Unpopular opinion: I'm glad The Delta got destroyed in ST: Generations. 1701-D was an overgrown minivan; bulky, ugly, a Range Rover of a star ship. The Epsilon is what I expect from the flagship of The United Federation of Planets, especially bearing the name Enterprise.
I mean I get why they did it, new sets, new ship etc, but it still doesn’t forgive the flagship got destroyed by a rusting camaro with vanity license plate weedmobile….
Damnit the Duras are the Han Solos in this.
It also has to be said between this and the DS9 ep The Jem’Hadar (which was just a few months prior) that saw the Galaxy-class Odyssey get punched in the face repeatedly. Starfleet definitely needed something new for a capital ship.
I love both the D and E for different reasons.
frontier001
In the books, in the aftermath of the Galaxy class kills in the Dominion War, and the one lost in TNG season 1, they established the ship had a critical design flaw to explain why so many blew up. 😆
I’d like to imagine if they’d known the borg were the next films villain, they’d have waited and sacrificed the ship to them, or something. But that’s hindsight. I do agree it was a 1987 starship though. Bloated minivan.
I’d forgotten about that.
The Big D’s interior design screamed hotel but I love the graceful lines of the exterior. I don’t fully agree with that old adage that the Enterprise-E looks like a plucked turkey (it’s got some good lines too) but I still love the Enterprise D’s graceful swan-lines. As far as I know, the Enterprise-D was the only ship that had families incorporated from the ground up (yes Saratoga had Jake and civilian Jennifer but it was not initially conceived for families, and Voyager always made it up as it went along) with classrooms, a full counseling staff (supposedly), a barber shop, and uhhh says here ambo-jitsu room.
As the show moved away from the season one ethos and view of the future, those pastels remained. Star Trek Generations showed about as much as you could modify those sets as well without tearing them down completely.
But I understand some of the practical reasons for tearing down the Enterprise. Part of the Enterprise-D sets like the hallways dated back from The Motion Picture (I think parts of sickbay also dated back from Wrath of Khan). They’d been standing for 15 years by Generations which was a long time for any set.
This I might be pulling out of my ass but out of the models themselves, only the six-footer (the one that separated and was built by ILM) was up to snuff for the feature film (the two and four footer were never meant for anything more detailed than television) and it was as I recall, unwieldy to film.
All that aside, doesn’t change the fact that the flagship got its ass handed to it by a decommissioned Bird of Prey.