Why the distinct shape?

[publiusr]

Enterprise is essentially a smiling swan as I see it. In the Making of Star Trek, the pre-Independance pre-Daedalus sphere-less design was just a cylinder that seemed to have shuttle-bay doors that opened, as they did for heat dissipation. The next drawing showed a slab, not unlike an aerogel slab used to catch comet debris on Stardust or whatever. Those might make for good early spacecraft on their own.

 

[Saquist]

The Enterprise is a distinct saucer and cylinders shape - why?

I used to think the saucer had to do with warp field geometry. That is, in-universe. In the real world, probably just because saucer = spacemen. And that the secondary hull was separate to be detachable, of course, but also due to the space requirements of the deflector array - a part of the ship integral to warp travel, and necessarily just that big in relation to the rest of the ship, for it to reach those speeds. Also, I thought the nacelles were apart (unlike the Saber and Steamrunner Classes) because they were hazardous in some way.

But none of that seems to fit all the different forms of ships we've seen. Alien ships you can discount to a degree because aliens will think of alien ways to do things, but it seems like most of them also don't follow my guesses as the why the Enterprise looks the way it does.

And if it doesn't need to look that way, it's a pretty silly, if intriguing, way to design a ship.

Quite simply the saucer shapes the warp field.
And that shape is important in order to reduce temporal spatial drag at warp.

 

[Caesar753]

I think the best explanation is that Federation technology dictates the shape of the hull, as opposed to technology from other species. If you look at ships from U.S. Navy and NATO allies, they all share similar design features because they use the same technology. Ships from other countries (China, Russia) have obvious design differences because they are using different types of technology. I know this explanation only goes so far, since the Federation is made up of hundreds of different species, but it seems to be the most logical explanation to me.