The D-4 story is just sad. It's amazing to me that anyone could be that unappreciative and out of touch with reality and still hold such a high ranking position.
I agree.
The Temporal Cold War was extremely unpopular and was also the result of executive meddling. One of the higher ups wanted a time travel arc to make it "more futuristic". Part of the problem is that it doesn't make any sense. With the type of time travel depicted in the arc you can't even have a Temporal Cold War that heats up. You can have a cold war that stays cold, or you can have a hot war that was always hot, but you can't have one become the other. The instant shots are fired in one time period they'll be fired in all time periods. If the shooting is going on in all time periods, then it was never cold, was it? And they didn't even make good use of the tech once it did heat up. Even low-tech ships like the NX class could easily render the enemy extinct if sent to the correct time period. It would also be a recurring issue in all the series for that very reason and yet there was never a mention of a massive war taking place throughout time and space in any series other than ENT. The only thing I liked about the Temporal Cold War was the dog fight over Manhattan. That was just insane enough to be awesome. That Braga wanted to continue it is not something I've heard, though. Everything I've heard about it suggests somebody higher up at Paramount than him was the one that wanted it. Not that he seemed to mind it as much as the writing staff though.
I also agree. Time travel isn't a straight forward journey, it twists and turns and events constantly change the past. To be honest it would confuse the audience as the 22nd century was said to be an important part of the cold war so things would chance so much between episodes most casual viewers would just get too confused. To be honest I probably would have as well. It's not like Doctor Who were you're following the adventures of the character who is making the changes. It was a bad thought out and poorly executed arc that really should have never happened.
Apparently Rick Berman had very little to do with ENT (or so I read, don't know how true that is) and he didn't even want to do ENT to begin with. Braga I heard was the one in charge for the most part until Manny Coto came in at the end of season 3 and totally turned the series around.
The dogfight was cool, Nazi fighters with plasma cannons beating the poop out of a 22nd space ship was funny to see.
I still like to think the whole temporal cold war happened because of Janeway, Because she defended herself from the 29th century starfleet and stopped the destruction of the 29th century Earth it caused the creation of the cold war because certain people were alive that originally weren't and this caused an altered 22nd century with Archer and the NX-01 with also due to this created a new timeline different from the TOS/TNG/DS9/VOY timeline. So ENT was start of the new timeline where Trek 11 and 12 are in and when Spock and Nero went through that blackhole back to the 23rd century they crossed into this timeline rather than just simply going back in time and thus didn't alter their own history.
They submitted several designs, including one with a sphere instead of a saucer, but somebody at Paramount was dead set on the Akira.
Fitting that many people seems like a stretch at first, but it does have seven decks and the captains quarters were awfully small, so I think it's likely that non-officers had bunks in tiny rooms like TNG Klingon ships, which would have cut down on the needed space. I don't think they really ran into space issues until the did things like add an ambiguous number of MACOs to the crew or try and stick the entire crew inside a single nacelle. Since the ship was already cramped, I don't see how either of those could have worked.
It's a shame as while the Akira is a good design, it's also a fan favourite and people instantly saw it in the NX. That Paramount person really had a lack of originality as I know John Eaves and Doug Drexler would have come up with something really original if they were given the freedom. Some of their original alternative designs were cool. In fact I'll probably look at some some of those myself at some point for A2.
I liked how the NX only had 83 crew members, I do believe the Constitution people were just jammed in as you said with bunks etc. I also think the technology was minimized in the 80-100 years between ENT and TOS. Technology does change and gets smaller, take mobile phones in the real world, no reason to think it doesn't happen in Trek either. That could also account for more space on the Constitution.
I loved the interiors. I think they were specifically modeled after submarines. They even have hand holds on the floors, walls, and ceilings in case the gravity goes out. It's little details like that that show at least some of the crew really cared about the show and Trek in general.
On Memory Alpha, it says that the first season was going to be set entirely on Earth during construction of the ship and the season finale would have been the Enterprise's launch. While this could have been interesting, I'm not sure what kinds of stories they might have had. Do you guys have any ideas?
Yeah Herman Zimmerman and his team apparently visited a US submarine and got their inspiration from there for the interiors. I think the interiors were the highlight for the series. Totally fitting and I'd love to see them do a series or something set in the Earth-Romulan war, perhaps on a Daedalus this time with a similar interior, with a new crew etc but they could have Archer and co make guest appearances.
To be honest if the entire series had been set on Earth, it would had been boring to be honest. It's not Trek's style.
Also, it looks like a Season 5 plot line would have had T'Pol's father revealed to have been a Romulan agent to explain her emotional issues. They also planned to have more Mirror Universe episodes, possibly as many as half of them, which makes me think they may have intended for the crews to meet at some point. I'm pretty unsure about the thing with T'Pol's father, but the Mirror Universe episodes in Season 4 were fantastic. And Shran joining the crew could only have improved the series. I really don't see any way that could have been bad unless the writers didn't know what to do with him, like Mayweather. Poor Anthony Montgomery.
Shran was a favourite of mine, as are the Kzinti and so season 5 to me was going to be awesome. I remember something about T'Pol's origins being in it. I also remembered that they were going to visit some places from TOS in season 5. I never knew they were going to do more mirror episodes, that was a great episode in season 4, really goes to show what we missed out on.
EDIT:
I also found this on Doug Drexler's facebook page about the NX and it's refit.
[fieldset=Doug Drexler]
Doug Drexler
Digging through some records, I came across something I had written up about the designing of the NX for Enterprise. I cannot remember what this was for, but I enjoyed it, so I thought you might too -
The design process of the NX was long and convoluted. After DS9, I ended up at Foundation Imaging working as an artist on the Voyager CG team. I remember Enterprise was starting up, and that John Eaves was on board and doing designs for the new ship. Man, my heart was there, I wanted so badly to be a part of it. John stopped by Foundation to say hi a couple of times, and tried to talk me into coming back to the art department. The problem for me was that I did seven years as a scenic artist, and didn't want to repeat myself. They already had an illustrator in John.
Some time went by, and I began hearing about the struggle that the art department was having finding something that pleased Mr. Berman and Mr. Bragga. Unless you have a very visual turn of mind, and know what you want, you won't make a decision until you have seen a zillion sketches. The general approach is that you can't make a decision until you have seen every possible drawing right up until zero hour.
Eaves had done something like 30 or 40 designs and none of them were acceptable. It wasn't that they weren't good designs. They were. There is a joke amongst designers when dealing with the clients, and it goes like this: I don't know what I want, but I'll know it when I see it. Man, is that a slippery slope! That could go on forever, but by now, Eaves and Production designer Herman Zimmeran were supposed to have been onto designs for the standing sets. So Mike Okuda suggested bringing me in, and I bringing along my new computer skills. 3D applications in the art department were pretty rare in those days, and for all I know we were the first in television production design to do this, especially to this extent. It would turn out to be a huge boon. For the first time Herman could see a design in motion and in various lighting conditions. It was huge.
I couldn't just up and leave Foundation. FI was very good to me, so I had to give at least two weeks notice. Herman said: No problem! What time do you get off of work? So for the next two weeks after working 10 hours at FI, I'd drive all the way from Valencia to my house, and Herman would be sitting on the front porch waiting for me. Then it was another four hours that night with "Z" sitting behind me at the computer. Man, it was scary and fantastic all at the same time. Hair raising and wonderful.
Unfortunately I was now caught in the same loop that John had been in. Nothing was right. The finally agreed upon a design that was very close to the TOS ship. Hallelujah! One of the associate producers on the show who was a big TOS fan walked into Rick Berman's office and saw it on his desk. Wow! He gushed! It looks just like Kirk's ship!
That was the end of that design!
I was at work at Foundation when Peter Lauritson called me and asked if we had the Akira in stock. I'll never forget it. It was like a cold hand closed over my heart. I'm a purist and a big believer in Trek continuity as being the lynchpin of it's durability. I also happen to be one of the top Trek historians. I could see it was going to be a stormy and often frustrating process. In reality it was all of those things, but it was exhilarating bending the design around to Matt's original Enterprise as much as we could, and letting the powers that be feel that they were still getting what they asked for.
From that point on it was a Raymond Loewy type restyling. You know Loewy? One of the top industrial designers who ever lived. He specialized in taking long established designs and restyling them. The locomotive becomes the streamliner. That's where I drew a lot of inspiration. I had a copy of Loewy's book, "Industrial Design" on my desk every day.
This CG approval model had been through battles to rival any that the fictional ship had been through during it’s four year television voyage. It had been volleyed back and forth between art department and producers. It had been pulled, stretched, cut, and pounded before it had been given a go for throttle-up, and shipped off to the CG facility where it would be built by Pierre Drolet with extreme attention to detail. The approval model appeared very early on in print (TV Guide, USA Today) before the high resolution model was ready.
Once the final configuration was agreed upon, I spent about six weeks doing additional design, fine tuning and massaging the details resulting in my approval model.
I had a field day detailing out the NX, and every nook and cranny is accounted for. I added details that I hoped would allow for cool ideas later on, if and when the opportunities presented themselves. But I had to be cautious about obvious details to the ship that were not approved, because they could get me into trouble. Yes, The chain of command was heavy on Enterprise. Herman Zimmerman, our stalwart production designer was once balled out because I labeled a nacelle as a nacelle on a framed blueprint in the dry dock observation room. He was told that it wasn’t a nacelle until the front office said it was. So I tucked gear behind doors and hatches, and then wrote up notes “suggesting†the vessels potential. This jack-in-the-box approach was the result of ol’ Doug covering his posterior. Necessity is the mother of invention. So the Enterprise NX had numerous hatches and trap doors from which it could deploy a variety of gear. Hatches that were relatively flat to the center plane of the ship had a rotating drum with cylinders like a revolver. Each cylinder housed a specialized piece of equipment (phase cannons, antennas, probes, communication relays… anything the writers might come up with), and could be rotated inline with it’s respective hatch for egress.
Mike and I always felt that the NX was a ship that took constant work to keep running. Tearing the warp engines down would have been a regular occurrence, and this area of the ship would have been buzzing with activity after nearly every sustained period of high warp travel. During WWII, my uncle was the engineering chief on a submarine. The old diesel subs had more than one engine.. One was always being torn down, renewed and put back together. My vote would have been for two warp cores. One always in a state of rebuild.
The doors on the fan tail are dedicated engineering facilities, and are not cargo bays. The TOS style A-frame assembly conceals the engineering tunnel. When in dry dock, the entire A-frame assembly can be removed, and the warp core, or even the entire engine room, could be slid out like a drawer and replaced. The idea being that while the NX is out there exploring the unknown, a new engineering department is being built and tested in an Earth orbital facility.
We added a Symmetrical Warp Governor between the nacelles. The theory being that back in those early days of high warp velocities, warp field generation was iffy at best. The NX warp coils, unlike later starships, were asymmetrical and therefore generated an asymmetrical warp bubble. This was an extremely dangerous proposition. The SWG generated a low yield sub space field which “bends†the warp bubble into a more acceptable configuration for high warp velocities. Until this shortcoming was overcome, extreme warp factors of 6 to 8 were not possible.
The NX design lineage leading to the constitution class warp nacelle is plain. Just look at the large intercooler assembly and spillway. Externally, the major cosmetic difference between the NX and the Constitution nacelle, is that the NX has more external access hatches, and a heavier construction. As Federation starships evolved, they were designed to be worked on almost entirely from within, and there was rarely a reason to EVA in a hostile environment. The NX design was maintenance intensive, and took a hardy breed of engineers to run.
The NX airlock and docking hardware was designed by Mike Okuda, and based on the International Space Station airlocks. Note communication and sensor array, Pike-type sensor bar, and navigation beacons.
Ultimately the NX as I designed it had much greater abilities and utilities than the ship as portrayed on television. There was an episode where the NX was damaged by a Romulan mine. The script had a character hiking across the hull, and dragging equipment after him. It was absurd that they were so ill equipped. I had designed the ship like a skyscraper, with tracks embedded between the hull panels for repair cars to travel. I had also provided articulated arms like the International Space Station (this is not to mention the various vehicles they could have taken). It was thought the danger of hiking across the hull was more important than what we had developed. I can see that, but in my opinion this breach in logic undermines the believability of the ship, it’s crew, and starfleet in general.
If I had been left to my own devices, the NX would have had a sphere instead of a saucer, recalling some of Matt's early Enterprise designs, and in my world the TOS ship would have been the first ship with a saucer configuration. We had suggested this to our producers, but they were afraid to 86 the instantly recognizable saucer. I understand.
I very much like the NX we got There isn't a frivolous line on it. Every bit of it has a purpose and is thought out. It makes sense to me that starships began without a dedicated engineering hull. I felt that eventually the NX would put into dry dock and be refit with a secondary hull, and I had this in mind as I worked the design through. Incidentally, Pierre Drolet and I refitted the show's CG model with a secondary hull for the Ships of the Line 2011, just as I had always wanted to do. It finally looks like a senior. I'm fulfilled to see it evolving toward the original 1701.
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