We have never seen any Trek ships with such antennas on them—certainly not in TOS including the Botany Bay which Jefferies designed as a late 20th century vessel.
The nacelles are oriented as they are for a few reasons:
- the upper nacelles evoke the idea that eventually (most) ships will require only two nacelles set in a somewhat raised configuration. The lower nacelle evokes the eventual familiar secondary hull.
- having the nacelles oriented in a Y pattern strengthens the notion of the vessel in flight while the lower nacelle cements the idea this vehicle is never meant to land. Having the nacelles in an upside down Y pattern looks more aircraft like and lessens the idea of a space ship in flight—it also doesn’t look as cool.
It’s meant to be a deep space exploratory ship.
I would use a sphere only if it works design wise. There is nothing to say any pre TOS ships absolutely have to have a spherical hull. It was, after all, an idea Matt Jefferies abandoned. And to be fair very few designs with a spherical hull have actually looked good. The later retconned Deadalus-class, closely mimicking one of Jefferies’ early sketches, has never looked good—it looks awkward and ungainly and has no visual grace whatsoever. There have been occasional fan versions that have looked much better, but a sphere tends to visually undermine a design’s sense of forward motion.
My philosophy for a fictional ship design is that no matter what I’m doing it should have its own integrity and possess a measure of coolness and something of a heroic sense to it, even for enemy ships, ancient ships or lowly shuttlecraft. In hand with this philosophy, in this project, is visualizing something that would look like it belonged if we had seen it in TOS. And, as I have stated once or twice upthread, the post TOS universe does not exist for this project. The goal is to design things as if it were still the mid to late 1960s.
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