Star Trek: Every Starship Enterprise Ranked From WORST To BEST

2. NCC-1701/A

When Star Trek moved from the small screen to theatres, the original Enterprise underwent a number of conceptual refits. First, the ship was given more surface detail. While television screens of the 1960s were better suited to smooth ships, as evidenced in the Enterprise, the Romulan Bird of Prey, and the Klingon D-7 Battlecruiser. 

For The Motion Picture, while the Enterprise would receive an overhaul, the Klingon K'T'inga class was a highly detailed upgrade of the D-7. The theatrical age had reached Star Trek's filming models. A proposed Phase II series resulted in Jefferies doing a slight redesign to the original idea. The nacelles were changed from cylindrical to rectangular, now swept back rather than arching straight out from the hull. The saucer section was largely unchanged.

When Phase II became a film (thank you Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and Star Wars), a team that included Joe Jennings, Richard Taylor, Mike Minor, Jim Dow, Don Loos, Douglas Trumbull, Harold Michelson, and Andrew Probert were all involved in bringing together the result that is seen in drydock and beyond.

This version of the Enterprise is this writer's clear favourite of the bunch, a truly beautiful upgrade to what came before, and one so enduring that the filming model was reused as the subsequent Enterprise as well. Both the NCC-1701 and 1701-A are symbols of that era of Star Trek where the final frontier was a little wilder, a little more lawless, and delivered a lot of beauty shots that we still enjoy today.

We may not know what God needs with a starship, but we can certainly understand why they'd pick this one.