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

While Enterprise aka Star Trek: Enterprise prematurely ended its run after its fourth season (and the regrettable "These Are The Voyages..."), the NX-01 saw new life six years later when the SS Enterprise refit debuted in the 2011 Star Trek: Ships of the Line calendar.

Though this was a new and exciting development for fans at the time, according to Doug Drexler, the refit was part of the ship's design from the very beginning:

If you look at the NX, the proportions are almost the same as the 1701 because the idea is that it’s growing towards that design… We knew we’d make it more primitive by just taking the saucer and the nacelles and they would eventually build up to an engineering section. Everything in Star Trek is like that, look at the phaser, it’s got the pistol phaser and the hand phaser that goes on the top, the battery pack goes on the bottom. The Enterprise was the same way, it was modular… So while I was designing it, I was taking the secondary and placing it underneath and adjusting the symmetry of it to work with the secondary hull from day one.

Doug said that he believed the refit design helped to turn around fans who were previously turned off by the NX-class Enterprise:

Usually I found that as fans found out there was a plan, they started to fall in love with the whole idea. Once they saw the refit, the NX won over a lot of people because they loved having that “aha” moment when it’s like “Really? I didn’t realize that!”