Star Trek: 10 Secrets Of Enterprise NX-01 You Need To Know

With much of Enterprise taking inspiration from the birth of warp drive as seen in Star Trek: First Contact, the NX-01 herself was notoriously influenced by Alex Jaeger's Akira-class USS Thunderchild from that movie.

While the producers apparently toyed with the idea of using the relatively obscure ship wholesale as the NX-01, cooler heads prevailed and the designers merely used the ship for inspiration.

Though many identifiable characteristics of the Thunderchild made their way into the NX-01 (the twin booms, the notch in the front of the saucer, the pod between the engines), Doug Drexler believes the ships were less similar than some critical fans believed:

I took a lot of flak [for how similar the ships were]... If you put the Akira next to the NX they really don’t look the same. But the one thing that it does have are the twin booms, like the P38 Lightning. That was the perfect idea to not have a secondary hull and Starfleet had done it already. To freak out and get pissed off because this came from the Akira, that’s crazy... Just look at Starfleet ships, the whole aesthetic is they borrow from one another, it’s mix and match.