BEHIND-THE-SCENES
DESIGNING USS EQUINOXarticle accompanying [EQUINOX] Episodes 120 and 121
BEHIND-THE-SCENES
DESIGNING USS EQUINOXarticle accompanying [EQUINOX] Episodes 120 and 121
The similarity between the drawing of the Defiant Pathfinder in the book DS9 Technical Manual and USS Equinox NCC-72381 was no accident. When Rick Sternbach, [Star Trek: Voyager]'s resident senior illustrator, received the script for [Equinox, Part One] he saw that it called for a small Starflect science vessel that was supposed to be relatively modern. Because nothing suitable had been designed before, he started work on creating a new ship.
Rick Sternbach's design sketch for the Defiant Pathfinder. He designed only one half of the ship as Doug Drexler would then mirror it to produce the other side.
The Defiant Pathfinder final version as finished by Doug Drexler, using the graphics program Adobe Illustrator, for the DS9 Technical Manual.
I began roughing out shapes for a ship that was at least as old as Voyager (as opposed to a new ship like the Prometheus), and perhaps a couple of years older. The Oberth class came to mind as a starting point, but that one was at least 80 years old. While I was drawing I was also thinking, 'Small Starflect ship ... smaller ship ... what small ships can I study? Hmmm...' And then it dawned on me that I already had one that had never been used before.
| The ship Rick Sternbach refers to is something he came up with when he was writing the DS9 Technical Manual. In the section on the Defiant he wanted to develop a backstory for Starfleet's first warship, so, working backward from Jim Martin's finished design, he created a prototype version of the Defiant that was a little more closely related to conventional Starflect vessels. |
| I kept some of the shapes, like the two rows of circular widgets behind the bridge, the bridge area itself, and the forward curve of the hulljust behind the nose extension. My intent was to imagine that the admirals running the Advanced Starship Design Bureau [ASDB] needed a fast torpedo ship, something akin to the 'Borg Buster' we heard the writers were looking for at one time. I theorized that plans were drawn up at ASDB, but somewhere along the way the mission requirements changed. The basic specs were sound, but modifications were needed to protect the ship from massive weapons fire, hence the tucked-in look of the nacelles and the big shells round them on the finished Defiant. All the normally 'vulnerable' parts of a starship were plated over. | Rick Sternbach's design below shows the addition of familiar Starfleet components such as phaser strips and transporter emitters. He replaced the twin torpedo launcher at the front of the ship with a sensor platform.
Tim Earl's final sketch below shows a developed version of the Equinox. It has eight decks, the shuttlebay is at the rear of the ship, and the warp core is located in the centre. |
USS Equinox colour design sketch. Source: ST DVD
As this prototype had never been used on screen, and since it was a small ship, it seemed ideal. He needed something to show Peter Lauritson, [Star Trek: Voyager]'s supervising producer, so he took a photocopy of the Defiant Pathfinder and put it next to a top view of Voyager in scale. Lauritson was pleased with the design and gave him the go-ahead.
USS Equinox. Fore view. Source: ST:M.
USS Equinox. Dorsal view. Source: ST:M.
USS Equinox. Port view. Source: ST:M.
Although the Equinox is basically the same as the prototype Defiant, Rick Sternbach had to make a few changes. Specifically, he wanted to show that the Equinox was a science vessel, so he removed the six torpedo launchers and replaced them with the large sensor arrays you would expect to find on a science ship. One thing that stayed the same was the recessed bridge. As on the Defiant the bridge is protected by a circular wall, which can give the illusion that it takes up the whole of deck 1.
 USS Equinox. Ventral view. Source: ST:M. |
When he had done his original drawing for the DS9 Technical Manual Rick Sternbach had not bothered to work out what the underside of the ship looked like, so, when he drew the final blueprints he decided to maintain a Star Trek tradition.
I decided to continue the trend of giving some Starflect ships a large shuttle-like embedded craft, such as the captain's yacht on the Enterprise-D and -E, and the aeroshuttle |
Once Rick Sternbach had made the changes, he handed his work to Digital Muse, the company that would build the Equinox as a computer-generated (or CG) model.
Orthographic views were definitely needed in order to build a CG model of the ship, so I worked those up on tracing vellum. All of the typical Starflect hull parts were called out, and colors and lighting specs were furnished to visual effects. Eddic Robinson from Digital Muse built the model based on my drawings, and after a couple of over-the-shoulder sessions, and discussions on colors and markings, the ship came out of LightWave almost exactly as drafted. |
 USS Equinox. Fore view. Source TOSTFF.
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USS Equinox. Port view. Source TOSTFF.
Click to enlarge.
USS Equinox. Port view schematic. Source ST:M (I have mirrored it).
Once the model had been built, there was one last thing to do: smash it up! In the story it was vital the audience could see the Equinox had been under attack for a long time, so it needed to be obviously damaged. Fortunately, Rick Sternbach says, creating damage is something that computer modeling programs excel at.
The CG model was initially built pristine, and then the textures were altered to look burnt and broken. From what I've seen in LightWave, you can subdivide a group of polygons where, say, you want to make it appear that a phaser hit has smashed away bits of the hull plating, and remove or distort those polygons until they look twisted, vaporized, and so on. Some of the digital modeling tools are quite remarkable.
Understanding that a few fans might wonder how a prototype warship and a science vessel could look so similar, Rick even went to the trouble of coming up with a backstory that linked the Equinox and the Defiant.
To my way of thinking, Starflect looked at a number of possibilities for the Nova-class science vessel, and dug out the Defiant Pathfinder design, which had never been built (though it did undergo a number of changes before they started cutting tritanium). The ASDB decided that the original Pathfinder could be adapted for use as a science ship, replacing the torp launchers with sensor platforms, etc. This could have occurred almost simultaneously with the decision to change the Pathfinder into the final Defiant; perhaps some ASDB officer said, 'Say, Bob, since you're not using this one, can I have it for the Nova class development cycle?' Both the Nova and Defiant classes could have been in work at least two years (and maybe more like four) before the Defiant first appeared on DS9, so a finished Nova-class vessel could have run through the yard build in plenty of time for Captain Ransom to have taken command and gotten yanked into the Delta Quadrant.
USS Equinox. Dorsal view. Source TOSTFF.
Click to enlarge. USS Equinox, dorsal view schematic. Source ST:M.
USS Equinox. Ventral view. Source TOSTFF.
 USS Equinox - screenshots, specifications and schematics
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