Early Look At Star Trek Online’s USS Enterprise F Saucer Separation & Auxiliary Craft

Earlier this year Star Trek Online hosted a contest for artists to design the next USS Enterprise for use in the game. They are now working on creating the in game model for the winning design and some new work in progress images have been released revealing the saucer separation and the auxiliary craft. Check those out below.

 

Enterprise F saucer separation and ‘auxiliary craft’

If you missed it in July, here was the first official image for the USS Enterprise-F for Star Trek Online.


The Enterprise F (click to enlarge)

Here are now some (work in progress) images of the USS Enterprise F saucer separation and auxiliary craft released by Star Trek Online lead ship designer Adam Williams (via Twitter).


Enterprise F star drive section


Saucer



Auxiliary craft docked


Auxiliary craft in flight

He has also released an animation of the auxiliary craft.

Free to play coming soon

And remember that Star Trek Online transitions to "free to play" on January 17th. More information at startrekonline.com/f2p.

 

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That looks pretty sweet.

I think the auxiliary craft is cooler than the Ent-E yacht.

Why does this look like a garden shovel?

@ 3 Phil: I believe the first picture (if that’s the one you’re referring to) is actually the Enterprise F drive section without the saucer attached.

Don’t like the triangular look of the saucer section. Needs to be round as Star Trek was before.

Looks too much like a scout vessel in my honest opinion.

This is honestly better than that Fanmade MONSTROSIty that won Atari’s Star Trek Online contest….

This one looks like a garden shovel with warp nacells (yawn). I also agree with #5 …. the saucer should have stayed rounded…

Um… guys… the first image is not the full ship, just the stardrive section.

This is how the ship looks when assembled
http://www.startrekonline.com/dyncontent/startrek/uploads/StarTrek_EnterpriseF_screen_main.jpg

How I miss Andrew Probert’s designs…

8, agreed. Every fan design basically just looks like a mashup of other starships to me (in this case, the Ent-E and Voyager).

People complain about the Ent-D, but it was at least truly unique and original– and in fact looks like an elegant work of ART compared to the one above:
http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20061013021009/memoryalpha/en/images/4/4b/USS_Enterprise-D%2C_These_Are_the_Voyages.jpg

@7. Okay, it looks like a bigger garden shovel now…..

Glad too see these types of articles back on TrekMovie.

I get that basic concepts of a transport will remain the same. A plane will have a cabin, wings, and engines. A warship from 100 years ago bears a resembalence to what is in the modern navy. That being said, nothing remains constant in development and design – the aircraft carrier doomed the battleship, and the Wright flyer was nothing more then proof of concept compared to a 747. This is why Trek has gone stagnent, it’s had it’s creativity taken away – Federation craft have to look a certain way, as to Romulan and Klingon ships, and woe to anyone who suggests otherwise. Looking at NCC 1701 to the new F, are you asking me to believe that there has been no breakthrough in materials, mission, society, or technology that suggests that there has been no fundimental advancement in ship design in over 200 years? Or a need to design a new craft?

They should do a new series based on the Enterprise-F or maybe the G?

Worst part is I saw other ships that would have made a much better Enterprise-F

I like the Enterprise-E, I think it is a vast improvement on the D (which I’ve never cared for – sorry #9). The E is, to my eye, a logical culmination of the process of each variant getting more sleek-looking since the original 60’s model. (This doesn’t count the ST2009 model, which is deliberately retro, but is nevertheless sleek, BTW).

That having been said, the correlation of more modern = more sleek is a bit lazy, and it is certainly unrealistic. Pure space vessels do not need to be aerodynamic at all. One of the reasons why the OS version tends to stay with me is not so much its iconic value as the fact that it looks the least aerodynamic of all of the variants. To me the gold standard in spaceship design is the Discovery from 2001: A Space Odyssey because it is truly a space vessel. The OS Enterprise meets, let’s say, a silver standard using those parameters.

Now then, as to the F model, I am sorry, but I have nothing good to say about it. It’s like the E, but not a logical extension, it just looks fatter and has extraneous elements tacked onto it. Also, I agree with other posters, the ‘saucer’ is too spade-like… again with the sleeker-is-more-modern paradigm, where neither aesthetics nor the exigencies of space travel bear on the design.

Back when this design competition was happening, I voted for the one by Chris Madden: http://www.6pix.net/images/87356619254784088725.jpg
And I also found this one intriguing, though not entirely to my taste:
http://www.6pix.net/images/05333130325123426808.jpg
http://www.6pix.net/images/25902539087104131567.jpg

@13. Why? What do these ships bring to the small screen that we haven’t seen on Enterprise, Voyager, DS9, TNG, or TOS? If Star Trek returns to the small screen it’s going to have to explore uncharted territory – maybe do a show where they are actually exploring for a change.

^ don’t know why the links get borked on this site. You can try just copying and pasting the links (and, it seems, hard-refreshing the browser to get around the bad redirect).

I think the saucer separation is cool and all, but wouldn’t Starfleet have realized the practicality of a warp engine on both pieces by now. I mean at least a warp five or six engine should be installed on the saucer piece in case the drive section gets destroyed or better yet, what if the core has to be ejected? It’s cool, din’t get me wrong, but what about practicality?

I like it a lot. And it looks like Ten Forward is more centrally located underneath the main saucer (instead of on the leading edge of the saucer), so it should be easier for crewmembers to grab a pint in between shifts.

Ten Forward on the Enterprise D was actually located on deck 11. Therefore, it should have been called Eleven Forward.

The Prometheus from the “Voyager” episode “Message In A Bottle” was able to seperate into smaller vessels, two of which had warp drive, as the Prometheus as a whole had four nacelles. It was a bummer that we didn’t get to see that ship, or any of its sister ships, in the Dominion War.

Ditto for the Sovereign and Intrepid classes, though we did see one Intrepid, the Bellerophon, in one of the final “Deep Space Nine” episodes.

#17

Yep, new ships are needed.
So… what are you waiting for? Design ’em, Phil.

So… it’s the Sovereign Class mixed with a sperm whale?

I agree with #15
This ship is redundant and not very original.
The Enterprice-E got a wonderful and coherent design.
she is a masterpiece and the one of the Top 3 Starfleet Ships ever imo

What class vessel is this?

I still think that Enterprise-A is the best designed. I looked at this one and I think WTF is this thing.

The ships coming from STO seem to just be “let’s use this part, pare it down, fit it to this part, beef it up, and add this part”.

Enterprise-A and Enterprise-D are the two best ships in the Enterprise line. Nothing else, no B, C, E, or beyond seems to work.

19. Captain Conrad

Having two separate warp cores (one for each section) makes perfect sense. The saucer section core could be typically kept at minimal capacity; that way, in the event disaster strikes, there’s no wait for start-up. Of course, somebody will bitch about it just because “that’s not the way it’s been done before”. After all, people complained that the Enterprise in ST09 had separate cores instead of one single tube. Didn’t Voyager getting its’ core stolen demonstrate that the single core design makes no sense?

UGH! Looks like Voyager on steroids. Can I say I have hated every Enterprise design since the C? What’s with the streamlined areodynamic look? Makes no sense, space travel requires no areodynamics, just ask the Borg. Voyager was tolerable because it wasn’t so flat, and designed as a landing craft that required areodynamics for ascending/descending through atmospheres The D was butt-fugly, probably the worst of the bunch.

RE:21 RED DEAD RYAN
I think the third(top) part of the Prometheus had a single pop-up warp engine. And yes, the Enterprise-F looks like a fat E turkey. Warp powered saucers seems a no-brainer. I miss TV Trek, the 90’s spoiled all us Trek fans. I am glad to have discovered Dr Who in it’s absence. Looking Forward to the Dual Holiday Cheer of Who on X-Mas and Sherlock Holmes on New Years. ;-}

Flat looking ships suck

Wish it didn’t look like it belongs in an online game aimed at space battles.

What was described when TOS hit the airwaves was that space was still largely unexplored, so, like when the Spanish pushed out in their Galleon ships the Federation pushed out in it’s Constitution ships. 200 years after TOS the mission has changed. Federation space, largely explored now, only requires smaller, better armed vessels to keep the peace. The Starbase network, and breakthroughs in transporter technology have made having to board a ship to travel or ship small cargo a thing of the past. Drone probe development allows for fast exploration and reconnisance. Quantum Drive, or Fast Warp has made the old Warp 10 limit a thing of the past, but because of ine intense energy demands of the system the use of this system is limited to about two dozen large “Explorer” class ships, who’s mission of exploration and defense takes them far from Federation quadrants for extended periods of time. These vessels are more like small cities in space, designed to probe the deepest regions of our galaxy, and under specific circumstances, operate as first contact envoys with neighboring galaxies. As such, the design of these ships is unlike anything in the Federation fleet…….

32, not buying the premised that by the later series all we explored and now they just police, as TNG also started with the “to boldly go…” prologue. TNG often explored, too. Space is very large, always room to explore and find new things.

Saying space is basically all explored is just a crutch to revert to Star Wars type shootups on a regular basis and forgo the more intriguing aspects of TOS and TNG.

Or put another way, psuedoscientific gobbledygook is no excuse for boring stories featuring nothing but shooting. Basically STO (and a lot of the later novels) just takes all the progress made up to the TNG era in terms of peace and understanding and improving the lot of beings as a whole and tosses it out the airlock in favor of excuses to break everyone up and start shooting at each other. Even DS9, with the Dominion War, concluded on a note of hope, peace, and further understanding for all the races concerned.

It’s fine for what the game is.

JJprise is bigger and could eat that Christmas ornament for lunch

@33. Well, that’s not quite what I said. The reality of the situation is that space is mostly…space, and very boring. Anything of interest will be going on around inhabited systems with FTL capacity. Like anywhere else, once people put down roots they are going to seek to find the easiest and least expensive way to get stuff done – the wild west didn’t stay wild, and the final frontier will only be final until a new one is discovered. Exploration will continue, but visiting the established races isn’t on the list of things “to do” any more. The crutch isn’t whether or not space is explored, but how. TNG era Trek relied on script gimmicks to do the job (Q, unexplained phenomenom that seem to be everywhere) as opposed to the more correct path, that innovation and advances in technology would allow Trek to do what was not possible during the TOS.

@33. The basis for my outline assumes that the A,B, C, and D quadrant species have, to some extent, learned to get along. Defense is required for regional issues, disaster relief or external threats, but I’m not introducing that by having a wormhole pop up somewhere spewing pissed off aliens. Of course, we could assume that the major species all hate each other with a passion now, and are slaughtering each at every given opportunity. So much for the optomistic future….

FWIW, the starship design feature on the blu-ray version of Star Trek 09 does talk about how the design of the various Enterprises evolved over the years; they talked about how the nacelles in each succeeding model were built further and further down to minimize exposure,

Of course, they didn’t address the issue, first brought up more than 40 years ago, of why you would have the command center of your ship way up there on top and visible for all to see? I guess they were trying to address that issue, though, with the seldom-seen “battle bridge” on the Enterprise-D.

@39. This actually shows off a problem with the ship being able to seperate in any situation other then to be abandoning one section or the other. Everything in each section needs multiple redundancies. Both sections need command, life support, propulsion, weapons, etc… quite wasteful.

Here we go again with people hating on an Enterprise design…seriously guys when will you learn to stop bicthing when the design is already finished. You should have voted for something different if you dont like it. Just for shits and giggles, Im going to get this ship when its available, and pwn everyone who talks unreasonable crap about it…just like I did with the Imperial class. I guarantee, if we ever see an Enterprise G anytime in the future, people will say, “That ship doesnt look right…it has to look like Kirk’s original enterprise or its not the enterprise”, I hate those guys the most

Bitching is what Trekkies do best.

Hey it won, and seems to be heading off into production in gaming land. The only point I was trying to make was that you would not expect the evolution of spacecraft to remain static.

It looks too much like Voyager.

They should do a update version of Enterprise D instead of fusing voyager crap design with the Enterprise E.

Best ships TMP enterprise, Excellsior and Enterprise D, fuse those 3 to make a proper Enterprise.

somebody said the Prometheus has 2 sections with Warp drive…
thats incorrect, all 3 sections of the Prometheus have Warp Nacelles.
the nacelles from the saucer are a bit smaller, one is behind the bridge and the other one is hidden below where the connection point is.

google and you may find it

If it’s not on film, it’s not cannon…

Hee hee hee…. that’s canon, folks

Merry Christmas, everyone!!!

UGLY.
Looks like Voyager. And Voyager sucked.
WHY this squid look???
Total lack of any originality.

BTW, Merry Xmas.

Its ugly, but I’ve stopped playing the game anyways so not really effecting me a whole lot.

@26

Totally agree,
A and D are the best.
They look like flying fortresses.

The Ent-E looks good, too, but too aerodynamic, more like being designed for a space race, not like the biggest and strongest ship of Starfleet.

I also like the Excelsior-Class, but not in its Enterprise-B design.