TCM April 2010

TCM: Why did you choose the Enterprise for this series?

FF: The Enterprise is one of the most important pieces of Star Trek. Approaching an entirely new era, one that was designed to recall the glory days of the franchise, couldn’t be done without that ship.

TCM: Can you tell us a bit about the ship? (design, registry etc) FF: Our Enterprise is a much smaller ship than its predecessors, and is a reflection of its time. Whereas past Enterprises were flagships, this one is a heavy cruiser, designed to patrol the border. The legacy of its name has been mostly forgotten, but Chase is out to change that.

We never reached a final design on the ship, although we were headed in that direction. After meeting with Mike Okuda to talk about how to go about designing a new Enterprise, he suggested we change one of the three key pieces: the saucer, the nacelles, or the engineering section. We decided to alter the saucer, losing the graceful curves in favour of harder lines.

There are a few variations of this design we liked, all available on the Final Frontier site, but we never settled on one.

The registry was never finalized. We knew that we didn’t want to just add another letter to it, but hadn’t decided if it should be NCC-1701. Most likely it would have had a completely new registry in order to illustrate how much things had changed. We were so focused on the nuts and bolts of getting this thing produced that details like this were put off until later.