[martok2112]

Originally Posted by kevin

I get the idea of the ship being the silent additional character............but Star Trek isn't about the ship as such. It's the people ON that ship.

The ship becomes a part of the show in the same way that Galactica does in BSG, or the Falcon does. But it's not the series as a whole. It's important it works as a setting of course.

Exactly. Star Trek/Star Wars/Battlestar Galactica....any sci-fi/space fantasy worth its salt is not about the ships/technology/wow factor stuff...it's definitely about the characters, the people involved. But it is a nice little side effect that the ships eventually get regarded by fans, and even by the writers, as sort of a character unto themselves.

They may be silent characters, but when their guns fire up, or their warp engines/hyperdrives/FTL's kick in, those silent characters speak volumes.

[Captain Tom Coughlin]

Sometimes they are an extension of the human characters. The Falcon is an extension of Solo. A scruffy ship for a scruffy smuggler .

[horatio]

The Falcon andthe Galactica have an existentialistic, survivalist touch which the Enterprise doesn't (and VOY is rightly criticized for feeling like the Enterprise when it should feel like the Galactica). When the ships go down in TSFS and GEN it is not a matter of life and death, the crew survives without the support of their vessel .
Solo is out of business and thus nothing without his ship and in BSG humankind direly needs their one capital ship. If Picard loses a ship he simply gets another one (well, after some ten year or so captain hiatus).

I think that's why the former two are as Tom described more like characters whereas the Enterprise is as Kevin described more like a mere background.

[martok2112]

Good points, Horatio. Indeed, some stuff I'd not exactly considered.

[starbase63]

What bugs me most about the design is that the primary was taken very liberally from the Connie upgrade version from the TOS movies, but the secondary has that flowy "organic" styling that Church seemed so pleased about, to me the two don't mix when put next to each other.

Plus the smaller secondary hull makes the ship look front/top heavy, like the Galaxy class.

And the nacelles on steroids? Bah.

[Quark]

I just have a problem with this ship. Just because it's the current ship doesn't mean that we have to like it. I remember when I first saw the ship, it looked awesome but upon closer inspection, it just was flaw after flaw after flaw. The ship just seems to go against the law of physics. How on Earth could those stubby and flabby pylons support those huge falic bagle dog-looking warp nacelles? I prefer the ship used in Galaxy Quest than this version of the Enterprise.

[omegaman]

Originally Posted by Quark

I just have a problem with this ship. Just because it's the current ship doesn't mean that we have to like it. I remember when I first saw the ship, it looked awesome but upon closer inspection, it just was flaw after flaw after flaw. The ship just seems to go against the law of physics. How on Earth could those stubby and flabby pylons support those huge falic bagle dog-looking warp nacelles? I prefer the ship used in Galaxy Quest than this version of the Enterprise.

No question that they do. One could also say the same for the original Enterprise… and the same applies to the saucer and the sail connecting it to the secondary hull (on the old and the new)… especially if you think in aerodynamic terms which are totally irrelevant in space.

[kevin]

At the end of the day it's called fiction. We know in Trek you have construction materials and methods that are supposed to be very different to ours. They are not building these ships out of materials that we would be limited to in the present day.

If this society can create magic forcefields that prevent them all being squished like bugs when the ship hits Warp Velocities, if they can disassemble a human body at the molecular level move it thousands of kilometers and reassemble it intact and can also warp space itself..................they can probably technologically figure out how to balance a Nacelle on a pylon.

Nothwithstanding if Warp Nacelles operate on the manner in which we saw the D's Warp Nacelle in the 24th Century then they may be fairly hollow and despite their size not necessarily the 'heaviest' part of the ship. That's IF all nacelles are essentially hollow tubes. They of course may not be.

[Quark]

Originally Posted by omegaman

No question that they do. One could also say the same for the original Enterprise… and the same applies to the saucer and the sail connecting it to the secondary hull (on the old and the new)… especially if you think in aerodynamic terms which are totally irrelevant in space.

I would still like to know how the Enterprise was put into space. Was it launched like the Phoenix? Or was it simply beamed there?

[Captain Tom Coughlin]

These are no less spindly