Star Trek: 10 Most Unique Starfleet Ships
Starfleet's engineers have tried a lot of bizarre stuff over the years in Star Trek
Most Starfleet ships follow design trends set by the original Enterprise model from the '60s. You have a saucer-shaped primary hull attached to an elongated secondary hull that the engine nacelles extend out from. You can find these basic elements in countless starship classes, from the Galaxy-class to the Excelsior, the Intrepids, the Ambassadors, and many of the rest. Because of this, it's always exciting when Starfleet changes things up a bit and tries something different, even if it can backfire at times.
Throughout its history, Starfleet has come up with many unique designs, both beautiful and hideous. Here, we're going to go over some examples that stand out as particularly interesting, for better or for worse.
Whether they were kitbashed together in an afternoon or designed by a team of expert visual effects artists working around the clock, these are the most unusual Starfleet vessels we've seen in Star Trek.
10. Federation Tug Ships
Some of the strangest Starfleet ships come from kitbashing, a technique where model makers combine parts from several different pre-existing ships and other items to create something new. This method is a lot cheaper and faster than designing ships entirely from scratch, though it can lead to some interesting implications when we start to consider these ships canon.
The script for the DS9 episode A Time To Stand called for a shot of damaged Federation starships being towed away after a battle. A member of the production team, Judy Elkins, designed a Federation tow ship for this scene using several different model kits.
The tow looks fairly normal at first, but you can notice some strange details upon further inspection. The ship's nacelles aren't Federation in design, they actually come from a model of a D'deridex-class Romulan warbird, and they connect to the hull with a set of pylons from a USS Voyager model.