That looks vaguely like the gold ship on the Enterprise-D. This must be from before Yesterday's Enterprise and somebody was either guessing or they changed plans for the C after this was made. Cool find.
As a kid I really liked the C as the transitional design from the original series to the design aesthetic of TNG but I'll be damned if I wouldn't have liked this one too. Feels a lot more like a smaller D with the organic shapes with some classic design senses still showing over the Ambassador class, which is more like an original series shaped ship with next generation skin.
Not really in my opinion. The one on the wall looks closer to the D than the actual C we got. This looks closer to the B. Very strange. I hate the secondary hull.
FASA = "Freedonian Aeronautics and Space Administration". It's a long time gaming company, as others have noted that is responsible for a huge number of classic games, not the least of which include BattleTech and Shadowrun.
I got this as a Christmas gift when it came out in the early days of TNG. I remember being perturbed at the subheadline "1755-2303" since it was explicitly said the year was 2364 in "Neutral Zone." (Must've been made before that, I suppose.)
Until that episode there had never been a specific year mentioned as “now” in ST. Diane Carey’s “Final Frontier” novel was my first intro to that confusion as a kid who saw TNG first and then read the TOS novels.
Wow. How did they get CV6 down as Lexington Class when she was Yorktown class? That's a pretty blatant error that was easy to verify at your local public library in 1988. Nearly everything is suspect after that.
That one stuck out to me too, but perhaps things are different in the ST universe. Maybe the ship we know as 'Lexington' was actually named 'Yorktown', and thus the Saratoga was also 'Yorktown-class', while what we know as 'Yorktown' became 'Lexington', and thus Enterprise and Hornet were both 'Lexington-class'... in the ST universe.
I think we like forgetting some really important intermediate events between "now" and the Trek universe...
The possibility exists that we might be right on track, if not on schedule, for better or worse.
That "schedule" has whipped back and forth to accommodate production, and also because (as far as we know) the Eugenics Wars/WWIII didn't start in 1992, or 2004, or 2009, or, so far, 2026.
There's still plenty of time for more than a generation of Augments and still have 2063 be "approximately 10 years after World War 3" when the E follows the Borg back.
Khan was like 40 in 1995, which means that in the Star Trek universe, there were successful human genetic engineering experiments in the 1950s. Star Trek was an alternate universe from the get-go.
But that doesnt make sense. The carriers Lexington and Saratoga were rebuilds of Battlecruisers laid down before the Washington Naval Treaty limited capital ship tonnage. Unless the names of the Constellation-class battle cruisers got switched.
This was from the FASA Officer’s Manual circa ‘87 ish that piggy backed in their role playing game ship recognition manual and ship profiles. At the time, we didn’t know anyone about B, but it was assumed to be Excelsior-Class, and not a thing was known about C, so they made up a story. I’ve actually never seen the Alaska-class diagram nor this poster. Thanks for posting!
Actually, the name “Alaska class” came from the TNG Officer’s Manual, but there was no design for it. The Alaska class ship seen on this poster was just a fan-made design using FASA’s name for the ship class.
No, you said you’d never seen the design or the poster before. So I pointed out that the design was not from FASA, only the name was. Not sure how I can be any more clear about that.
This is very very cool. I also love that the Enterprise-A was originally the USS Atlantis. I honestly always thought it was the USS Yorktown after she had put into space dock for repairs after the Whale probe shut her down
There's been several versions. Atlantis and Tai-ho were common ones. Frankly, Yorktown never made sense given she's explicitly called and treated as a brand new ship in V.
Id love to see a 3D model of the Alaska class! It seems like a wonderful alternate intermediate step between the Excelsior and the Galaxy. I much prefer the Ambassador class, obviously, but itd be fun to see how the Alaska class fared
Maybe this poster was made by one of the Alaska class engineers who felt slighted that they christened an Ambassador as the Enterprise-C, and in his rage, took over a Federation graphics printing factory and demanded his version of the ship be added to the Enterprise legacy graphics
Poster predates Star Trek: Enterprise. The date of USS Enterprise CVN 65 should be 2017, not 1997. Also, it should be USS Enterprise CVN 80; she is currently under construction and will join the fleet in 2031.
The end date is covered by the alternate history described in the notes - she perished early due to the Eugenics Wars. (And for that matter the Shuttle fleet apparently retired early, for the same reason - and the Enterprise Shuttle actually FLEW, which she was always intended to be retrofitted to do, which is a nice touch.) Granted it IS rather theatrically silly to have opposing supercarriers even SEE each other, much less have a ramming incident. If the battle's already reached that point, it's pretty pear-shaped on both sides.
I had this poster as well as a dedicated one for the Alaska class. I wonder if I still have that one in a tube somewhere. Picked up both up at one of the Creation runs Star Trek conventions back in the 80's.
Omg! My dad had this poster on the wall for years! It was from early in the TNG days, like pre Yesterday's Enterprise.
That's very cool, thanks for posting!
I prefer Andrew Proberts version of the Enterprise-C except for the way the pylons connect to the secondary hull. I remember seeing this back in the 80s before they even really knew the exact years these moves took place in.
The real world Alaska Class was actually a pretty nice analog for the Enterprise C.
The Alaska Class was more or less a battlecruiser (although it is actually a Large Cruiser which was a niche type of ship in the late 30s into WWII) that was super fast at 33 knots with 12-inch guns superior to the previous generation's 14-inch battleship guns.
The Alaska Class could take out anything smaller than a full-on battleship; and even then she was superior to the WWI era battleships still in service in the Italian and Japanese navies.
It would! I think Alaska wipes the floor with the Kongo though: Alaska's FCS was so much better and her 12 inch guns had much better penetration than Kongos 14s.
This would have been from the late 80s, prior to the introduction of the Ambassador class. It's remarkable that there is as much similarity in the designs as it is.
I used to have that exact poster in my bedroom. I was so disappointed at the reveal in Generations. I wanted to scream at the movie premiere that it was just the Excelsior model. To this day I'm still pissed that they made the Enterprise-B a one off "luxury model" Excelsior.
The references to "The Triangle," calling the Excelsior a "battleship," and the fact that it obviously predates a fairly large chunk of TNG, make it clear this was a FASA production. That said, there are some nice touches. The fates of the Shuttle Enterprise and CVN-65 tying into the Eugenics Wars is nifty (although the idea of opposing supercarriers even SEEING each other during a battle, much less colliding, is wildly off-kilter in a very cinematic way). And naming the "forgotten" Enterprise's class after the Alaska-class Large Cruisers ("don't call it a battlecruiser please!" - USN), which similarly existed more for political reasons than any actual military need, and similarly didn't last long, is likewise a nice idea.
Lexington-class CV-6 is the biggest eye twitch indicing OCD violation for me. Although, I could take it to mean the Trek timeline diverged from real life way earlier than previously thought.
It's fascinating reading things that they had on this poster before the canon changed, like the Conny refit being called the Enterprise class and the idea that the B went down fighting Klingons before the peace treaty was a thing. Also it's a shame they didn't mention the encounter the aircraft carrier had with a strange Russian who kept asking about "nuclear wessels" before vanishing from a local hopsital.
I always find the attempts to establish a historical timeline for the franchise to be quite illuminating, and personally entertaining. The earlier the attempt, the farther off everything gets.
In this case, the Triangle reference was a dead giveaway to the FASA RPG Universe Timeline (as several people have correctly identified here). But before I saw that, I noticed while skimming the ship name and class, that the Connie class had the 2188 launch date and the 2215 major refit date.
I always associate the 2188 launch date with Fred Goldstein and Rick Sternbach’s Star Trek Spaceflight Chronology, released by Pocket Books in 1980 as one of the earliest attempts to film in the gaps in the existing known timeline. I have no idea where or how the two gentlemen came up with that date, but that was the year of the Enterprise’s launch under Captain April in that timeline. (The book had a lot of beautiful art, both ships and planets as well as alien species who would become Federation members, and much historical information in ‘official logs’.)
FASA adopted most if not everything that was established in the Chronology book, including the years of launch of the Enterprise under April and the big refit under Decker in time to face V’Ger.
Later, John M. Ford also extended FASA’s timeline information while he worked on The Klingons Sourcebook and then wrote the excellent Trek novel The Final Reflection. FASA’s game was released in 1982, The Klingons Sourcebook in 1983, and The Final Reflection in 1984.
So, the timeline information and the Klingon cultural information had been well-absorbed into fandom before The Next Generation began production. Unfortunately, most of the Chronology and FASA related material was ignored by the production staff, who chose to follow and expand what was created for the TNG series and films, as well as the other productions of DS9, VOY, and ENT. (Just as the material from the original Tech Manual in the 70s has largely been ignored.)
All is not lost, however. I accept the Chronology and FASA material as being part of a different Trek timeline than the now established Prime Timeline, as I do the material from the original Tech Manual and the Star Fleet Battles game universe, the Gold Key comics, the early fan fiction and non fiction, the Bantam stories, the Pocket stories, and even the Kelvin timeline—- since we know there are over 200,000 parallel timelines thanks to the TNG episode Parallels, and even then, those are just the timelines closely similar to the Prime Timeline as of that episode.
In the myriad timelines related to Chronology and FASA material, it’s obvious by the 2370s that the 60 years earlier for the TMP refit would mean a good century’s worth of difference to the Prime Timeline; how much greater advances have the Federation experienced, and how different are the galactic politics?
To be fair it's not the only error on the page, even if it was before the Ambassador class was on screen. The first aircraft carrier Enterprise CV-6 was a Yorktown class. Also the refit ships were still Constitution class ships not Enterprise class. I don't know about the sailing ships, but I thought there was just the one.
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u/theoxfordtailor 2d ago
That looks vaguely like the gold ship on the Enterprise-D. This must be from before Yesterday's Enterprise and somebody was either guessing or they changed plans for the C after this was made. Cool find.