Vulcan Starships are Beautiful

[Imperator-zor]

This is a minor point, but one I'd like to make, in Enterprise we get to see the ships of the Vulcans before the Federation and frankly they are some of the best designs in Trek.
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There's a basic form (pointy front, ring shaped nacelle towards the rear, broken in the case of the Vahklas, lines that have a curve out and have an art deco look to them) to them and it's followed with variations on the theme. Compare and contrast that with, for example, the Romulans from the TNG era. When it comes to Romulan ships we have the D'deridex, a Science Ship, The Valdore class in Nemesis* and Shuttles. With the Cardassians we have the Galor class, the Galor class with a box glued on top, the Hideki class and the one shot missile from Voyager. These are not species of the week, but the principle players in on going story arcs. Over the course of Three Series their fleets were less developed than those of the Vulcans in Enterprise.

Say what you will about Enterprise but the ship designers and modelers did their job damn well.

*I'm not counting the Narada because that's a funky Borg/Romulan Hybrid made well after the end of the TNG Era and the Scimitar because that's a Remen design and Nemesis was crap. Nor does that Freighter design which was used by both the Klingons and the Cardies.

Zor

[Admiral X]

The D'Kyr is my favorite design out of all of them.

[Yukaphile]

The Sh'ran is my favorite.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

I like the scout. Underrated ship that gets looked over for the carrier due to comparable resource requirements.

[Darth Wedgius]

Does the D'Kyr remind anyone of the Orville?

[MissKittyFantastico]

I've always been particularly fond of the survey ship from 'Carbon Creek' - I adopted it as my runabout for Mass Effect roleplay (it's turian there), so it's kind of a sentimental fave.

The ENT designs are pretty solid, but the one thing I feel is missing is some connection between them and Starfleet. I mean, I know despite Starfleet being all multi-species (so far as the makeup budget allows) it's an Earth thing, but the Vulcans are founding Federation members and were around even before the Andorians and the Tellarites, it just strikes me as kind of weird that at some point they're just like "Welp, humanity's got their issues worked out as last - may as well just mothball the fleet and let Starfleet take it from here." As a for-instance, given NX-01's saucer and nacelles configuration, I think it would've been cool if a recurring thing with the Vulcan ships in ENT had been that they all have a primary/secondary hull configuration - so it'd seem like the Constitution class, and future Starfleet designs, and the result of the early 'Earth Starfleet' being married to Vulcan shipbuilding once the Federation properly brought them together.

Mind you I can't think of a way to do a secondary hull with a good-looking ring engine at the same time, and I love how the ring engines look (and that they play into the XCV-330 and the transports from 'Unification'), so there's that to consider too. I don't mind what they did, it's good work.

[abki]

Interesting, I always found that there was something about the Vulcan ships in Enterprise that rubbed me the wrong way. The colour combined with the obvious CGI maybe? Taking a closer look I guess they would be nice in a gray and bronze colour scheme.

The fact that the CGI bothers me is odd, as I'm quite fond of B5. I'm not sure if I'm just biased against Enterprise, or if Enterprise's CGI ships fell into an uncanny valley that B5 was able to avoid.