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The Consitution Class


Her incarnations as the Enterprise in the original series started the Trek ball rolling. She lived on in Trek movies 1-3, and as the Enterprise-A in movies 4-6. Then there's her 'missing' incarnation from the Phase II Trek series that never was.

I'll use this terminology on Constitution versions & variants, just to keep things straight:

  1. TOS Pilot episode, "The Cage"
  2. TOS Production
  3. Star Trek Phase II
  4. Star Trek Movie 1 low-detail pre-production appearance
  5. Star Trek Movies 1-6

Consitution I
Differences from Constitution II

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Consitution II
Overall views of the ship:

This Old Starship, an Air & Space Magazine Article on the 1992 refurbishing of the 11-foot Enterprise model in the Smithsonian.

See CultTVman's SF Modeling Page for several photographs of the lady as she hangs in the Smithsonian.

The Trials & Tribble-ations Enterprise, saucer bow/topside shot (50k)

To Grid, or not to Grid...

Details on the

CG Rendered image (48k) from the 2001 "Ships of the Line" calendar. Seeing this, I'm ready for Paramount to make special edition DVDs of some of the original episodes - The Ultimate "Ultimate Computer," anyone?

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Consitution III
This may be open to debate... but this image was on a 'Blooper Show' poster in 1981 or '82.

Model Citizen Thomas Minihan wrote in with this bit of tid about the picture & poster:
The starship design on the bloopers poster came from a Paramount promo film released to theaters in either late 1978, or 1979. The film showcased upcoming movies from Paramount, and STAR TREK-THE MOTION PICTURE was one of them. The ship was a painting that crossed the screen from left to right.

There are also some images in the books, The Art of Star Trek and the Phase II book showing the partially-completed model. The bridge section appears similar to that later used for the U.S.S. Bozeman on TNG.

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Consitution IV
Another debatable... some of the STMP publicity pictures released prior to the first movie showed an Enterprise with considerably less detail than ended up on the model actually used for STMP. It had (see image) a saucer superstructure similar to Constitution II's and lacked the self-illumination ports around the bridge & lower domes - shown in these images 1 | 2.

From Model Citizen Bob Mosley, comes this bits'o'tid:
Constitution IV: ...when Robert Abel's group was fired from the film - they'd only completed *one* SFX shot in almost two years of production - Doug Trumbull was brought in to get things back on track. A lot of the additional details were added by Doug's team, including the bottom dome lights.

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Consitution V
No debate here - this version definitely existed. The outside remained pretty much unchanged throughout the movies, though the interior was constantly being upgraded.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture

These nine images are sections from a large poster photo of the TMP Enterprise:

TMP Enterprise
Same links, for non-graphical browsers:

Saucer Stbd
Saucer Port
Starboard Nacelle
Saucer Center
Connecting Dorsal
Nacelle Strut
Saucer Superstructure
Secondary Hull
Port Nacelle

Also, here are images from the kit box of...

This is the CG version (49k) of the ship for the new upcoming special edition release of TMP.

Close-up on the secondary hull (50k)

The Wrath of Khan


Port Nacelle

Command Decks

Starboard Nacelle

Secondary Hull & Lower Dorsal

Impulse Engine & Upper Dorsal

The Search for Spock

ST3 Enterprise; bow shot
Starboard Part of Saucer | Saucer Center & Secondary Hull front | Port Part of Saucer

The Voyage Home

The Final Frontier

The Undiscovered Country

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