USS Farrington Freehand Study 1

I was almost tempted to classify this under "scraps," but because it does lay a vital groundwork for the reimagination process of the featured vessel, I've decided against it, even though the handiwork is so rough that I wouldn't classify it as art by anyone's definition!

This set of technical doodles was freehanded by me in the latter half of my lunch hour at Harvest Market on June 17th, 2009. It was an attempt to work out some very basic shapes for the complete redesign of a special ship: one of the protagonist vessels of my Star Trek fan multiverse, the United Space Ship "Farrington" (NX-2010).

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As mentioned in the descriptions of some of my other submissions, the Farrington hails from my "Delta-universe" or "Deltaverse," an alternate version of the parallel reality portrayed in J.J. Abrams' 2009 film "Star Trek."

(This explains why she is a whopping 1,140 meters long instead of the canon Excelsior-class' 467 meter length, because she's designed to maintain the same scale with the movie's 760m U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701 as the canon Excelsior maintained with the 289m U.S.S. Enterprise of her reality.

Abrams' U.S.S. Enterprise has not been given a definitive length yet, but various sources have given her overall length as anywhere from 600 meters, to 718 meters, to 752 meters, to even 900 meters. However, ILM art director, Alex Jaeger, gives a length from an early design chart on his blog of approximately 2,500 feet or 760 meters, and that's the size I'm using as it was also the one featured on the "Enterprise Tour" promotional website.)

She is one of the "Four Sisters," four highly advanced Excelsior-class test types used as experimental platforms for different categories of bleeding-edge technology that the Deltaverse Starfleet hastily reverse-engineered from the remains of a Terran Empire (Betaverse) starship that had emerged in their reality. Although NX-2010 was the second of the four sisters planned and laid down, due to her radical new reactors, power distribution networks, and drive systems, she was the last one completed and didn't receive her commission until August 5th, 2287/Stardate 2287.217.

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In reality, the U.S.S. Farrington NX-2010 was a kitbashed model built from a U.S.S. Excelsior NCC-2000 kit by the acclaimed modeler April Welles. Although the starship is no longer listed on the site now, she had a page on the website in the year 2001, the year I first began to put together the pieces for the earliest version of what would become the multiverse of "Dark Reflection."

Because she was kitbashed from the U.S.S. Excelsior, her appearance was very similar to that of the canon starship. However, her hull detailing was white and bright green instead of the bluish-grey and red the Excelsior filming model used, her warp engine nacelles were of the model used on the U.S.S. Enterprise (NCC-1701-B), and her dorsal interconnector (a.k.a. "neck") had been completely removed; instead, her primary and secondary hulls were mated together directly. I also believe that her saucer section mounted the two extra impulse engine fairings we saw on the rear of the Enterprise-B's saucer, but as I no longer have the photographs of the original ship that I saved nearly 8 years ago, I can't confirm that.

Furthermore, the "bulb" on the top of the secondary hull that on the original Excelsior was used to mount the warp nacelle support pylons had been converted into a more angular structure. A second "bulb" had been mounted on the underside of the secondary hull, and the warp nacelle struts now emerged from that bulb instead. The bulb on the dorsal side instead became the housing for the device that would become characteristic of the ship: her wormhole drive.

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You see, the original U.S.S. Farrington's backstory was directly tied to the incident in Star Trek: "The Motion Picture" where the U.S.S. Enterprise (refit) traveled through a wormhole by accident. Starfleet, noticing how much the wormhole cut travel time, decided to try to create a drive system that would duplicate this natural phenomenon and created the U.S.S. Farrington from a modified Excelsior hull as a test platform. Unfortunately, during her first test of the wormhole drive, the wormhole the vessel created intersected with the path formed by a naturally occuring one, flinging the ship into the Andromeda galaxy.

With the wormhole that threw them into this strange new world closing, the wormhole drive significantly damaged, and no plausible way to even tell Starfleet about what happened, the captain of the Farrington decided to explore the Andromeda galaxy in search of a way home.

A heavily modified version of this backstory would eventually be used by me to form one of the core segments of the "Dark Reflection" plot line, featuring the circumstances behind the Farrington's development, her adventures in Andromeda & the alliances her crew forms there, her return to Federation space, and her subsequent combat career against the Terran Empire.

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Aside from the overall change in the shapes that comprise her hull to be a little more in line with the aesthetics Ryan Church created for the movie starships, the biggest change that can be observed even in these inchoate drawings is that I've changed the physical arrangement of the mighty vessel's wormhole drive.

Instead of merely a small, bulb-like protrusion on the dorsal hull, the drive now takes the form of a semicircular ring structure connected to the vessel's warp nacelles, with a field stabilizer unit in the center of the half-ring. The ring is supported by a vertical pylon that then connects to the ship's dorsal bulb structure. The arrangement is bulkier and more vulnerable, but it better fits the nature of Starfleet's prototype wormhole technology as I'm portraying it.