Over time I've dabbled with conceptual designs for pre TOS era starship designs. My baseline has mostly been "what might be have seen if given the chance in TOS?" That means I use the TOS aesthetic in general and pretty much ignore what was shown in ENT and most other post TOS productions in terms of references to the 21dt to early 23rd century period. For inspiration, beyond my own notions, I've based ideas on early Matt jefferies sketches as well as other soucres I felt could be adapted in a way consistent with the TOS design aesthetic. One of those inspirations has been designs found on Masao's Starfleet Museum website. While I might quibble with some of Masao's ideas I found others t be inspired and insightful. And one cannot argue that the Starfleet Museum represents a great deal of thought and work. In this thread I want to continue sharing some of those pre TOS era designs for those who might be interested and appreciate another perspective. The Hercules-class star clipper is one of may favourite designs. It's meant to represent a major evolutionary step from the mid to late 22nd century. The Independence-class is from the late 22nd century period. The Vanguard-class was meant to be the major design before the familiar Constitution-class ships. It is from the eraly 23rd century era and represents ships like the Valiant referenced in "A Taste Of Armageddon." It is largely inspired by a Matt Jefferies' sketch as he worked his way toward the final Enterprise design. A size comparison. And so continuing this is the next concept being worked on. This is based on the idea of an early 22nd century design prior to the Earth/Romulan War.
I really like the Hercules class! It still looks like it fits in the Trek universe without looking like a devolved Enterprise/Constitution ship.
That's hard to do. The Connie elements had to have evolved from something somewhat similar, but you don't want it to look too much the same either. The further back you go it gets somewhat easier.
I like your Independence class, especially the large round engines in the back. Interesting start on your next concept. Inspired a bit by Masao's Wasp?
Preliminary view with the main elements in place. Some thoughts. After Cochrane's successful flight the key to FTL interstellar travel was finally known. Unlike the scenario shown in FC Cochrane was more likely part of a research and development program working to making a workable FTL system. There were probably a number of such R&D programs going on at the same time yet Cochrane's was the first to succeed. What we don't know is if Cochrane was the lead scientist, engineer, pilot or whatever. All we know is that he's recognized as the developer of the space warp. We also don't really know the extent of his success. Did the first space warp ship go only marginally faster than light or significantly faster? He's recognized as Cochrane of Alpha Centauri--so does that mean he was the first to reach Alpha Centauri or he settled there wherein his name became prominant enough for his name to be historically linked with the place? We can speculate after the first successful space warp others would be keen on developing the science and technology further. The first FTL craft were likely then current (and somewhat modified) spacecraft with the new drive fitted. But soon enough there would be efforts to design ships specifically with the new drive in place. Like the early days of aviation there could well have been a lot of concepts and avenues explored to push the science further and find the optimum system. This is where the first ringships could have been developed as the massive space warp coils made it easier to establish a significant and more stable space warp field. But improvements and refinements to the science and engineering could have led to multiple nacelle arrangements rather than massive coil rings. Ultimately the advancements would lead to the now familiar twin nacelle and even single nacelle configurations of the 23rd century. My above design is meant as one of the designs that evolved from the previous ringship designs. I started with MJ's concept sketches (that resulted in what's known as the Deadalus-class in contemporary Trek) that eventually led to his final design for the TOS Enterprise. I felt that the Daedalus concept looks awkward as conceived and executed, but I felt there was still a possiblility in MJ's basic idea. At some point I might come up with something with a spherical main hull and twin nacelles evolving from the tri-nacelle configuration. Or maybe the next evolution is a saucer with twin nacelles. My initial idea was t have a quad-nacelle arrangement, but I found that to look more cumbersome and not as visually interesting as a tri-nacelle configuration.
I could rationale this by saying the initial design concept was initially a ringship configuration with a larger main section added to the forward hull. But development was advancing rapidly and the design went through changes that went from ring to quad than finally the tri-nacelle configuration. Ships were getting ever faster (relatively speaking) with ever more stable and warp dynamic systems, but they weren't really suited to genuinely extended range forays. FTL communication systems were still struggling in development. Also the support systems then existent could only support relatively small crew complements for extended periods. Then contemporary computer and sensor systems were also taxed when it came to navigating while in warp. In the early days warp flight was basically plotting your flight to a set point, warping to that point and out-warping, then replot the next leg of the flight and so on. Ships were getting larger and ever more sophisticated until the advent of the Earth/Romulan War. Then faced with the necessity of producing large numbers of combat oriented spacecraft the designs were stripped down to essentials to facilitate large scale production.
Interesting work. Good stuff. For pre-TOS, I still love Rick Sternbach's art in the Spaceflight Chronology.
I've realized that the mistake I made with this design was using a perfect sphere as the main hull. What I should have done was fatten the sphere just a bit to have a slightly ovoid shaped main hull. It would have been a subtle difference, but I think it would have partially helped overcome the problem MJ had with a spherical hull. A spherical hull tends to make a design look less "fast" and sleek and seem somewhat stodgy. I'm not going to change it now because I've come too far for that, but assuming I come up with the next evolutionary step in design then I will fix that issue. Here all the major elements are done and I next have to think about the detailing and markings. I haven't decided on a name yet, but I'm leaning on calling it the Constellation as a nod to a future ship that will also bear the name. Perhaps this Constellation distinguished itself sufficiently that the name was passed down to future vessels including NCC-1017. It's interesting to contemplate the notion of ENT's creators having had the balls for their hero ship to have been something more along these lines. It could have coloured much of how the rest of the show looked in general. Imagine... - No saucer - No transporter - No phase pistols - No Warp 5 (unless we assume an older Warp formula) - No catsuits - No Suliban - No temporal guys - No Klingons - No Ferengo or Borg ...to name a few things.
Yeah, that deflector dish looks a bit cartoony. Sorry, but there's just not a better word that comes to my mind to explain it.
I kept thinking it looked like some robot's noxe. Part of its problem is the central spire is too thick and not the right shape. I'm presently tweaking the design and shortening the housing about a quarter or a third. Initially I thought of using something of a radar dome shape as Matt Jefferies originally planned, but I felt that on this design it would look even more like a kind of nose. The housing also needs a bit more detail as does the rest of the ship, of course, It's a question of fashioning the right looking detail. In some respects I'm following a road not taken by Matt Jefferies as he worked toward the final Enterprise design. And while this doesn't work for a contemporary design to the Constitution-class it does work as something pre TOS by about a century or so.
Try making the housing have an oval cross-section, then a smaller (round) dish inset. Making it a bit shorter might help as well. There are a lot of circles in the cross-sections of all the different components, need to break that monotony a bit perhaps. You could also try the dish on the lower part of hull, inset kind of like on the Excelsior, instead of protruding.
This ship isn't all that big. Pushing the deflector into the main hull means sacrificing interior space. Also I sketched out that idea while I was thinking this up and it didn't click for me. Part of the challenge of using a spherical hull is adding sufficient detail to make that shape somewhat more interesting. I also have to have a hangar bay primarily because in this era there are no transporters. I thought of putting the hangar on the aft side of the sphere, but it would have to be on the upper section to avoid the lower warp nacelle support pylon. And on the upper section the craft would exit right between the upper warp nacelles--also not an ioptimum solution. No matter what I do this design will end up looking somewhat more rudimentary than the TOS Enterprise design and that is basically how it should be.
MJ is pretty much on record actually saying that a spherical hull was akin to a speed bump in terms of defeating a sense of sleekness and speed to a design. When I decided to start with a spherical hull to see what I could do with it I tried to add components that could somehow overcome the sphere's overwhelming effect visually. Part of that was to offset the sphere with enough mass and interesting shapes as a visual counterbalance. One immediate solution was to make the connecting neck or dorsal from the sphere to the aft section thicker and more robust instead of opting for the scrawny neck seen on the Daedalus style design. That small change alone makes the sphere less heavy looking on the front end. I also found it challenging to design an aft hull along the lines MJ tried with only two nacelles. But there also was a sketch of MJ's that gave me the idea to try a tri-nacelle arrangement fixed at every 120 degrees. From that I felt I was finally overcoming the prominence of the sphere at the forward end. I rationalize the tri-nacelle arrangement as the next evolutionary step from the ring arrangement as seen on the ringship Enterprise design. But from what I have now one might be able to envision how successive designs might evolve toward the familiar twin nacelle designs of the mid 23rd century. Eventually the third nacelle--when no longer needed--evolves into the more familiar secondary hull. The sphere becomes flatter and then changed to a saucer with the impulse engines getting ever smaller until they can be housed in the aft end of the saucer. Eventually you get to my Vanguard-class design and then the Constitution-class. One design variant I'd like to come up with would be one that you could see inspiring Romulan ship design as seen in "Balance Of Terror." Perhaps Earth had something that impressed the Romulans sufficiently that they incorporated some of the ideas into their own designs. Although later we saw the Romulans using Klingon D7's there's no reason to think the Romulans were no longer using their own designs. It makes more sense that there were other Romulan designs flying in the TOS that didn't look like Klingon D7's or Romulan BoP's.