I’m personally a big fan of the late TMP designs like the Excelsior and Centaur, what do you guys like?
Honestly? Probably the ‘Lost Era’ between TOS and TNG.
Excelsior and Ambassador classes were excellent.
No one’s shown any love for my favourite ship design yet, so I’m gonna speak up about my love for the Intrepid class. Voyager just looked so sleek and graceful compared to other ships of the era — the comparatively lumbering Galaxy glass, the oddly square shaped Defiant class, or the cold and sterile Sovereign class.
ENT era.
Externally speaking Starfleet ships march to the beats of NACA/NASA X-planes, Klingon embrace a very soviet yet alien look in contrast, Vulcans look advanced and sleek yet ancient and mythical with the biggest pointiest toys on the block.
Internally speaking construction is depicted as having limits, tech and interfaces are familiar to real world, cramped ship like rooms are the norm, and there’s no handwaving over how everything might fit inside the ships.
It peaked with the Excelsior.
The Enterprise F we briefly saw was also an absolute beaut.
The long line ships of STO are beauties, I agree.
I wish Terry Matalas hadn’t been so keen to push them out of use in Picard.
The Vesta class is also a favourite of mine. Mark Rademaker’s designs are very compelling.
TMP Era is just the best looking classic Star Trek experience some of the designs in my opinion were in things like Starfleet Command the video game like the Akula class, but I have a soft spot for the DS9/First Contact/Star Trek Armada period.
The TMP nacelles are very 70s (lol), but the rest of the ship looks so good that it makes you overlook it.
The Dominion/Borg/DS9 era of ships. The Akira, Steamrunner, Defiant, Prometheus, Sabre, and Sovereign are awesome (and the Galaxy even though that came earlier). It represented a reality check when Starfleet finally snapped out of complacency.
The DS9-Prodigy (~2370-2385) era gave us several lovely ship classes-- the Sovereign, Intrepid, Parliment, Obena, and Protostar classes come to mind for me
deleted by creator
I’m partial to the Galaxy class. It’s big, sleek, and luxurious, which is great for when you need to be diplomatic. “Join the Federation! We have abundant resources and advanced technology, like this cool starship.”
For when you don’t need to be diplomatic, it’s also got plenty of firepower (enough to melt 20% of an unadapted Borg cube in one phaser blast) and speed (it can soundly outrun a D’deridex).
I have seen almost all the Star Trek content, and never developed a love of the ship structure. I like the Defiant because it doesn’t look like it will snap in pieces when it turns a corner. It also proves you don’t need to put the propulsion on sticks.
The Defiant had a lot of issues due to it’s “lack of sticks” though.
The manual for a licensed video game I once played claimed that the nacelles are mounted on pylons to separate them from the rest of the ship because they emit hazardous radiation when in use.
According to Memory Alpha, however, each of the Galaxy class’ unusually large nacelles contains a control room for monitoring the warp drive’s operation up close. This implies that it is safe to be not only near but inside the nacelle while the warp drive is running, which nixes the hazardous radiation theory.
DS9, Defiant & Kelvin Timeline Enterprise versions (bonus points for the Vengeance)
Loved some of the TNG ships as well, but in terms of uniqueness the above still stands.
Agree with ye OP. I’m even a fan of the Miranda and the Oberth, I feel like nobody likes those classes. There’s just something special about the TOS film ships. Those sexy nacelles 🥰
For ST, the Voyager looked good, but I didn’t like the moving nacelles. The updated Enterprise from the first movie was my favorite iteration of the Big-E.
But, my favorite ship is the Omega class destroyer from Babylon 5. (sue me)
TOS/TAS/Kelvin/32c
I like the TOS/TAS and 32nd century designs for pushing the envelope for what a star Trek starship could look like, instead of just iterating on the same basic designs over and over, or repeating generic Sci-Fi starship designs. A starship that’s just a giant disco blob, a bunch of loosely-connected pods, or a space doughnut/colon
y, are all unique ideas we’ve not seen before or since. Even the Enterprise was unique compared to the rocket-ships of the time, taking a lot of design work to give it that iconic look, unlike any other starship seen before.By comparison, a lot of series after TOS/TAS tended to mostly iterate on the same design. For its flaws (like using a millennium-old drive mechanism), the 32nd century ships appear to try and buck that with radical changes. Chain and Courier ships look nothing like alien vessels of the time, and the Federation starships are rather different, with ships like the Eisenberg class being tall instead of wide, compared to previous Federation ships we’d seen before.
Kelvin is just a fun modern take on the TOS, even if I’m not entirely convinced about the interior, and like Discovery, lays the groundwork for the TMP style of ships, with their square-ish nacelle designs.
ENT era, and specifically the Andorian Kumari-class.
