I was requested to design a Star Trek Federation starship to help inspire a fan fiction writer. The brief was that it had to look like it was from the near future of the Trek universe, some time around 2400, should keep with the established look of the future ships yet retain the qualities of Kirk's enterprise, and that it would be capable of slipstream travel, as seen in Voyager. Other than that I was free to make it look however I liked.

Slipstream is different from the type of faster-than-light travel most associated with the Star Trek franchise, warp drive - it involves navagating extra dimensional tunnels. Basically, it was a story device to make the Borg faster than the good guys. I suppose in the 21st century plodding zombies didn't seem to cut it. Anyway, so in Star Trek Voyager there was a ship(The Dauntless) specifically designed to use these spacial tunnels and I used it as a basis for my first few designs.

I started by sketching lots of rough ideas, trying out ways of using the Dauntless' general shape. The arrow shaped 'saucer section' and nacelles tucked underneath some kind of marine animal.

The numbered drawings are the ones we liked the most, which I further developed. I suppose this led me into a few tangents, continuing with the arrow shape, but also the more biological designs in the second and third pictures below. In the end those ones were decided to be a little too advanced for the time period of the story and not as identifiable as Starfleet ships.

Now it seemed to be down to two designs, the arrowshape and the more rounded one(which I found quite tricky to draw). I much prefered the former, but the writer I was designing the ship for was still fond of the round saucer.

So I merged the two designs.

The indents on the 'saucer' section are the Slipstream engines, based vaguely on the blue grills on the engines of the Dauntless. The rear ends of the warp nacelles are also supposed to reflect the tapering of the Dauntless'. I made a few more drawings of the ship, schematics, a dedication plaque and drew the Independence and Volition, two similar ships that may have been launched by Starfleet at around the same time. My schematics came out a bit wonky and don't represent the Enterprise exactly how I envision it, but I'm not that practiced in 2D drawing. I much prefer my 3D sketches of the ship. The alternate version of the Starfleet embelem is by Scott Benson, the rest of the dedication plaque was made by me in Adobe Photo Deluxe. As you may notice, the vessel in the battle picture is not the Enterprise, but USS Pinnacle, another Revelation Class starship. Some other ships of the class are; Deliverance, Destiny, Liberty, Salvation, Serenity, Tenacity and Victory. The crew number is around 300, it's classed as an explorer and the prototype vessel, Revelation, was launched in 2403.

I also tried to make a CGI model of the Enterprise, but not being very skilled in 3D modelling yet it was kind of simplistic. But it came in useful for working out how the ship would look from different angles. I hope to make a more accurate model in the future. I had to recreate the slipstream effect for the background of the fifth picture as any screencaps would have been too grainy.

The writer(I'm starting to make him sound mysterious calling him that...) had this to say, "I was blown away by the final designs and they exceeded my expectations. John Pearse has a true, genuine talent and he shouldn't let it go to waste."