Star Trek: 10 Secrets Of Strange New Worlds' Enterprise You Need To Know

As we stated previously, Star Trek: Discovery's art department went to great lengths to flesh out their updated USS Enterprise design, much more so than any other "ship of the week". The artists also worked out the reasons for the redesign, describing her as an earlier version of the same ship that would one day be commanded by Captain James T. Kirk and appear in The Original Series.

Officially licensed material, like Eaglemoss' Star Trek: Discovery Starships Collection, even describe the Discovery-era Enterprise as "the same ship that Kirk commanded at an earlier stage of its life, before several refits."

However, changes to the scale of the ship (which make her nearly twice the size of her "future" TOS counterpart), makes this a difficult concept to reconcile. Did the Discovery-era Enterprise shrink to become the iconic TOS starship? Or maybe Kirk's Enterprise is buried deep within the revamped hull we've seen in Discovery?

Probably not.

With appearances of this "new" Enterprise in Short Treks "Ephraim and Dot" (which takes place in the TOS-era) and as a holographic model in Star Trek: Picard's "Maps and Legends", it would seem these episodes are actually telling us something different: This new Enterprise design isn't an older design, it's not a refit or a pre-fit, it's simply just the Enterprise. It's the way the Enterprise has always looked, we just didn't know it.

Despite the Star Trek Universe being a fairly cohesive one, this isn' the first changed premise or continuity revision the franchise has undergone. Remember lasers and emotional Spock in "The Cage"? Remember the way the Borg looked in TNG versus how they looked in Star Trek: First Contact, Voyager, and Enterprise? Remember James R. Kirk?

That being said, overwriting the original, iconic look of the USS Enterprise is a big decision and the producers have been pretty cagey about it. According to Alex Kurtzman:

Obviously it looks more modern than The Original Series, because we are in a modern world now and if we made the show look that way people would not feel that it was worth the money. That being said, every prop and costume design is filtered through what existed at the time... But, obviously we wanted to create a more modern experience and that necessitated certain adjustments.

Cutting to the chase: She's a retcon.