Star Trek: 10 Secrets About The USS Dauntless You Need To Know
2. Quantum Leap
Oh boy is the USS Dauntless one speedy ship. In its one and only appearance for Voyager, it's announced that the NX-01-A is equipped with an experimental quantum slipstream drive which makes it, to use Spock's words, "Go fast".
The blue hue to the front of the Delta Quadrant Dauntless is its slipstream drive and the same feature is replicated on the hull of the full Starfleet NCC-80816.
The effect of the slipstream itself was the work of Foundation Imaging and Adam "Mojo" Lebowitz who got that the concept was speed right from the beginning. Part of the reason that the Voyager USS Dauntless was made in CGI was down to time but the other was due to how the ship would distort when it made the jump to slipstream. That in itself would be difficult to achieve on a physical model.
Quantum slipstream was then envisaged as a computer-generated tunnel through which the Dauntless would travel. It had to be new and different and something that made the audience aware that the starship was travelling in a different way to standard warp speeds. It was also purposely made transparent so that viewers wouldn't think that the ships were inside a kind of "big solid superslide".