10 Reasons To Greenlight Star Trek: United NOW
9. Let's Talk About Ships, Baby
Flagships, Romulans, and Aenars, oh my!
Star Trek: United already has one of the crucial requirements for any Star Trek show: its own flagship.
Federation One: an Envoy-Class consular vessel. This civilian ship has the registry: U-F-P-Zero-One. It was designed by Star Trek concept artist Andrew Probert (he of Picard’s Enterprise-D and Kirk’s Motion Picture refit), who reached out to Mike Sussman after hearing the buzz around United. The brief resembled Air Force One with a pair of ample nacelles. This design was further brought to life in three dimensions by Emmy award-winning visual effects artist Robert Bonchune.
Federation One has another trick in its arsenal. She's two ships in one, with the upper section detaching from its warp sled, inspired by Spock's shuttle in The Motion Picture, suited for planetary landings.
With President Archer now mobile, the show could help to shed light on some of the greatest missing chapters in Star Trek's history. First of which is, of course, the Earth-Romulan War. This is a conflict never depicted in a film or series, yet it is so significant that it shaped galactic politics for centuries to come. As Sussman says:
The way I see it, the series would open with a flashback to a battle set during Enterprise’s sixth year out of spacedock — a season we never got to make. We’re aboard the NX-01 in the thick of the Romulan War. That immediately tells the audience: we’re finally giving you what we promised.
Sussman also promised his series would finally answer one of the franchise’s most enduring mysteries: why did no one in Captain Kirk’s time, a century later, know what a Romulan looked like? According to Sussman, it’s not a plot hole — it’s a story waiting to be told.