Enterprising

There's an engineer out there who proposes that we can build a fully-functional Enterprise (like the one from "Star Trek") in 20 years.


Okay... why?

I mean, I get the idea of building a spaceship capable of interplanetary travel. That's brilliant. I think we should be focusing on that as a species.

I'm down with that.

But why pick the Enterprise as a model?

Just look at it? The Enterprise is... just counter-intuitive as a spaceship model.

It's ungainly and is clearly developed with a concept of "artificial gravity" as a working technology. And even assuming artificial gravity, why would one make a starship that's so just... all-over-the-place?

I've long found a problem with certain types of spaceships (like Enterprise) portrayed in film and TV. So the Enterprise can't land on planets and it has artificial gravity, making "up" and "down" arbitrary. Why wouldn't the ship be designed in a more simplistic, cylindrical or spherical shape?

Seems to me those shapes would be more structurally-sound and offer better fields-of-fire in combat scenarios.

Further, why wouldn't the starship's "up" be the direction it's flying rather than 90-degrees from the ship's "up"?

Think about it: you've got no gravity to worry about. Why wouldn't the horizontal planes of gravity for the crew be perpendicular to the direction the ship travels? That way when you're accelerating with the ship's thrust, you use that thrust to generate gravity and don't need to use this "artificial gravity" magic technology.

Or does that just make sense in my head?

I think about this stuff too much.