Original subtitles

[Gates McFadden] Star Trek,

science fiction's most influential franchise,

has been around longer and traveled further than any other.

Let's jump.

[McFadden] And it's all thanks to a seemingly infinite armada of starships.

Nothing is more important than my ship.

[McFadden] From the original Enterprise to its most distant relative,

Star Trek has been designing starships almost as long as NASA.

[man] Liftoff.

[McFadden] What started with plastic models

has evolved into computer-generated wizardry.

And throughout it all, an unmistakable design language

has been written in the stars.

The story of how those designs came to be,

and came to be loved,

literally spans time and space.

Warp drive, Mr. Scott.

[McFadden] So beam aboard and hold on tight

as we boldly explore the starships of Star Trek.

And you can see it all from here in The Center Seat.

All I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.

[McFadden] If you love Star Trek , you love starships.

You know, I love starships. Star Trek loves starships.

[McFadden] The vessel that virtually defined the look of a spaceship

for generations began where Star Trek began:

with Gene Roddenberry.

[Michael Okuda] Roddenberry knew that the ship

was an important character.

It had to be distinctive. It had to be believable.

He knew if you didn't buy the ship, you weren't gonna buy the series.

[McFadden] But the Enterprise was hardly the first starship.

The word "starship" had been around before Star Trek in books.

[McFadden] The first visualizations of spacecraft were mostly saucers

or distinctly tobacco-themed.

Outer Limits, which was a couple years before Star Trek,

and it's a cigar-shaped rocket...

...against a black duvetyn with pinpricks in it for stars.

[McFadden] Rockets for the Rocket Age.

[man] Liftoff.

[McFadden] But with the Space Age now dawning,

Gene wanted something that would take the audience further.

Gene didn't want it to look like those rocket ships that everybody knows about.

He wanted it to be different.

[McFadden] To let our imaginations take flight,

Gene brought in a man who had experience of exactly that.

Roddenberry, he brought on the art director Matt Jefferies

very early on to start conceptualizing the ship.

[Matt Jefferies] Roddenberry, about all he said was several don'ts.

"No flames, no fins, no rockets.

And one do is make it look like it's got power."

And he walked out.

[McFadden] Well, Gene could afford to be a little short with Matt.

He knew he had real-world experience with magnificent flying machines.

[Doug Drexler] Matt Jefferies was a flight engineer on a B-17.

Gene Roddenberry was a pilot on a B-17 in the Pacific.

He worked on a lot of war movies, drew ships,

designed a lot of airplanes for movie productions.

[Okuda] So he was an excellent choice.

He knew aircraft and he kept up with space technology.

[McFadden] Gene and Matt combined their own experience of military aircraft

with ideas emerging from America's new national obsession:

the Space Race.

[Dr. Heinz Hoffmann] When Man steps into his rocket ship

and leaves the Earth behind,

he must be well equipped to survive in the hostile realm of outer space.

[Drexler] One of the things that Matt and Gene looked at,

there was a series of television shows.

Now, here is a model, my design for a four-stage orbital rocket ship.

The top section will consist of ten crew members plus equipment.

And Collier's magazine did a very famous series of articles

about how we're gonna go to the moon.

[McFadden] But Gene wanted something to take the audience

further in their imaginations than science could hope to go in space.

[Andre Bormanis] It needs to look powerful,

it needs to look futuristic,

and it needs to look functional like there is a sense behind this design.

So he went through a painstaking iterative process.

[Dorothy "D.C." Fontana] Old science-fiction magazines

that had spaceships on the cover, different looks, different kinds,

and Roddenberry would look at them and say,

"How about we try this, but do this with it,"

and Matt would come up with something.

It had to be instantly recognizable, which meant I was looking for shape,

but I didn't know what the shape looked like.

[McFadden] So Matt tried new combinations

of familiar shapes.

[Rick Sternbach] You know, shiny saucers with a dome,

he started with those sorts of shapes and textures.

[Okuda] And Roddenberry would say, "I don't like that. This looks goofy.

I like a little bit of this."

[McFadden] The process was hit or miss,

but even Matt Jefferies' rejected designs were ahead of their time.

[Drexler] Matt Jefferies' original shapes,

actually, instead of a saucer, had a sphere out front.

The best shape for a pressure vessel is a sphere.

And Roddenberry looked at that and said, "Oh, yeah, you know, I like this.

I like that. I don't think I like the sphere so much."

That got changed to a saucer,

but the saucer was on the bottom of the engineering hull.

[McFadden] But the breakthrough that made the Enterprise

was anything but technical.

Gene, I think, took and flipped it.

[McFadden] Even upside down or from whatever angle,

Matt's design was majestic.

The ship didn't look like the typical, you know,

silver sweptback-wing kind of spaceships.

The Enterprise was something way different.

-[beeping] -The Enterprise is not a want or a desire.

It is a mechanical device.

No, it's a beautiful lady and we love her.

[McFadden] We do indeed.

Gene finally had what he wanted.

The Enterprise would be a mix of the old and the new.

[Drexler] They came up with this incredibly original design

by combining elements of science-fiction ships

that had become tropes and turn them into something new.

You know, the nacelles and secondary hull

are very much like your standard cigar-shaped rocket.

And then they used a saucer,

a flying saucer like we saw in Forbidden Planet.

[McFadden] But it wasn't just a hodgepodge that happened to look good.

Matt's design work on Star Trek was coming from somebody

who understood aeronautics and space structures,

so he was able to put together something

that was more believable than, say, some other designers.

[McFadden] So after dealing with the outside

of this soon-to-be-iconic starship, Gene turned his attentions to the inside.

Because they didn't have money, they couldn't go out

and buy expensive surplus to make their switches on the consoles

and things like that.

They came up with the idea of taking novelty ice cube trays

with all different shapes and coloring epoxy,

pouring it in the trays and when it's set, popping 'em out,

and now you had all these really unusual-looking colored buttons.

They almost look like candy.

But they would catch the light from overhead and they looked lit up.

[McFadden] Well, when television viewers caught their first glimpse

of the USS Enterprise in 1966, eyes lit up and imaginations sparked.

There was no doubt who was the star of this show.

[John Tenuto] The number one person to get letters

was not Leonard Nimoy or William Shatner,

but the Enterprise received more fan letters

from kids wanting pictures of the Enterprise

than any of the actors.

It changed everything as far as people's expectations

in what spaceships, "starships" look like.

That's...

The Enterprise.

[McFadden] She truly has stood the test of time.

Something they designed in 1964 still stands

as an icon of science-fiction design.

Who doesn't know what the Enterprise is? That famous silhouette.

It could be the size of a dime and you knew what it was.

[McFadden] The starships of Enterprise, Next Generation, Deep Space Nine,

and every starship to take to the heavens since

owes something to the mothership.

Everything, it looks like a family. There's a lineage.

[McFadden] Well, in 1979, the Enterprise went somewhere

no Starfleet ship was ever designed to go,

all the way to Hollywood,

as Star Trek took to the silver screen for the first time.

Steady as she goes.

[McFadden] And for this new era, a new Enterprise.

Production illustrator Andrew Probert was among those charged

with improving on Star Trek' s most emblematic design.

It was my first task on the Enterprise to supply some detailing for the ship.

[McFadden] Collaborating with production designer Richard Taylor,

Andrew's first instinct was to go big for the big screen.

And I told Richard, I said, "Let's go big with this thing."

And Richard said, "No."

[McFadden] Richard Taylor wanted to stick

to Matt Jefferies' original Enterprise concepts

for a Star Trek show that would show the evolution of the Enterprise

but never quite evolved itself.

Phase two...

[Drexler] You could see the original series Enterprise

evolve into the motion picture Enterprise.

[McFadden] The reimagined Enterprise

would receive a new bridge,

observation deck,

and what any taxpayer expects to see in fancy new military hardware.

We need more power.

[McFadden] More firepower.

[Andrew Probert] I was actually able to make the saucer bigger.

Richard said, "Okay, now let's come up with a paneling."

[McFadden] For the big screen,

small detailing would give the ship a texture,

making sure the Enterprise was ready for her close-up.

[Probert] It should look like it's put together with little pieces

just to give it some scale and help define the shape.

And I came up with what they call an Aztec pattern for the saucer,

which is these interlocking pieces that I thought would create

this kind of a tensile strength, keeping this whole thing together.

[McFadden] And propelling this whole thing

was a redesigned powerhouse.

[Probert] Richard Taylor actually wanted to do the engines himself.

He said, "I know you're designing this,

but I wanna do the engines because I have this idea."

[McFadden] Richard's big idea

was to reshape the Enterprise's trademarked nacelles.

[Probert] And so Richard designed those new warp engines,

which I think are amazing.

[McFadden] For the first time,

Enterprise's warp nacelles were about to be warped.

At first, I was a little concerned that we didn't have

those glorious what we call Bussard collectors now.

That energy happening in front of the nacelles, I love that,

but I think that that was a result of Jesco von Puttkamer,

who was a NASA scientist who was connected to Roddenberry

and said it suggested combustion.

[McFadden] So after consulting scientists, the engines were bigger,

but the most appreciated upgrade was more subtle.

[Probert] It also set the visual style for the rest of the ship,

which was this kind of an art deco look.

The motion picture Enterprise is so gorgeous, so elegant,

still reflects that respect for engineering and believability.

It is the most exquisite model of spaceship I've ever seen.

[McFadden] And it was all thanks to designers

eloquently speaking the design language of the original.

The original, Kirk's Enterprise, had these dual red lines

going down the spine of the engineering hull,

and I thought, "Let's build on that

and actually use that to enhance different details."

So we had 'em wrapped around the phaser banks

and we had 'em wrapped around the reaction control system,

with all of these beautiful lines accentuating parts of the ship even more.

[McFadden] The interior of the new Enterprise

opened up a whole world of new possibilities.

The carbon units use this area for recreation.

Then the script called for a rec deck.

[McFadden] Floor-to-ceiling windows

that would offer a never-before-seen starfield.

The production designer at Paramount wanted there to be

this kind of a grandiose vision out the back of the ship,

and he says, "I want it in the rim of the saucer."

[McFadden] But Andrew wasn't letting grand designs proceed

without acknowledging certain engineering realities.

And I said, "If you put the rec deck there,

people are gonna get really tan because that's where the impulse engine is."

[McFadden] To avoid the new Enterprise becoming a warp speed-capable sunbed,

the design was changed.

Scotty would have been proud.

I'm responsible for the safety of this ship.

[McFadden] Speaking of health and safety...

[Drexler] If you look at the engine room,

they had people in anti-radiation suits near the warp core.

That's a forced perspective and they put children in uniforms

down towards the end of it so that it looked like it was a long distance.

[McFadden] The Star Trek motion pictures not only gave us a deeper look

into previously unseen corners of the Enterprise, such as...

The Enterprise has a docking port at the back of the bridge

so that people can directly access that,

and that's what, of course, Spock used when he came aboard the Enterprise.

[McFadden] They also ushered in a plethora of new starships.

[McFadden] The Star Trek films filled our screens

with a range of new 23rd-century starships,

expanding Starfleet in ways we had never seen before.

The Reliant NCC-1864.

[McFadden] The unassuming Reliant

was strangely familiar

and yet radically different.

[Tenuto] We really had never seen a starship

that wasn't the configuration of a Constitution-class starship before.

[Okuda] Coming up with a new Star Trek starship

is always a challenge.

It needs to fit into something that feels

like it's part of the family of Enterprise,

but it also needs to have a distinct identity.

It retains the idea of the Enterprise, the two warp nacelles.

[McFadden] But this humble ship

was about to turn the world of Star Trek vessels on its head.

What's neat about it is it's actually upside down in the movie,

based on its original design.

It was supposed to be where the nacelles were above it.

[McFadden] Which was all every Trekker had ever known about a starship.

Until that is, as you might remember,

producer Robert Sallin had his way with it.

Yeah, I just flipped the Enterprise upside down.

And so instead of having the nacelles up here,

nacelles are down here.

[McFadden] Which wasn't just a flippant decision, so to speak.

We had a good guy and a bad guy.

I said, "I want it to be an obvious difference."

[McFadden] With the unprecedented success of the motion pictures,

it seemed the bigger the movies got, the bigger the starships became.

Would you look at that.

[McFadden] And none was bigger than...

The Excelsior.

In the third movie, The Search for Spock , we introduced this ship, the Excelsior.

The Excelsior, which is supposed to be the flagship of the Federation.

My God, that's a big ship.

Which is a big monster of a ship.

[McFadden] The final design of this monster

was literally put in the hands of director Leonard Nimoy.

The Excelsior, there was versions of it, and we were making changes on the model.

Leonard, he would say, "Let's try this, this, and this on this."

They'd take it away, break it apart, bring it back in,

make another few changes,

and finally we had an absolute final model.

[McFadden] The Excelsior needed serious power under the hood,

which was easily achieved in the script

by adding a single word to "warp drive."

She's supposed to have transwarp drive.

Aye.

And if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a wagon.

Prepare for warp speed, standby transwarp drive.

[McFadden] Scotty was right to be skeptical.

I guess it means faster than warp drive. [laughs]

What can be faster than warp drive?

[McFadden] We wouldn't learn about the details of transwarp power until later,

but we did learn that not all Starfleet vessels are built for speed.

Federation science vessel Grissom arriving.

The Oberth class is a fun little ship.

[Drexler] You had the saucer and you had the nacelles

and you had that unusual secondary hull

that was like a boat hull and it was dramatically different,

but you still went along with it.

[McFadden] Everyone barring the Klingons,

who sadly took exception to the Oberth class.

[speaking Klingon]

[McFadden] Of course, when it comes to starships exploding,

there's one in particular

that even Gene Roddenberry didn't approve of.

Computer. Destruct sequence one.

[McFadden] In the film The Search for Spock,

Kirk destroys the Enterprise to save his crew.

And if you think that was tough for Kirk,

spare a thought for every hardcore Trekkie out there.

When I saw the Enterprise destroyed in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock,

that was worse than seeing Spock die.

That was like a gut punch. I mean, I felt that physically.

I know that Harve Bennett wanted there to be spectacle and action in the picture,

but the part that hurt the most was the destruction of the Enterprise.

And I never really recovered from seeing the Enterprise destroyed

because to me the Enterprise is Star Trek.

What have I done?

[McFadden] No, that's not the question.

What do you think of the Enterprise-D?

[McFadden] That's the one.

With the return of Star Trek to television in 1987,

the Enterprise was once again reborn for a new age and a new audience.

The first live-action TV series since the original,

Next Generation was set much later

and introduced us to Picard's Enterprise-D.

My Enterprise is far superior.

[McFadden] The Enterprise almost didn't make it to The Next Generation

for the unlikeliest of reasons.

[David Gerrold] One day, Gene said,

"What if we don't have a starship but just use long-distance transporters?"

I said, "Oh, hell no. The star of the show is the Enterprise.

You gotta have that starship."

I was absolutely adamant, so Gene dropped the idea.

[McFadden] Nope, the Enterprise wasn't going anywhere except out there.

Engage.

[McFadden] This new Enterprise presented its own unique design challenges.

How do you redesign the Enterprise for a new TV series for Next Generation ?

How do you do that?

[McFadden] The Next Generation 's starships were conceived

more than 20 years after the original series Enterprise.

But in the Star Trek timeline, they arrived almost a century later,

which created a problem for designers.

[Mark A. Altman] Because the Enterprise, again,

is so recognizable and so beloved,

you know, what kind of changes are you gonna make?

[McFadden] Before he was even hired on The Next Generation,

senior illustrator Andrew Probert was already working on that problem.

[Gerrold] Andy came to me and said, "I've done some sketches

on what the Enterprise could look like in Next Gen,

but I'm afraid Gene won't like 'em."

I grabbed him and I dragged Andy and the sketches into Gene's office.

"Here's your new Enterprise."

Gene looks at it and says, "Oh, that's good."

Well, it's a new ship.

[McFadden] For The Next Generation...

But she's got the right name.

[McFadden] ...it wouldn't just be a new look,

but also a new form for Enterprise.

I made it organic because I feel that an organic shape

is structurally more sound than geometrics that are stuck together.

In my head, it's made up of plastics and ceramics.

It's not steel, you know.

And who knows? In the future, they're gonna have other materials.

And it's not welded together, it's sonic-blended. It's not welded.

[McFadden] The result was a sleeker-looking vessel

to be known as Enterprise-D.

And something else that I did was I took the engines that were high

on the original Enterprise and I dropped them down

to the center of mass because it would have

a better propulsion balance than being at the top.

From what I've seen, you've got a fine ship. A real beauty here.

[McFadden] Andrew was letting his imagination run free,

but what he was dreaming up didn't come for free,

and Gene didn't want to pay.

I designed the ship for a crew between 3,600 and 4,600 people.

And I told that to Gene and he said, "No, we don't have enough money

to afford the extras that would actually reflect that number of crew,

so let's say that the crew has 1,100 people on it."

[McFadden] Despite budget constraints,

Andrew did have one very enterprising idea for his Enterprise.

We'll show 'em what this baby can do, sir.

The ship has a battle section that separates out of the hull.

[McFadden] What if the Enterprise could make itself a smaller target

by dividing itself into two?

But even this radical idea wasn't exactly new.

That's in the very first proposal for Star Trek dated 1964,

is that the saucer could separate.

The reason they never did it in the original is because of cost.

[McFadden] This time, budget was not the issue.

Six-five-four-three.

[Probert] This battle section as part of the saucer,

I even had a drawing showing the engineering hull

going off to protect the saucer.

Separation successful, sir.

[McFadden] When it came to breaking up the Enterprise,

producers had separation anxiety.

And they said, "No, the engineering hull is the battle section.

The saucer separates to protect the crew."

[McFadden] Which sounded reasonable,

but Andrew had a much more radical idea.

I said, "Additionally, what you could do is just cloak the saucer

so it could go invisible."

And they said, "No, we can't do that."

[McFadden] Well, if the Enterprise couldn't be invisible,

that just meant more opportunities to admire its features,

which included a new way to shoot the enemy.

Fire all weapons.

When I did the phasers for The Next Generation ship,

I created that whole phaser strip.

They could actually follow what they were shooting at.

It is a most lethal weapon.

[McFadden] There was the art of war,

then there was the art on the wall.

[Probert] The set decorator wanted to flesh out Picard's office.

So we thought, "Well, let's have a painting of the ship..."

-[bell dings] - "...like all captains usually do."

So Rick and I came up with this. I did the ship and he did the background.

[McFadden] Speaking of home decorating,

there was the small matter of the new bridge.

Gene wanted a full overhaul, telling designers...

[Okuda] "I want this to be simple and elegant and minimalistic

to show how advanced this is, to show how far technology has come

since the days of Captain Kirk."

[McFadden] And so cool mid-century minimalism

became a little more touchy feely.

This was the handiwork of scenic art supervisor Michael Okuda.

[Okuda] I ended up with a plexiglass service,

behind which I had a photographic transparency,

and behind that I had lighting gels,

which is certainly a lot cheaper than drilling holes

and putting toggle switches and meters and blinky lights.

[McFadden] This simple innovation was so well-regarded

that panels became known as Okudagrams, after their creator.

[Okuda] That term, Okudagrams, was invented

first season of Star Trek: Next Generation

by our set decorator John Dwyer,

who had been a set decorator on the original series.

So for him to come up with that name,

at first I was kind of embarrassed, but then I realized I should be honored.

[McFadden] The bridge of this Enterprise was so new,

even Kirk might have struggled with the user interface.

We put five workstations back behind the command chair,

instead of all around, and those five could address

everything that needed to be addressed on the ship.

So technologically, we see everything that surrounded Kirk originally

is now consolidated down into those five stations.

I think the Enterprise-D bridge is as classic

as the original series bridge is.

[McFadden] With redesigned workstations,

Andrew's bridge still retained a touch of business class for the captain.

What have they done to my ship now?

[Probert] Picard's command chair, originally I designed it

so that it had little screens that would pop up out of the armrests,

so all he had to do was tap them and then these things would pop up.

I remember Kirk walking around in the original series with a cup of coffee.

Forward readings, Mr. Spock?

[McFadden] So cup holders for the center seat?

So therefore I put two food replicators...

-[bell dings] - ...on the bridge...

-[bell dings] -...which they never used.

[McFadden] Oh, and just some housekeeping before we move on.

[Probert] There is a bathroom on the bridge.

If you look at the bridge from the viewscreen,

-the head is over on this side... -[bell dings]

...opposite the door that goes back into the conference lounge.

[toilet flushes]

[McFadden] Yup, Picard's Enterprise seemed to have it all.

And just in case we forgot how starships used to roll,

The Next Generation also introduced us to yet another Enterprise.

The Enterprise-C that we see in "Yesterday's Enterprise,"

it has been pulled from a different time,

but it is not a different stylistic Starfleet ship.

Andy Probert had done some early sketches

of what the C could look like.

We added new graphics to the overhead panels.

The Enterprise-C was certainly a new step

in starship evolution.

The Enterprise-C really has a way of bridging the gap

design-wise between the Enterprise-B, which we see in Star Trek: Generations,

and then of course with the Enterprise-D.

[McFadden] Which was Picard's ship.

And if all these designations are forcing you to relearn your ABCs,

relax, you're in good company.

[Scott] One-seven-O-one.

No bloody A, B, C, or D.

[McFadden] A, B, C, or D,

the Enterprise has remained unmistakable.

[Altman] Star Trek had a very good batting average

of making the ships feel germane

to the universe and the design consistency.

[McFadden] It may surprise you to learn that not all starships make it to space.

Please sit down.

[McFadden] Some just take up space in the background...

-[bell dings] - ...like this one,

the Stargazer, whose travels we only see through the memories of Captain Picard.

In the ready room, we built a model of Captain Picard's previous command.

[McFadden] But even a fragment of the past

needs to embody the Star Trek design tradition.

[Probert] So we put together a model of what we thought this

deep space science vessel might look like.

It's the Stargazer.

[McFadden] In a world before CGI,

these starships were still handcrafted.

[Altman] Literally, people taking model kits

and throwing them together and creating new ships.

I would give almost anything to command the Stargazer again.

[McFadden] Which gave designers like Rick a chance to experiment.

There were only two plastic kits out there.

One was the original series Enterprise, which was deemed too old in design.

So I took two copies of the refit kit, four nacelles,

you know, added some auto parts to it, and our set decorator put it on the set.

[McFadden] Just as the Stargazer model sits inside the Enterprise,

all Starfleet starships stand in the shadow of the Enterprise,

the mother of all motherships.

As Star Trek and the Enterprise continued to evolve,

so too did the storylines.

During one of Starfleet's war-torn chapters,

Federation ships came under unprecedented attack by the Borg.

Resistance is futile.

[McFadden] Fortunately, one Star Trek writer,

initially for the series Deep Space Nine,

came up with something new to bolster Starfleet's defenses.

We can and will defend ourselves.

The Defiant.

Tough little ship.

[McFadden] It could put the Borg and anyone else in their place.

[Ronald D. Moore] I decided that it was a prototype warship

that the Federation abandoned 'cause they don't really build warships.

You know, it's not really what they're about, but they had built this one.

It's overgunned and overpowered for a ship its size.

[Moore] And it was in danger of pulling itself apart.

And I got to name it.

So I named it after the starship from "The Tholian Web."

The Defiant.

She may have flaws, but she has teeth.

To have a ship that was a Borg-buster was exciting.

[McFadden] Living up to its name,

the Defiant defied Starfleet design conventions.

It didn't have the traditional configuration of a Federation starship.

[McFadden] Maybe because this starship was based on a Marquis fighter,

originally designed for DS9 by Jim Martin.

You couldn't find an airlock. You couldn't find a phaser strip.

You couldn't find anything recognizable.

It was up to us to turn it into a Federation starship.

[McFadden] Doug and his colleagues

gave the Defiant the unmistakable stamp of the Federation.

[Drexler] We would do that by putting the name on it in a distinctive way,

that circular manner that it is on the saucer,

to have the red stripes with the Starfleet arrowheads on it.

[McFadden] But the new shape had some defensive design elements

not normally seen on Federation vessels.

The fact that the nacelles are not mounted on pylons,

you wanna shield those things so they aren't within enclosures.

A more militaristic vessel than the Enterprise in the original series

or Next Gen or Voyager.

[McFadden] The military-industrial complex

had finally caught up with Starfleet hardware.

Likewise, Starfleet hardware had to catch up

with Star Trek 's increasingly war-torn storylines.

We have engaged the Borg.

[McFadden] For the Battle of Wolf 359,

it was all hands on deck to build enough starship models

for one of the franchise's biggest conflicts.

And you start to get to these episodes with these massive space battles.

The fight does not go well, Enterprise.

We're attempting to withdraw and regroup.

[McFadden] In an age before CGI,

each starship required a physical model to be built and filmed.

[Altman] They're still shooting miniatures, so they are literally going,

"Let's find every spaceship we've ever built

that we can throw into this shot."

Fire.

[screaming]

[McFadden] By the time of Voyager , calm had been restored.

And after all that chaos, it was a case of "I want my mothership."

It's the Voyager.

[McFadden] Believe it or not,

this imperious Intrepid-class vessel

began life like so many good ideas:

as a doodle.

[Sternbach] I started just doodling and doodling and doodling,

and I eventually started evolving the shape

of what we were calling the prototype.

[Bormanis] We had to come up with a distinct look for Voyager,

and Rick Sternbach was probably most responsible

for changing the configuration of Voyager from what we were familiar with.

He really came up with the distinctive look.

Voyager really could be thought of as the Galaxy class' younger sibling.

[McFadden] Star Trek is often its own inspiration.

What I did on the runabout,

I was actually borrowing bits and pieces with the pylons and the nacelles.

[McFadden] But Voyager borrowed a little from something a long way from deep space.

In fact, from deep water.

I made the nacelles nice and long,

almost like it was one of those ice boats that you see on a lake.

Sleek, fast.

[McFadden] But Voyager's final shape would have something to do

with a design built not for speed but for comfort.

Jeri Taylor pulls me aside and says, "Can you make it a little curvier?

Kind of like a Lexus."

[horn honks]

[Bormanis] Jeri Taylor wanted to work some of that sensibility

into the design of the Voyager

in order to make it look a little more contemporary

and a little bit ahead of its time.

Welcome aboard.

[McFadden] But producers wanted Voyager

to do something no starship or Lexus had ever done before.

One of the initial notes was that something on the ship had to articulate.

[McFadden] And this was not about warping the design.

It was about warp speed.

[Paris] If we don't get more power to the warp drive,

we're all gonna have to get out and push.

[Bormanis] Each nacelle generates a warp field that bends space and time

and creates this warp bubble.

You know, the idea behind the pivoting nacelles

was that the strength of the field is what determines how fast you go.

And maybe there are some ways of changing the distance between the nacelles

that will make it easier to achieve a higher speed.

You're cleared for launch.

Aye, Captain. See you at warp ten.

[McFadden] Unlike this transwarp-enabled shuttle,

Voyager couldn't quite reach warp ten.

But it was the fastest starship in the fleet.

Besides, in space you can go too fast.

Traveling at infinite velocity accelerated

the natural human evolutionary process by millions of years.

[McFadden] That's right, there was something very fishy

about Tom Paris dabbling with transwarp drives.

[Chakotay] There are traces of human DNA.

But I have to admit, I'm not sure which one is the Captain.

[McFadden] Not only could it go faster,

Voyager could also do something

no previous Starfleet vessel ever really needed to.

We could land the ship.

Are you sure that's necessary?

[McFadden] For the longest time, it wasn't.

Thanks to this contraption.

Energize.

[McFadden] Originally conceived to save money

by enabling quick transitions.

The ship won't land, but we'll transport several people down.

Well, that's a little difficult for you to understand.

[McFadden] The beloved transporter was finally made redundant on Voyager.

[Sternbach] Landing on a planetary surface with Voyager

was something that came in with some of the writers' notes.

[Bormanis] They didn't necessarily intend for it to land on a regular basis,

but they wanted to give the captain that option if it were necessary.

It was something that was rarely done

and something that was only done in kind of extreme situations.

Prepare the ship for landing.

Captain, I think I should tell you,

I've never actually landed a starship before.

That's all right, Lieutenant. Neither have I.

Now, we weren't gonna see it for a while, but I had to make sure

that the landing gear hatches were at least, you know, in the proper place.

We're down.

Not bad for a beginner.

[McFadden] As Star Trek has evolved with each new chapter,

its writers have set out to break the rules.

[computer] USS Prometheus.

Experimental prototype designed for deep space tactical assignments.

[McFadden] And in the case of the USS Prometheus,

to break the mold.

[Sternbach] The USS Prometheus as a super-advanced Starfleet ship,

very secret, stolen by the Romulans. [chuckles]

Engage the multivector assault mode.

[Sternbach] Some of the writer notes

talked about the ship breaking into five parts.

[computer] Autoseparation in ten seconds.

"Oh, you mean like Transformers?" [laughs]

Transform and combine!

And they knocked it back to three parts.

[McFadden] Because breaking the mold doesn't mean you can ignore all the rules.

A ship in three parts still has to conceivably hold together.

[Sternbach] Quite a fun task to try to match up the hull sections

with, you know, turbolift connectors and utilities connectors

and, you know, matter-antimatter conduits and all that kind of thing.

But it worked.

[McFadden] Starfleet ships may have

their longstanding features to accommodate,

but there's a whole other category of starships.

The alien ship is not pursuing.

[McFadden] For these ships,

Star Trek designers threw out the rulebook

because these ships belong to the ones who don't play by the rules.

Hailing frequency's open, sir.

[McFadden] If Star Trek would have us believe anything,

it's that we are not the only ones out there.

[Tim Russ] If you are established in the Star Trek world,

you have spacefaring civilizations.

They've traveled from one star system to another.

Resistance is futile.

[McFadden] And those many alien species we've met over the decades

have their own take on what makes a good starship.

That fine vessel was Ferengi!

Every culture that has come up with a spaceship

has a slightly different look.

[McFadden] And as impressive and advanced as these designs may appear...

[Sternbach] Klingon looks different.

Romulan looks different. Cardassian looks different.

[McFadden] At the end of the day,

their starships were designed by plain old humans.

How boring.

[McFadden] Well, not boring humans, brilliantly inventive ones.

Doing alien versions of things required me to kind of think differently.

We don't want everything to look like Starfleet.

Cardassian warships. Galor class, type three.

Cardassians are a bit more brutal.

Cardassians are like timber wolves, predators.

[Sternbach] If you look at the Cardassian Galor-class cruiser,

it's different.

They don't have the same nacelles that Starfleet does.

[McFadden] To find an aesthetic that was both extraterrestrial and familiar,

Star Trek 's designers turned to nature.

Some of these are inspired by animal shapes.

[Probert] They needed a Ferengi ship.

It's like, "Well, what's this gonna look like?"

Well, they described it a little bit.

And then the writer, Herb Wright, said,

"Well, maybe it should look like a horseshoe crab,

a big dome with these little legs and stuff underneath."

So I started with that and then I gave it an extension with a forward pointy area,

which reminded me of earwigs or pincher bugs, you know,

which I thought were creepy.

[McFadden] Some aliens took their inspiration

from higher up the food chain.

A Bird-of-Prey.

Klingon Bird-of-Prey became one of the most significant ships

in the history of the franchise.

[Dax] This isn't a Federation starship. This is a Klingon Bird-of-Prey.

We could have had an easy victory.

The Bird-of-Prey had to look like it was a different society,

a different everything.

And it had to look alien but not terribly alien

'cause it has to feel like it belongs in that world that we're creating.

Klingon Bird-of-Prey, sir! She's arming torpedoes!

Fire, Mr. Scott!

[McFadden] The Klingons were not the only ones

that imagined themselves as ruthless galactic hunters.

What will a Romulan ship look like?

They're painted like a giant bird of prey.

[Probert] On the TV show, the Romulan's actually had

a bird of prey painted on the bottom of their ship,

so I thought, "Well, I'll just carry that into The Next Generation. "

Romulan warbird deep cloaking directly ahead.

[McFadden] When Star Trek returned to television in 1987,

it brought starships that we hadn't seen fly

since the original series,

and times had changed.

I thought the warbird should actually be a vertical design,

so keeping the two warp engines visible through these supports

that actually went around and supported them all with a bird's head.

And I thought, "If you had an enemy that was vertical,

there would be a visual conflict in addition to the way it looked."

And Rick Berman, the producer, said, "No, we'll keep it horizontal,

but make the head look more like a bird, so it's more like a seagull, or, you know,

kind of a parrot-beak kind of face."

With a Romulan ship, it's more of an art deco look.

[Probert] But it is much bigger.

It's like 4,000 feet long

instead of the 2,000 feet that the Enterprise is,

so it's a much larger ship.

[McFadden] Big-screen Star Trek

delivered starships on a scale we've never seen before.

Designs first imagined for the original series by Matt Jefferies

were scaled up to take advantage of the big-screen real estate.

Shall we raise our shields, Captain?

Never been this close.

[McFadden] And this bigger footprint was made believable

by the smallest of details.

The fiber-optic lighting that was in the Klingon warship,

all the little points of light all over the surface of the hall

and then the areas that were supposed to be the bridge

were single-source illuminating rods.

It made the scale of the ship look very large.

[McFadden] Inside the battlecruiser,

Andrew Probert imagined how Klingons might design their defenses.

I'd been asked to create concept designs

for the Klingon bridge under Doug Trumbull,

and Trumbull wanted the Klingon bridge to be all kind of dark and greasy

and smoky and have this suspension system so like if the ship is hit really hard,

then the suspension kind of shock-absorbs hard hits.

So that's why you have these big piston-looking things on that bridge.

[McFadden] Which may have been a Klingon idea,

but due to budget constraints, it was borrowed to form

the torpedo bay of the Enterprise in The Wrath of Khan.

[bell dings]

Fortunately, the Klingons seemed to be cool with it.

-[choking] -Give me Genesis!

[McFadden] Whatever the starship, alien or Federation,

Star Trek has always endeavored to make the fantastic feel plausible.

It had to feel like it could work. There had to be a sense of reality to it.

[McFadden] Evolving bad guys' starships over the years is one thing,

but in the early 2000s, designers had a most unusual challenge.

The ship is not only from another universe, it's from another time.

About a hundred years into the future.

[McFadden] For Enterprise , the prequel series,

the task of making a new starship believable

was made even more difficult by the fact

that this Enterprise predated Kirk's original.

[Bormanis] How do you make a show look both 150 years in our future,

but 80 or 90 years before the original series?

[McFadden] This was the challenge faced by the designers of the NX-01.

This is Captain Jonathan Archer of the starship Enterprise.

We've come from Earth.

It became my and Herman's job to make it

as much like the original series Enterprise as we could.

[McFadden] This new-old Enterprise would be similar to its predecessor,

but very different in one key way.

It never actually materialized.

[Bormanis] We never even built a model for Enterprise.

That was purely digital, never built a physical model of that ship.

If we had to put the NX in a museum, the Enterprise from start,

it would be a CD-ROM on a stand with a spotlight on it. [laughs]

[McFadden] Of course, starships aren't designed for museums.

This vessel, I give, she takes.

[McFadden] Like Kirk's Enterprise, NX-01 had a military pedigree.

Targeting scanner still can't get a lock.

I'm gonna have to do this the old-fashioned way.

-[man] Dive, dive. -[klaxon sounds]

So Rick and Brannon and Herman Zimmerman

toured a nuclear submarine prior to starting to design NX-01.

Captain, can I have a word with you?

[McFadden] Taking design cues from the Ohio-class submarine USS Florida

was a nod to Gene's original vision of the Enterprise,

which also drew on naval themes.

[klaxon sounds]

[Bormanis] We wanted to make this ship look less comfortable

because that tells you it's more primitive, right?

Touches like in Archer's ready room, he has to duck under a beam.

We have the evidence to back it up.

They haven't quite got that spacious Captain Picard Enterprise yet.

This was right around the time that flat-screen TVs were becoming popular.

And they said, "We'll put flat-screen TVs, you know, throughout the bridge."

-Move into a stationary orbit. -Aye, sir.

[Bormanis] "And let's take graphics

that are sort of inspired by the original series..."

Ah, yes.

"...and project those on those screens,

and that suggests both the past and the future."

[Herman Zimmerman] I bet we had

$4 million worth of TV equipment all over the bridge,

and any other place that we needed 'em.

It was a culmination in my mind of all the kinds of things

that I'd done and been exposed to in this Star Trek universe.

[McFadden] Drawing from real-world war machines

has always given Star Trek 's writers a jumping-off point

for flights of fancy about fancy flight

and how it might one day happen.

[Sternbach] The scientific and technical help

that they got from the aerospace field

gave them an actual propulsion system

where you started to hear about things like matter and antimatter.

Matter and antimatter have a tendency to cancel each other out violently.

[McFadden] Ever since the original Enterprise,

Starfleet ships of all kinds have always been powered by one very powerful idea.

Starfleet's specialty is antimatter power.

[Sternbach] Starfleet propulsion systems involve matter and antimatter

reacting inside this big armored chamber,

and the energy is then fed out to the nacelles.

[McFadden] And while it's certainly served the Federation well,

science tells us there's a speed limit.

You cannot change the laws of physics, I told him.

So according to the special theory of relativity,

you cannot travel faster than the speed of light in the universe.

The closer you get to that speed, the more your mass increases,

and it would take an infinite amount of energy

to accelerate to that point.

So you can't do it because there's not enough energy in the universe.

[McFadden] But that's kind of an inconvenient truth

when you need to boldly go somewhere.

So Star Trek needed to find a way,

and it did, with just two simple words.

Warp drive standing by.

Warp drive, that was just made up, of course.

We don't know what warp drive is.

It may happened, but we don't know what it was.

Humans have discovered how to travel faster than light.

It just made it faster than light,

which was what we needed to do to go through our galaxy, which is vast.

Then we used to sort of cheat Einstein.

[McFadden] Fortunately for Starfleet,

it only required one little word to achieve that.

[all] Engage.

[McFadden] And while this may look like a stretch to nonbelievers,

there is actual scientific theory about just that:

a stretch.

Space itself can expand or contract

much faster than the speed of light,

and there is a way to expand space behind you at, say,

a hundred times the speed of light,

contract in front of you at a hundred times the speed of light.

[McFadden] So maybe, just maybe,

Star Trek has been ahead of its time all along.

Within your little bubble of space-time, you may not be moving at all.

But the space around you is moving, so, in effect,

you've traveled from point A to point B at a hundred times the speed of light.

[McFadden] Well, whatever the science,

when it comes to the starships of Star Trek , there's one simple fact.

Wow, this is a starship.

Oh, it's really a darn beautiful ship, isn't it?

Most people had never seen one.

[McFadden] Now millions of us have seen starships,

and they have become part of the furniture, quite literally.

[Altman] The Enterprises were displayed in the Smithsonian Institute,

you know, the Air and Space museum.

The Enterprise is quite a ship.

[McFadden] It sure is, and it's a name that has long inspired

through acts of bravery and exploration,

protection and raw firepower.

But it's the USS Enterprise NCC-1701 that's inspired humanity,

including actual human starship makers.

[Maria Jose Tenuto] On September 17th, 1976,

they had the rollout of the Space Shuttle Enterprise,

and in attendance was Gene Roddenberry

and most of the cast of the original series.

[McFadden] Be it the original or any USS Enterprise,

in the words of the great Captain Jean-Luc Picard,

let history never forget the name...

Enterprise.

[theme music playing]

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