When production designer Joe Jennings and art director Mike Minor got to create the first Federation starship besides the Enterprise to be featured in a Star Trek movie, they tackled the project and its problems with gusto.
“In the dogfight, you had to instantly recognize which ship you were looking at, so they had to look different,” Joe Jennings told Star Trek: The Magazine in 2002. “At the same time, you had to make them look like they came from the same culture and had the same technology. We had long postulated that the circular saucer said, ‘This is Starfleet navy,’ and it used engines that looked pretty much like those on the Enterprise.”
From these starting points, they developed a ship that was shorter, lacking a secondary hull. They sent sketches of the new ship to executive producer Harve Bennett who approved them, but not quite the way they imagined.
“We were mailing everything over to him and getting him to approve it and mail it back to us,” graphic designer Lee Cole told Star Trek: The Magazine, “so we did our first sketch of the ship and mailed them off to him. When he got it in the mail he took it out of the package upside down, I guess, and wrote out on the bottom, ‘Yes, this looks very good, proceed.’ So when we got it back we realized he’d approved it upside down.”
The design team was unable to reach Bennett (who was out of the country) to clarify his decision and instead opted to simply the flip their design and add a “roll bar” to create the Reliant we now see in the Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
images scanned from the They Boldly Went archives. If you appreciate our ongoing mission to provide unique Star Trek content, please consider supporting this blog on Patreon.
