Updating a Star Trek Icon

From the moment it debuted on the big screen in Star Trek: First Contact, the Akira-class starship has been a fan favorite. This may be due in part to the extra attention the production team gave it, thanks to its screen time in the movie. Featuring an aggressive posture and a lot of practical details, it appears to slot in between the grand, sweeping peacetime era of the Galaxy-class and the new generation of Starfleet ships represented by the Sovereign-class. This starship design by Alex Jaeger is definitely one of my favorites, but when I decided to model it, I wanted to make some changes.

First, I thought parts of the silhouette could be smoothed out. When we talk about detail on Starfleet ships, it’s usually not in the form of little widgets and “greebles.” The complexity of these amazing machines is concealed beneath a smooth, sleek exterior. Detail is used to establish scale, as with windows, or to explain a specific function, like a shuttle bay door or a deflector dish. Second, I wanted to bring in some elements from other Starfleet designs. As a result, my variant on the Akira-class feels closer to a TNG era ship made for exploration, rather than the battle cruiser we see in First Contact.

The following images show my variant on a dark gray background compared with the CG model from Doug Drexler‘s archives (by no means the definitive version of the Akira-class, but close enough).

The original design calls for a through-deck hangar where small ships can exit forward and enter aft. I like the idea of the hangar for both combat and relief missions (as indicated by the ship’s designer), but aesthetically I can’t resist a nice, complete arc to the iconic saucer shape. My variant keeps the aft hangar doors but removes the forward ones. Instead, some of that deck space is used for an Intrepid-class-inspired auxiliary deflector dish. I gave slightly more real estate to windows and window cut-outs. In the dorsal view, it’s clear how I’ve pulled the nacelles in tighter and smoothed the shape of the pylons they connect to. The paint scheme uses light blue, a common color on past Federation hulls, but also a dark navy pattern borrowed from the Sovereign-class.

The forward view is mostly consistent. My variant is slightly more compact, but also creates just a little more vertical space in the decks on the underside of the saucer. I gave the primary deflector dish a nice level of detail and added large forward windows a la Voyager‘s mess hall or the Enterprise-D‘s ten-forward lounge. The pod held aloft by the ship’s “rollbar” – a weapons platform in the original and a sensor platform in mine – is not my best work. It doesn’t look very sleek, and functionally, it should look like the platform could be swapped out for different purposes. That’s what I would focus on if I were to work on that area again.

The aft view shows some space cleared beneath the double-hulled part of the ship, along with some new detail to the impulse engines.

The silhouette viewed from the side is most faithful to the original design. Here you can see the addition of RCS thrusters to the edge of the saucer, which seemed to be conspicuously absent from the original. I also removed what I felt were unnecessary adornments on the warp nacelles, but I do think that the look of the bussard ramscoops is a little too “retro” as a result. I always liked the red, jewel-like appearance of this feature on Federation starships, but my approach looks too plain here in the context of the rest of the design.

Finally, the bottom of the ship. On the saucer, I pushed the windows farther out to the edge. The curved shape of the hull there just barely allowed for two decks. Where the hull meets the engineering section, it’s almost flat, so having rows of windows there didn’t make sense. The engineering section itself is also more filled out, making details there feel correct rather than stretched. With all the extra space, I made sure to include more escape pods for the crew.

My intent in revising the Akira-class design wasn’t to suggest that I was making a better version. In both mine, and the original, I see things I love and things that I don’t. Every time I model a Star Trek ship, I come away with a fresh appreciation for the thought and detail that went into the design. Really, it was just a fun exercise to bring a bit of myself into an iconic Star Trek design, and on that front, I feel it was a successful effort.