I think that the Intrepid will always stand as one of my greatest disappointments. A view that many you interview will probably share. It was a mess from day one. I remember when he (Admiral Rush) approached the design department with that list of new classes. Half of the documents he gave us referred to it as a colony ship, the other as a science vessel. So from the very start our efforts weren’t properly concentrated.

I remember one of my colleagues (Captain Martin) ended up going a lot further down the science vessel path than the rest of us. One of his designs-

-was essentially a fat Oberth class.

Imagine if that’s what we had run with in the end! I doubt that the brass would have been quite as proud of that one as they were when the final Intrepid first left drydock.

As you might imagine, R&D was a lot less streamlined as an organization back then. I think the fact that we had multiple designers pitching hulls as opposed to today’s more collaborative group system is a solid example of the cultural inefficiency we coasted on back before 359.

People worked in their own silo’s and you hoped your drawings and models would be the ones that the brass eventually picked. There was a lot of wasted time and plenty of people ended up treading water below the radar, eventually leaving. We lost a lot of good people and talent that way.

I remember when the first version of the Intrepid was picked from my designs though. One of the greatest days in my life. It's what got me here!

Colony ships were something that the Federation, or more accurately Starfleet just didn’t care that much about.

Exactly! That was what the Intrepid was originally meant to be. Those ships weren’t and still haven’t been updated in about a century! Can you believe some of those ships functions still run on S/COMS (Spacecraft Operating & Management System)? Getting the chance to tackle a new one was a welcome excuse to get out of the ever more narrowly focused Galaxy Project. There isn’t much room for hull designers there, it’s more about how they can glue components together than make something new.

But as I mentioned, split focus. On one side we were trying to build a colony ship, on the other we had pressure from Tactical to make the ship as modular as possible so it could be a weapons platform, floating science lab - as they sold it to the politicians - or anything else Starfleet might need. With the Cardassians still causing trouble on the border they were all about keeping options open as ships continued on stream. You can see their influence on the Nebula class as well.

If things didn’t kick off in a major way, they could fill these ships and modules with science equipment. If they did, they wanted torpedo launchers for days. The initial version of the Intrepid had an IMSPS (Interchangeable Mission Specific Pod System) connector at the top of the secondary hull. Just like the Nebula. That eventually got stripped out when we did the big redesign after 359.

Regardless of the end result, I can still stand proudly by my achievement of being the only member of R&D to design a ship designed to land and take off again in the past century. That’s got to count for something right?