Star Trek: 10 Secrets Of Strange New Worlds' Enterprise You Need To Know
Everything we know about Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' new/old USS Enterprise.
With Paramount+'s recent ad campaign featuring tantalizing slash slightly humorous appearances by Anson Mount's Captain Pike and Ethan Peck's Lieutenant Spock, anticipation for the upcoming Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is at an all-time high.
We don't know much about Strange New Worlds yet beyond the casting of Mount, Peck, and Rebecca Romijn as Number One, but we do know the show will take a classic Trek approach by giving us optimistic, standalone episodes with a "modern character sensibility". We also know that the design sensibility will be similarly modernized to fit alongside Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard in the ever expanding revitalized Star Trek Universe.
Our best clues for what Strange New Worlds will look and feel like come from Star Trek: Discovery's Red Angel storyline, which heavily featured Pike, Spock, Number One and a fittingly Disco-fied reimagining of the USS Enterprise by John Eaves, Scott Schneider, William Budge, and Todd Cherniawsky. Appearing in just a handful of episodes of Discovery and several Short Treks, the Discovery-verse Enterprise quickly became a fan favorite, balancing fidelity to Matt Jefferies' original design with seamless incorporation of shiny new features.
We fully expect to learn a ton of new information about this ship once Strange New Worlds starts boldly going, but there are still stories to tell about this version of the Enterprise... ten secrets, in fact, about Star Trek: Strange New World's USS Enterprise that you need to know.
10. They Love To Change Things
The redesign of the USS Enterprise was a massive undertaking and a labor of love by several behind-the-scenes staff members late in the production of Star Trek: Discovery's first season.
Veteran Trek illustrator John Eaves along with concept designer Scott Schneider, VFX art director William Budge, and production designer Todd Cherniawsky collaborated to flesh out as much of the Enterprise as they could, despite a meager 18 seconds of screen time in her first appearance in Discovery's first season finale.
Changes made to Matt Jefferies' original design included tweaking her proportions to reflect the elongated look of the starship Discovery, the application of more convincing and detailed hull paneling, glowing engine grilles (an element Gene Roddenberry had wanted for TOS), and modifying parts of the ship to match the standing USS Discovery sets which would double for certain parts of the Enterprise's interior. The ship was also regressed in appearance in an effort to make her feel slightly less advanced than her sleeker 1960s configuration, with several elements of the 22nd century Enterprise NX-01 (hull plating, color, and engine details) incorporated throughout.
In-universe, the thinking was that Kirk's Enterprise would evolve from the starship featured in Star Trek: Discovery, with elements like the impulse deck, warp nacelles, and bridge all considered replaceable parts which could be updated and refined to someday look like they did in TOS. According to John Eaves:
We were trying to do things that implied that it could transition to the original Matt Jefferies ship later on. We wanted to create links with ships that had come before.