Reddit reviews BLUEPRINTS: STAR TREK: NEXT GENERATION NCC-1701-D (Star Trek: The Next Generation)

https://www.amazon.com/BLUEPRINTS-STAR-GENERATION-NCC-1701-D-Generation/dp/0671500937

ISBN is in the image dump. $50 new.

This magazine-style book, "Starship Design," may be a fan-production so not officially canon, but it's so well done that I have always considered it to be canon. Beta-canon anyway.

Enlarge pages 11 and 13 and you will see clearly-labeled aft phaser emitters (just above the hangar bay) and an array of 5 ventral phaser emitters on the bottom of the engineering hull. The aft phaser emitters are seen used in Enterprise - "In A Mirror, Darkly," although that is a pre-refit Connie, USS Defiant. I have checked on various models, screenshots, and other schematics available and those that show a ventral view all have those bumps clearly labeled as phasers.

Even though this is, as far as I know, beta-canon at best, we have to admit that having no ventral phasers of any kind (the aft phaser emitters can at least cover part of the aft dorsal arc) would be an enormous tactical oversight with almost the entire secondary hull unprotected from a huge angle. While ships and phaser emitters of that era don't have nearly the same 360x360 degree phaser coverage of TNG-era phaser strips, even the Miranda class variants have the megaphaser units for aft weaponry, and the greater maneuverability and smaller profile to make up for its blind spots.

For Connie-variant comparison, the Decatur/Belknap class designs show that along with the lowered pylon/nacelle assemblies, the aft phaser banks are relocated at the top of the neck aft of the saucer, where they canprovide far greater coverage than the placement on the Constitution class, where peripheral firing arcs are blocked by the nacelles and pylons.

Something else I've always loved about this book is how the articles details design changes to various pylon/nacelle assemblies and the experiments with them, which suggests a far greater degree of modular design than we thought, at least in experimentation if not in large-scale production. We could reasonably expect a lot of these experimental variants in a postwar period where modernization and fleet reconstruction are both high, so they can be produced and tested quickly, and the idea scrapped and refit to a working module if it doesn't meet expectations.

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Even ignoring this book completely, a previous write-up of mine posited this: The Constitution class was meant to fill a major gap in the fleet - a true modern ship of the line, heavy cruiser classification, that could stand toe-to-toe with the Klingon D-7 and K'Tinga battlecruisers as well as the fleets of other encountered species. It was overpowered and crammed with every last bit of top-of-the-line technology it could get, with zero free space for future expansions and upgrades. By comparison, the fully-canon Rick Sternbach blueprints of the Enterprise-D --full hi-res Imgur album link-- show an enormous amount of empty space all over the ship, earmarked for "future expansion," or "mission-specific space," to say nothing of the absurd number of small crew lounges and recreation spaces on every deck, easily removed to cram in new stuff.

The Constitution's time was limited from the day it was built, and even the refit could only do so much. Built before the Klingon war, wartime advancements led to the refit program to bring the Connies up to par and maintain the ship-of-the-line status for as long as they could. Once the fleet was back up to full operational strength (1/3 of the fleet probably took a good 15 years or more to rebuild, putting this timeline around the end of Kirk's 5-year mission), the Excelsior program was begun, and the Excelsior class isn't just massive for the sake of being massive. Learning from the limitations of the Constitution, t's got empty space enough for over 100 years worth of upgrades and refits and internal redesigns to keep up with technology in the same basic spaceframe.

The Miranda-class, meanwhile, had 2 major benefits that kept it in service and allowed it to be upgraded and refit many times. The first is its size; it's a heck of a lot faster and cheaper to build/refit these frigates than heavy cruisers with their enormous secondary hulls. And second, without the neck and secondary hull limiting what can be done to the existing hull without compromising structural integrity or inertial damping systems, you could slap additions or modules into, onto, basically anywhere on the ship you wanted to. You start out with a basic Knox-class frigate. The rollbar/pod and extended aft engineering section makes it a Miranda-class heavy frigate and solves a lot of those mission-specific alteration problems. The whole Miranda concept is just a modernized redesign of the decades-old Soyuz-class that was being retired from service right after the war.

As a bonus, when the Constitutions were eventually retired, the saucers could be easily refit into Knox- and Miranda-class frigates, and the warp nacelles switched over as well. So you might downgrade a ship in classification, but also extend its serviceable lifespan significantly for a bare minimum of manpower and materials cost. As the Excelsior replaced and eventually far exceeded the number of Constitutions, there was just no reason to keep the old beasts around.

The NCC-1701-D blueprints which were released toward the tail-end of TNG's television run / beginning of TNG's movie run (so mid-90s) show extensive dolphin environments aboard the starship. I think the accompanying documentation to those blueprints contains an extensive discussion of this particular feature of the ship as an example of something that was always part of its conception--from early-on in the show's history--but that they never were able to depict because of budgetary issues.


Aside: I think the closest we've gotten to seeing how these dolphin facilities would look like onboard a ship is from Seaquest DSV where they did show how the show's dolphin navigated through the body of the ship through special tunnels and had its own facility. I think the NCC-1701-D blueprints envision a much larger facility though -- large portions of one or more decks in the saucer section; though that's from memory, I could be incorrect.

When I lived in the dorms my sophomore year, I covered my walls entirely with blueprints of the Enterprise D. Needless to say, my roommate did not find himself complaining about all the sex I was having.