(Note: If Star Trek had architecture critics, they would write about starship design. This essay is intended as an in-fiction critique of the Excelsior class of starships. Any canon mistakes are the fault of the author.)
Transwarp Drive was supposed to change everything.
Imagine a starship capable of going so fast, it is technically everywhere in the galaxy at once. What would it even mean to be a part of the Federation, or the Klingon or Romulan empires if traveling from star to star was as simple as walking from room to room?
Starfleet was so enamored of this idea they built an entire ship just to serve as the Transwarp Drive’s test-bed. Enthusiastic onlookers might be forgiven for calling it “The Great Experiment.” This moniker somehow manages to still be less dramatic than the actual name chosen by Starfleet Command — Excelsior, a Latin phrase meaning “ever upward.”
Despite being an experiment, Excelsior’s design is immediately familiar thanks to the saucer-and-nacelles layout the Starfleet Corps of Engineers loves so much. But the longer you look at it, the more odd it seems in comparison to a more conventional design. Much depends upon the viewer’s angle. Everything seems perfectly conventional from above, below or behind, but a side or front view can be jarring for the unprepared.
The saucer section is a good example of this. It seems unremarkable at first, but its connection to the rest of the ship is downright odd to look at. A segment originating from the bridge goes straight back and down to the main hull, making it look like the saucer is held in a vise grip. And to this day, no one has been able to properly explain to me the odd outer covering in the connection leading down to the main hull. It is as if the ship is wearing a turtleneck sweater.
A technically-minded person will instantly point to the deflector dish, if they can find it. Rather than a dominant part of the main hull, advances in shield technology allow it to be recessed from the front of the main hull. The ship almost looks like it has been carved around it, as if by a skilled furniture maker. Deflector dishes have been one of the most prominent parts of large starships for decades. Excelsior makes its dish seem more like a stylish accent.
The hull containing the dish is extremely unconventional. About a third of the way to its aft, it begins to smoothly taper upward into a thin sliver. It creates an impressive profile if you are viewing the ship from a side angle. But the effect is completely lost from almost all other vantage points and one wonders why the engineers even bothered with the effect when a cylindrical hull would have afforded the ship more space.
The same could also be said about the nacelles, whose struts take off directly out of the main hull, before jolting upward at an almost 90 degree angle. This would end up being a lasting design choice that would make it as far as the Galaxy class, but I doubt anyone would be able to explain why.
But that’s Excelsior. Nothing about the ship is practical. If it were, it would’ve been built at both a fraction of the size and effort as a better test for Transwarp. Then it would be less shocking when it broke down on its first trip out of Spacedock. What was originally thought to be sabotage by the chief engineer turned out to be a major theoretical miscalculation. Transwarp Drive, at least in the 23rd century, was not to be.
But the ship that was strange in all the wrong places did not die with it. After being retrofitted with a more conventional warp core, the ship became a class originator for many other vessels that received heavy service in Starfleet throughout the rest of the century. Was Starfleet simply being thrifty, trying to recoup their investment? Undoubtedly. But it was also desperate for something new.
In many ways, the notoriety of the original Enterprise created a bit of a monolith out of the Constitution class. It became people’s idea of what a starship should look like. How else do you explain the decision to rebuild NCC 1701-A as a Constitution class again. From a design standpoint, Starfleet was bankrupt.
Which is why, for all its strangeness and its defunct propulsion system, Excelsior was a good thing for Starfleet. It shook things up and cleared the path for greater accomplishments.
Transwarp failed, but Excelsior continued ever upward (or whatever relative direction you happen to perceive as up in zero gravity).
