I had momentarily forgotten about some of the work I had done before regarding pre TOS ship designs.
Which brings me to this:
And this:
To my eye the lower image (an idea for the
Valiant) is evidently an evolution of the one above (the ringship
E glimpsed in TMP).
The ringship
E looks like a relatively small ship (in terms of habitable areas for the crew). It really does look more like an exprimental testbed for a new technology given how relatively little of the ship is given over to those manning the vessel. This is counter to what we see later where the habitiable areas of the vessel are far greater than the engineering/propulsion components. To that end the ringship E could well have been launched not that long after Cochranes's successful development of the space warp. Ringships that followed would have built on what worked on the ringship prototype.
So my conjectural ringship design really wouldn't be far removed from what could follow the ringship prototype. The warp rings would have been improved and the habitable parts of the ship expanded to allow the ships to have ever extended range.
With that said I imagine there could have been a variety of ringship designs and with few of them (if any) being built in large numbers. Most of them could well have built to fulfill specific purposes. There could have been some common platforms that were modified for specific needs. Perhaps colony ships, transports and survey craft could have done this.
(This leads me to wonder what a colony ship might be like. Is it a one-way transport only or might it make successive runs to brng more colonists and supplies?)
Now when I look at my conjectural design anew I don't see me making drastic changes to it as a predecessor to what came before my
Constellation design with nacelles instead of rings.