TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name

My favorite depiction of the Enterprise is in a fan edit of the Undiscovered Country.

The Constitution class ship isn't actually that large. It's 11 decks high, she's perhaps the size of a naval cruiser. It's Picard's Galaxy class ship that's stupidly huge in size. But they're both STUPID FUCKING POWERFUL

Roddenberry-era Trek likes to depict starships as moving like seagoing ships. They slowly and ponderously hove around through no apparent means of propulsion. In Star Trek II, Saavik pilot's the ship out of space dock under 1/4 impulse power, and the ship trundles forward at a good 10 knots or so like a navy ship leaving the wharf.

In the original cut of Undiscovered Country, Kirk orders 1/4 impulse power, and Lt. Valeris quotes regulation at him about thrusters only. II think it's a holdover from an earlier draft of the script when it was supposed to be Saavik, it might have been an interesting character moment between the two as Saavik had a habit of quoting regulations to Kirk, which he was more willing to tolerate during the training mission depicted in Wrath of Kahn than he is here. But Robin Curtis declined to reprise the role so we get suspiciously similar new chick and it comes off as a boomerific power play between the older Kirk and the younger Valeris.

In this fan cut, the Enterprise HURLS herself through the doors and out of Earth orbit at truly science fiction amounts of speed. Because of course that's what would happen under 1/4 impulse, those engines can fly the ship at half the speed of light. It makes Kirk look impatient and petulant, like a teenager burning rubber out of the garage because he's pissed his parents are making him pick up his little brother from choir practice instead of visiting his girlfriend. And Valeris comes off as genuinely concerned for how reckless it is to blast through that small doorway under that amount of power, if filtered through typical Vulcan aloofness.

And it gives you a sense of how sci-fi powerful the Enterprise is, that this relatively small machine packs an amount of power we just don't have now, that the barest tap on the throttle will huck the damn thing to Pluto, and those are the slow engines!

Have you seen the Expanse? They had to come with narrative excuses to make combat interesting, otherwise it was just lobbing volleys of missiles from thousands of miles away.