a tight budget.
An idea came to me while discussing Franz Joseph Schnaubelt's 1975 Star Trek Star Fleet Technical Manual in an unrelated thread (entitled "One Big Happy Fleet [FJ]) over in the "Trek Tech" forum. Albertese pointed out the common design elements of FJ's "Class I starships" on page one of that thread: This line of thought intrigued me, and got me thinking about my earlier designs in this thread. I looked over the two-nacelled NCC-585 Hermes ship that I posted in this thread back in 2008, and I began to think about it in a new light. This TOS-era Stargazer-like design does offer one major physical trait with military value that other starship classes with more complex configurations cannot offer: the simplified arrangement of the pylons and nacelles offers the saucer-mounted weapons superior aft firing arcs. Think about it: cruisers like the Constitution-class and other ships like the Reliant need more weapons because the warp nacelles and their pylons can block their rearward firing arcs. With the simpler design of this revised Hermes, this ship would make the ideal destroyer-type ship. It would be quite easy to situate saucer-mounted phaser batteries to provide superior firing coverage. The "lollipop" design has an advantage! So maybe I shouldn't have called it the Hermes. Maybe it should be the Saladin after all.