All language subtitles for The Center Seat 55 Years of Star Trek S01E09 Starships A-Z 1080p AMZN WEB-DL DD+5 1 H 264-playWEB_track3_[eng]

Star Trek,
science fiction's

most influential franchise,
has been around longer

and traveled further
than any other.

Let's jump

And it's all thanks

to a seemingly infinite armada
of starships.

Nothing is more important
than my ship.

From
the originalEnterprise,

to its most distant relative,

Star Trek has been
designing starships

almost as long as NASA.

Lift off.

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.

So beam aboard
and hold on tight

as we boldly explore
the starships ofStar Trek.

And you can see it
all from here,

inThe Center Seat.

All I ask is a tall ship,

and a star to steer her by.

If you love
Star Trek, you love star ships.

You know, I love starships.

Star Trekloves starships.

The vessel
that virtually defined

the look of a spaceship
for generations

began whereStar Trek began,
with Gene Roddenberry,

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
going to buy the series.

But theEnterprise
was hardly the first starship.

The word starship
had been around

before Star Trek, in books.

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.

Rockets
for the rocket age.

Lift off.

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.

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.

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.

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

He knew he had
real world experience

with magnificent
flying machines.

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.

So he was
an excellent choice.

He knew aircraft
and he kept up with space technology.

Gene and Matt
combined their own experience of military aircraft

with ideas emerging
from America's

new national obsession,

the Space Race.

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.

One of the things
that Matt and Gene looked at,

there was a series
of television shows.

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

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

And Collier'smagazine

did a very famous series
of articles about

how we're going
to go to the moon.

But Gene wanted
something to take the audience further in their imaginations

than science could hope
to go in space.

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.

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

So Matt tried
new combinations of familiar shapes.

You know,
with shiny saucers and the dome.

He started with those sorts
of shapes and textures.

And Roddenberry
would say, "I don't like that,

"This looks goofy,
I like a little bit of this."

The process
was hit or miss, but even Matt Jefferies'

rejected designs were ahead
of their time.

Matt Jefferies'
original shapes,

actually, instead of a saucer,

had a sphere out front.

Uh, the best shape
for a pressure vessel is a sphere.

And Roddenberry
looked at that and said, "No, 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.

But the breakthrough
that made theEnterprise was anything but technical.

Gene, I think,
took and flipped it.

Even upside down
or from whatever angle,

Matt's design was majestic.

The ship didn't look
like the typical,

you know, silver swept-back wing
kind of spaceships.

The Enterprise
was something way different.

The Enterprise is not a want or a desire.

It is a mechanical device.

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

We do, indeed.

Gene finally had
what he wanted.

TheEnterprise would be a mix
of the old and the new.

They came up with
this incredibly original design

by combining elements
of science fiction ships

that had become tropes
and turned them into something new.

You know, the nacelles
and the secondary hull

are very much
like your standard cigar-shaped rocket.

And then they used the saucer,

a flying saucer,
like we saw in Forbidden Planet.

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.

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 set, popping them 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.

Well,
when television viewers

caught their first glimpse
of the USSEnterprise

in 1966, eyes lit up
and imaginations sparked.

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

The number one person
to get letters

was not Leonard Nimoy
or William Shatner,

but theEnterprise
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 and what spaceships...

"Starships", looked like.

- That's...
- The Enterprise.

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 Enterpriseis?

That famous silhouette.

It could be
the size of a dime,

and you knew what it was.

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.

Well, in 1979,
theEnterprise went somewhere

no Starfleet ship was ever
designed to go.

All the way to Hollywood.

AsStar Trek took
to the silver screen for the first time.

Steady as she goes.

And for this new era,
a newEnterprise.

Production illustrator
Andrew Probert

was among those charged
with improving

onStar Trek's
most emblematic design.

It was my first task
on the Enterprise

to supply some detailing
for the ship.

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."

Richard Taylor wanted
to stick to Matt Jefferies' originalEnterprise concepts

for aStar Trek show
that would show the evolution of theEnterprise,

but never quite evolved itself.

Phase Two.

You could see
the Original Series' Enterprise

evolve into
the motion picture Enterprise.

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.

More firepower.

I was actually able
to make the saucer bigger.

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

For the big screen,

small detailing would give
the ship a texture,

making sure theEnterprise
was ready for her close up.

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'd thought would create

this kind of a tensile strength

keeping this whole thing together.

And propelling
this whole thing was a redesigned powerhouse.

Richard Taylor
actually wanted to do

the engines himself, he said,

"I know you're designing this,

"but I want to do the engines
because I have this idea."

Richard's big idea
was to reshape the Enterprise's trademark nacelles.

And so Richard
designed those with new warp engines,

which I think are amazing.

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,

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's a NASA scientist

who was connected
to Roddenberry and said, it suggested combustion.

So after
consulting scientists, the engines were bigger,

but the most
appreciated upgrade was more subtle.

It's 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 a spaceship I've ever seen.

And it was
all thanks to designers eloquently speaking

the design language
of the original.

The original
Kirk'sEnterprise

had these dual red lines
going down the spine of the engineering hull,

and I thought,
"Let's build on that." and actually used that

to enhance different details.

So we had 'em wrapped
around the phaser banks

and we had 'em wrapped around
their reaction control system

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

The interior
of the newEnterprise

opened up a whole world
of new possibilities.

The carbon units
use this area for recreation.

Then the script called
for a "wreck deck".

Floor
to ceiling windows,

that would offer a never
before seen star field.

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."

But Andrew wasn't
letting grand designs proceed

without acknowledging
certain engineering realities.

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

"people are going to
get really tan because

"that's where
the impulse engine is."

To avoid
the newEnterprise becoming a warp speed capable sunbed,

the design was changed.

Scotty would have been proud.

I'm responsible
for the safety of this ship.

Speaking of
health and safety...

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.

TheStar Trek
motion pictures not only gave us a deeper look

into previously unseen
corners of theEnterprise, such as...

The Enterprisehas
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.

They also ushered
in a plethora of new starships.

TheStar 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.

The unassumingReliant

was strangely familiar
and, yet, radically different.

We really
had never seen a starship

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

Coming up with
a newStar Trek starship is always a challenge.

It needs to fit into something
that feels like it's part of the family ofEnterprise.

But it also needs to have
a distinct identity.

It retains the idea
of the Enterprise,

the two warp nacelles.

But this humble ship,
was about to turn the world

ofStar 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.

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 Enterpriseupside down.

And so, instead of having
the nacelles up here,

the nacelles are down here.

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

They have a good guy
and bad guy.

I said I wanted to be
an obvious difference.

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?

...and none
was bigger than... - The Excelsior.

In the third movie,
The Search for Spock,

we introduced this ship,
the Excelsior.

TheExcelsior,
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.

The final design
of this monster,

was literally put in the hands
of director Leonard Nimoy.

TheExcelsior,
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.

TheExcelsior 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!

Scotty was right
to be skeptical.

I guess it means faster
than warp drive.

What can be faster
than warp drive?

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 Grissomarriving.

And the Oberth-class
is a fun little ship.

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.

Everyone,
barring the Klingons,

who sadly took exception
to theOberth-class.

Of course,
when it comes to starships exploding,

there is one in particular
that even Gene Roddenberry

didn't approve of.

Computer. Destruct sequence one.

In the film,
The Search for Spock,

Kirk destroys theEnterprise
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 Enterprisedestroyed,

because to me,
the Enterpriseis Star Trek.

What have I done?

No,
that's not the question.

What do you think
of the Enterprise-D?

That's the one!

With the return ofStar Trek
to television in 1987,

theEnterprise 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'sEnterprise-D.

My Enterpriseis far superior.

TheEnterprise
almost didn't make it toThe Next Generation

for the unlikeliest of reasons.

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 got to have that starship."

I was absolutely adamant,

so Gene dropped the idea.

Nope. TheEnterprise
wasn't going anywhere,

except out there.

Engage.

This newEnterprise 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?

TheNext Generation's
starships were conceived more than 20 years

after theOriginal Series'
Enterprise.

But in theStar Trek timeline,

they arrived
almost a century later,

which created
a problem for designers.

Because theEnterprise,
again, is so recognizable

and so beloved,

what kind of changes
are you going to make?

Before
he was even hired onThe Next Generation,

Senior Illustrator,
Andrew Probert,

was already working
on that problem.

Andy came to me
and said, "I've done some sketches on

"what theEnterprise
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 saying,

"Hey, here's your
new Enterprise." and Gene looks at it

and says, "Woah, that's good."

Well, it's a new ship...

For
theNext Generation, - but she's got the right name.

it wouldn't just be
a new look,

but also a new form forEnterprise.

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 going to have
other... other materials,

and it's not welded together.

It's sonic blended,

it's not welded.

The result was
a sleeker-looking vessel, to be known asEnterprise-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.

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."

Despite
budget constraints, Andrew did have

one very enterprising idea
for hisEnterprise.

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

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

What if
theEnterprise 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
was because of cost.

This time,
budget was not the issue.

Six...

Five... Four...

- three...
-This battle section

is part of the saucer.

I even had a drawing
showing the engineering hull

going off to protect the saucer.

Separation successful, sir.

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.

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."

Well,
if theEnterprise 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 Generationship,

I created that
whole phaser strip.

They could actually follow
what they were shooting at.

It is the most lethal weapon.

There was
the art of war,

then there was
the art on the wall.

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

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

"like all captains usually do."

So Rick and I came up with this.

I did the ship
and he did the background.

Speaking of
home decorating,

there was the small matter
of the new bridge.

Gene wanted a full overhaul,
telling designers...

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,

And so, cool,
mid-century minimalism became a little more touchy-feely.

This was the handiwork
of scenic art supervisor Michael Okuda.

I ended up
with a plexiglass surface,

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.

This simple innovation was so well regarded

that panels became
known as Okudagrams, after their creator.

That term
"Okudagram" was invented

first season
of Star Trek Next Generation

by our set decorator,
John Dwyer,

who had been a set decorator
in The Original Series.

So for him to come up
with that... with that name,

at first I was
kind of embarrassed,

but then I realized
I should be honored.

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 that
theEnterprise-D bridge

is as classic as
the Original Seriesbridges.

With
redesigned workstations,

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

What have they done
to my ship now?

Picard's
command chair,

originally, I designed it
so that it had little screens

that would pop up out
of the armrest, so all they 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.

Board readings, Mr. Spock.

So cup holders
for the center seat?

So, therefore,
I put two food replicators -

on the bridge,

which they never used.

Oh,
and just some housekeeping before we move on.

There is
a bathroom on the bridge.

If you look at the bridge
from the view screen,

the head is over
on this side -

opposite the door
that goes back into the conference lounge.

Yup,
Picard'sEnterprise seemed to have it all.

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

The Next Generation
also introduced us to yet anotherEnterprise.

The Enterprise-Cthat 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 Ccould look like.

We added new graphics
to the overhead panels.

TheEnterprise-C
was certainly a new step

in starship evolution.

The Enterprise-C,

really has a way of bridging
the gap design wise

between theEnterprise-B,

which we see
inStar Trek: Generations,

and then, of course,
with theEnterprise-D.

Which was
Picard's ship,

and if all these designations

are forcing you
to relearn your ABC's, relax.

You're in good company.

One-Seven-Oh-One.

No bloody A, B, C, or D.

A, B, C or D,
theEnterprise has remained unmistakable.

Star Trek had
a very good batting average

of making the ship's feel

germane to the universe
and the design consistency.

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

Please sit down.

Some
just take up space in the background,

like this one.

TheStargazer,
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.

But even a fragment
of the past needs to embody

theStar Trek design tradition.

So we put together
a model of what we thought

this deep space science vessel
might look like.

It's a Stargazer.

In a world
before CGI,

these starships
were still handcrafted.

Literally,
people taking model kits,

and throwing them together
and creating new ships.

I would give
almost anything

to command the Stargazeragain.

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 other parts to it,

and our set decorator
put it on the set.

Just as
theStargazer model sits inside theEnterprise,

all Starfleet starships
stand in the shadow of theEnterprise,

the mother of all mother ships.

AsStar Trek and theEnterprise
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.

Fortunately,
oneStar 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.

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

I decided that it was
a prototype warship that the Federation abandoned

because they don't really
build warships.

It's not really
what they're about, but they had built this one.

It's over gunned and overpowered
for a ship its size.

And it was in danger
of pulling itself apart.

I mean, 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 board buster was exciting.

Living up to
its name,

theDefiant defied Starfleet
design conventions.

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

Maybe because
this starship was based on a Maquis fighter,

originally designed
forDS9 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.

Doug
and his colleagues gave theDefiant

the unmistakable stamp
of the Federation.

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.

But
the new shape had some defensive design elements

not normally seen
on Federation vessels.

And the fact that the nacelles
are not mounted on pylons,

you want to shield
those things,

so they are
within the enclosures.

A more militaristic vessel
than the Enterprise

and theOriginal Series
orNext Gen orVoyager.

The military-industrial complex

had finally caught up
with Starfleet hardware.

Likewise, Starfleet hardware
had to catch up

withStar Trek's increasingly
war-torn storylines.

We have engaged the Borg.

With
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

where these massive
space battles...

The fight does not go well, Enterprise.

We're attempting
to withdraw and regroup.

In an age before CGI,
each starship required

a physical model
to be built and filmed.

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.

By the time ofVoyager,

calm had been restored.

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

It's the Voyager.

Believe it or not,
this imperious, Intrepid-class vessel

began life like so many
good ideas, as a doodle.

I started
just doodling, and doodling,

and doodling,

and I eventually started
evolving the shape

of what we were calling
the prototype.

We had to come up
with a distinct look forVoyager

and Rick Sternbach
was probably most responsible

for changing the configuration

ofVoyager 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.

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.

ButVoyager
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've seen on a lake.

Sleek, fast.

ButVoyager'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?"

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.

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.

And this was not
about warping the design,

it was about warp speed.

We don't get
more power to the warp drive,

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

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.

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't go too fast.

Traveling at infinite velocity
accelerated the natural

human evolutionary process
by millions of years.

That's right.

There was something
very fishy about Tom Paris

dabbling with transwarp drives.

There are
traces of human DNA,

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

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?

For the longest time,
it wasn't,

thanks to this contraption.

Energize.

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.

The beloved
transporter was finally made redundant onVoyager.

Landing
on a planetary surface

withVoyager was something
that came in

with some of the writer's notes.

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.

AsStar Trek has
evolved with each new chapter,

its writers have set out
to break the rules.

USSPrometheus, experimental prototype

designed for deep space
technical assignments.

And in the case of
the USSPrometheus,

to break the mold.

The USSPrometheus
as a super advanced Starfleet ship.

Very secret.
Stolen by the Romulans.

Engage the multi vector
assault mode.

Some of
the writer notes talked

about the ship breaking
into five parts.

Auto separation in ten seconds.

Oh, you mean like Transformers?

And they knocked it back
to three parts.

Because
breaking the mold

doesn't mean you can
ignore all the rules.

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

Quite a
fun task to try to match up

the hull sections with,
you know,

turbo lift connectors,
and utilities connectors,

and matter or antimatter,
and conduits

and all that kind of thing,
and it worked.

Starfleet ships
may have their long-standing features to accommodate,

but there's a whole other
category of starships.

The alien ship is not pursuing.

For these ships,
Star Trek designers

threw out the rule book,

because these ships
belong to the ones

who don't play by the rules.

Hailing frequencies open, sir.

IfStar Trek would
have us believe anything,

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

If you're established
in theStar Trek world,

you have
space faring civilizations.

They've traveled
from one star system to another.

Resistance is futile.

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.

And as impressive
and advanced as these designs may appear...

Klingon
looks different.

Romulan looks different.

Cardassian looks different.

At the end of
the day,

their starships were designed
by plain old humans.

How boring.

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-3.

Cardassians are
a bit more brutal.

Cardassians are like
timber wolves, predators.

If you look at the Cardassian
Galor-classcruiser, it's different.

They don't have
the same nacelles

that Starfleet does.

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.

They needed
a Ferengi ship.

I was like, "What's this
going to 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 ear wigs
or pincher bugs,

you know,
which I thought were creepy.

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.

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

because 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

The Klingons were
not the only ones

that imagined themselves
as ruthless galactic hunters.

What would a Romulan ship
look like?

They're painted like
a giant bird of prey.

On the TV show,
the Romulans 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
decloaking directly ahead.

WhenStar Trek
returned to television in 1987,

it brought starships
that we hadn't seen fly

sinceThe Original Series,
and times had changed.

I thought the warbird should
actually be a vertical design,

still 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,

but it is much bigger.

It's, like, 4,000 feet long

instead of the 2,000 feet
that theEnterprise is.

So it's a much larger ship.

Big screen
Star Trek deliveredstarships on a scale

we've never seen before.

Designs, first imagined
forThe 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.

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 hull

and in the areas that were
supposed to be a bridge

were a single source
illuminating rods.

It made the scale
of the ship looked very large.

Inside
the battle cruiser, Andrew Probert

imagined how Klingons
might design their defenses.

I've 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,

than the suspension, kind of,
shock absorbs hard hits.

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

Which may have been
a Klingon idea,

but due to budget constraints,
it was borrowed to form

the torpedo bay
of theEnterprise inThe Wrath of Khan.

Fortunately, the Klingon
seemed to be cool with it.

Give me Genesis!

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.

Evolving
bad guy starships over the years is one thing,

but in the early 2000s,

designers had
a most unusual challenge.

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

About a hundred years
into the future.

ForEnterprise,
the prequel series,

the task of making
a new starship believable

was made even more difficult

by the fact that thisEnterprise
predated Kirk's original.

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

but 80 or 90 years
before The Original Series?

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.

This new oldEnterprise

would be similar to
its predecessor,

but very different
in one key way.

It never actually materialized.

We never even built
a model forEnterprise.

That was purely digital.

Never built a physical model
of that ship.

If we had to put
the NXin a museum,

the Enterprisefrom Star...

It would be a CD-ROM on a stand
with a spotlight on it.

Of course, starships
aren't designed for museums.

This vessel.

I give.
She takes.

Like
Kirk'sEnterprise,

NX-01 had a military pedigree.

Targeting scanners
still can't get a lock.

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

Dive. Dive.

So Rick and Brandon
and Herman Zimmerman toured a nuclear submarine,

prior to starting
to design, NX-01.

Captain, Can I have
a word with you?

Taking design cues
from the Ohio-class submarine, USS Florida,

was a nod to
Gene's original vision

of theEnterprise,

which also drew
on naval themes.

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 Enterpriseyet.

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

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

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

And let's
take graphics

that are sort of inspired
byThe Original Series...

- Ah, yes.
-and project those on those screens.

And that suggests both
the past and the future.

I bet we had
four million dollars

worth of TV equipment
all over the bridge

and any other place
that we needed them.

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

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

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.

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.

Ever since
the originalEnterprise, Starfleet ships of all kinds

have always been powered
by one very powerful idea.

Starfleet's specialty
is antimatter power.

Starfleet
propulsion systems involve

matter and antimatter

reacting inside this
big armored chamber,

and the energy is then
fed out to the nacelles.

And while
it certainly served the Federation well,

science tells us
there's a speed limit.

"You cannot change
the laws of physics," I told them.

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.

But that's kind of
an inconvenient truth

when you need to boldly
go somewhere.

SoStar Trek needed
to find a way, and it did,

with just two simple words.

Warp drives standing by.

"Warp drive",
that was just made up,

of course, we don't know
what warp drive is.

It may happen,
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 the term
to sort of cheat Einstein.

Fortunately
for Starfleet,

it only required
one little word to achieve that.

Engage.

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 would say, a hundred times
the speed of light,

contracted in front of you,
a hundred times the speed of light.

So maybe,
just maybe,

Star Trek has been ahead
of its time all along.

Within your little bubble
of spacetime, 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.

Well,
whatever the science,

when it comes to
the starships ofStar Trek, there is one simple fact.

Wow. This is a starship.

Oh, God. Beautiful ship.

Well, most people
had never seen one.

Now, millions of us
have seen starships,

and they have become part
of the furniture.

Quite literally.

TheEnterprises
were displayed in the Smithsonian Institute.

You know,
the Air and Space Museum.

The Enterpriseis quite a ship.

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
USSEnterprise NCC-1701 that's inspired humanity,

including actual human
starship makers.

On September 17th, 1976,
they had the rollout of

the space shuttle Enterprise,

and in attendance was
Gene Roddenberry and most of the cast

ofThe Original Series.

Be it the original
or any USSEnterprise,

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

"Let history never forget
the nameEnterprise."