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Star Trek: What's the Story Behind Every Enterprise Design?

The USS Enterprise is Star Trek's most recognizable starship, though its iconic design from Matt Jefferies has informed the designs of future ships.

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Andrew probert redesigned the enterprise for the films and tng, the tng series and films called for short-lived enterprise designs, the fan-designed enterprises from picard and star trek online, redesigning the original enterprise for the modern age.

Over the course of six decades, fans have loved Star Trek for reasons that have ranged from the allegorical stories to the powerful relationships between characters. There are also the starships -- more specifically, every version of the USS Enterprise that's graced the big and small screen through the ages. While they share visual similarities, the design of each version of the ship is a saga in itself. Each designer has to strike a balance between advancing the look of the Enterprise while still remaining evocative of the classic silhouette.

When developing Star Trek: The Original Series , creator Gene Roddenberry nearly blew the budget researching starships. Art director Walter Matt Jefferies designed the iconic original design for the USS Enterprise, tweaking it between the first and second pilot and then once more once The Original Series was greenlit. The combination of the saucer section, secondary hull and dual nacelles was an instantly unforgettable design that stood out from the convex saucers and rockets found in then-contemporaneous sci-fi. Even those who didn't watch the show could instantly recognize the ship . This may be why every USS Enterprise hasn't strayed that far from this original shape. While every iteration of the Star Trek flagship has its merits, there is something special about the original.

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After unprecedented success in syndication, Paramount tapped Roddenberry to develop a sequel series in the 1970s. For Star Trek: Phase II , Jefferies redesigned the Enterprise , but he retired before it was complete. Designer Andrew Probert took over when the sequel series became Star Trek: The Motion Picture . His design changed the color scheme (particularly for the deflector dish) and hewed close to Jefferies' upgrade, complete with wider angular support struts and squared nacelles instead of the rounded ones in The Original Series . He also added a rectangular torpedo launcher at the base of ship's neck near the secondary hull.

While working on the original USS Enterprise refit for The Motion Picture , Probert wanted to really push Jefferies' design further. He gave the ship a more organic, rounded shape rather than stark angles. He also fixed something that bothered him about the nacelles, lowering them below the saucer. He imagined that when the ship accelerated, the placement would cause it to tip forward so that he could "place them closer to the ship’s center of mass," Probert said in a featurette on the complete Star Trek: The Next Generation Blu-ray. He wanted to "unify all of those shapes." When working on the sequel series, he had the image hanging on his wall. Consulting producer David Gerrold saw it, took it to Gene Roddenberry and he approved it as the official USS Enterprise-D .

The USS Enterprise-B didn't appear on the screen until Star Trek: Generations , the first film starring The Next Generation cast. Its design was based on the USS Excelsior , created by Nilo Rodis and Bill George for Star Trek III: The Search for Spock . John Eaves, a designer on The Next Generation , reworked the design by adding size to the vessel , including the portion of the secondary hull the Nexus energy ribbon would destroy, "killing" Captain Kirk. Eaves also added a cap to the Excelsior nacelles and a dorsal fin like on the original Enterprise from the series.

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While designing the ship for The Next Generation , Andrew Probert did some concept work for the ship that preceded it. He correctly assumed that the Enterprise-B would be an Excelsior-class vessel and reverse-engineered the Enterprise-C by combining that design with what it would evolve into with the Galaxy class . When The Next Generation Season 3 called for the ship to appear via time-travel in "Yesterday's Enterprise," designer Rick Sternbach built on Probert's work. Mostly for budget reasons and the shorter production schedule, he sharpened the angles on the Ambassador class vessel. Rick will be the first to admit that the resulting design wasn't as elegant as the original concept," Micheal Okuda told Forgotten Trek, but added the resulting design preserved "Probert's vision" and kept "the cost low enough."

When the Enterprise-D was destroyed in Generations , John Eaves was tasked with designing the next iteration. Eaves started as model-maker for the series, and he recalled the difficulty in shooting the four-foot model of the series' hero ship. When designing the new ship, he maintained Probert's organic shapes, but "thought about [the crew's complaints] while I was trying to think of how to handle the situation," he told StarTrek.com . Thus, the USS Enterprise-E model was more streamlined to give the directors of the next three films multiple angles to shoot the ship. Before the second wave of Star Trek ended, designer and CGI artist Doug Drexler was called upon to create a trio of new Enterprise vessels . He designed the NX-01 for the series named after the vessel.

Drexler incorporated elements reminiscent of the aerospace construction Jefferies studied while researching the original. However, his first design included a secondary hull and a round deflector. "It was close in configuration to the Constitution class, but when you looked at it you knew…it was not as ambitious" as the original, Drexler said in collector's magazine from Eaglemoss. This design was dubbed a "refit," to be introduced in a later season. The secondary hull was removed, creating the NX-01 as it appeared in the show. Drexler was also tasked with creating the Enterprise-J, a vessel from 400 years in the future that appeared for only a few seconds on-screen . Dubbed the Universe class, the ship was massive and meant to "defy the laws of physics," according to Drexler in another issue of the Eaglemoss magazine.

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The Star Trek Online game needed a new Starfleet flagship. Since the game wasn't officially canon, game developers held a contest allowing fans to submit their own designs. The winning vessel was designed by Adam Ilhe, creating the Odyssey class starship. For Star Trek: Picard Season 3, the veteran designers (including Drexler, Okuda and Eaves) all contributed to polishing and updating the vessel for its introduction into canon. However, the vessel was slated for decommissioning on Frontier Day, meaning yet another Enterprise was needed.

During Picard Season 3, much of the action takes place on the USS Titan , rechristened as the Enterprise - G . In the special features of the Picard Blu-ray, showrunner Terry Matalas confirmed the ship came from a design by Bill Krause, a photographer and video producer and starship model builder . Like with the previous vessel, the design team on the show, including Eaves (friends with Krause) tweaked his design into what appeared on-screen. Krause dubbed his ship a Shangri-La Class vessel, but the one that appeared in the show was renamed the Neo-Constitution Class.

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The original USS Enterprise was redesigned for both the feature film reboot series, called "the Kelvin Timeline" after the destruction of that vessel, and Strange New Worlds . For the film, director J.J. Abrams wanted to increase the size of the signature ship while also upgrading the design from the 1960s original. However, as other designers have found out, there's not much to improve upon where Matt Jefferies's work is concerned. Ryan Church still had to create a ship that evoked the original while fitting into a modern, big-budget sci-fi film. The saucer was significantly wider and contains more decks than original.

The biggest change came to the nacelles which were bulked up with a "hot rod" look according to The Art of Star Trek . In the subsequent films in that trilogy, the design was tweaked but only in small ways. In fact, designer Sean Hargreaves slimmed down "her ample nacelles," as Scotty put it, for Star Trek Beyond . This design was carried over to the Kelvin Timeline version of the USS Enterprise-A. When it came time to design the USS Enterprise for Star Trek: Discovery , Eaves, Scott Schneider and William Budge took on the job. At first, according to the Eaglemoss magazine, the Enterprise was going to look more like the USS Discovery than Jefferies's ship, "but this idea was soon abandoned," Eaves said.

The Star Trek veteran worked on sketches starting from the original ship and making that design fit in the Discovery aesthetic . The team figured that elements like the nacelles and outer hull would be refit often, eventually looking like the original . Eaves said the art department designed the ship so that removing hull pieces would eventually make the ship look like The Original Series version at Virtual Trek Con 5 . However, the visual effects team angled the nacelle struts at a sharper angle than the Jefferies' version. For Strange New Worlds , designer Jonathan Lee maintained that design, focusing his changes on the interior of the ship's new sets. He tried to maintain the modern aesthetic while marrying it to the feel of the ship from Star Trek: The Original Series . Each Enterprise is unique, but they all have centeral elments that hearken back to Matt Jefferies's first design.

The Star Trek universe encompasses multiple series, each offering a unique lens through which to experience the wonders and perils of space travel. Join Captain Kirk and his crew on the Original Series' voyages of discovery, encounter the utopian vision of the Federation in The Next Generation, or delve into the darker corners of galactic politics in Deep Space Nine. No matter your preference, there's a Star Trek adventure waiting to ignite your imagination.