There's brilliance already flashing from your work-in-progress,
@SCE2Aux, and it's thrilling to watch. Most of what you've integrated into your design are refinements that I could imagine being incorporated into an evolved refit configuration, say on the NX-02 or "NCC-02." But there's one big addition that actually resolves what I thought the original NX-01 lacked: a pair of hatches for a horizontal shuttle ingress (as it should be) rather than a vertical one.
I wonder if Doug Drexler still peruses this BBS. He'd have a lot to say about your refinements.
Way back before the "Enterprise" series premiered 23 years ago (sweet Jeez), on this very BBS,
TV Guide magazine showed us the first preview of the ship design, which was a single shot of a top-down view. The first reactions were mainly complaints, that they'd settled on the
Akira design from TNG for a storyline supposedly two centuries earlier. Drexler came back at everyone, saying, if a design pattern's good from the beginning, why couldn't it survive two centuries hence?
As that little squabble subsided, we were all wondering, what would be on the underside? Is there a smaller primary hull? The lack of one? I had thought a good storyline for the series would be if the original design were a mish-mash, a compromise between various camps' ideas, that would be re-thought and refined from season to season. I sketched my projection of how I thought the underside of the original NX-01 would look... and here it is:
I imagined a kind of cargo module which would also double as a kind of magazine for launching missiles, plus a communications array where the main deflector would eventually go in later designs. Otherwise, I wondered, where is everything supposed to go? Cramming everything into the primary dish seemed like one compromise too far.
So let me ask you this: What do you imagine your version of the refit's secondary hull should house?
DF "Trying to Make Image Posting Work Like Some Green Newbie" Scott
