Star Trek Designing Starships: Deep Space Nine and Beyond

Product Description

The inventive concept art behind Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s titular space station, U.S.S. Defiant and dozens more ships comes to life on the page!

Deep Space Nine is considered by many Star Trek fans to be the best of all the Trek shows in the franchise’s illustrious 55-year history, and
Star Trek Designing Starships puts the spotlight on the show’s space-faring vessels.
 
The fifth entry in Hero Collector’s ongoing series of
Star Trek Designing Starships,
Deep Space Nine and Beyond delivers original production art and extensive interviews with the award-wining artists who created the ships and helped bring them to the screen over the course of the show’s seven-year run (1993-1999) and its 176 episodes.
 

Review

From the inside flap

This book tells the stories behind the design of some of 
STAR TREK’s most famous ships and space stations, from concept sketch to screen. The designers reveal – in their own words – the inspiration behind the ships’ creation and the often surprising stories of how they evolved.

Discover the inside story on key ships from the TV series 
STAR TREK, 
STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION,
DEEP SPACE NINE, 
VOYAGER, and 
ENTERPRISE, and the movies 
STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE,
STAR TREK: INSURRECTION, and
STAR TREK NEMESIS.

About the Author

Ben Robinson has been involved with 
Star Trek for 20 years. Ben was the launch editor of the huge Star Trek Fact Files, went on to edit the US 
Star Trek: The Magazine, which ran between 1999 and 2003. He has co-written two Haynes Manuals, the first featuring all seven Enterprises, and the second focusing on the Klingon bird-of-prey. Ben created the Starfleet shipyards line of books and co-authored 
Star Trek Voyager: A Celebration.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From the moment work began on STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE in 1992, the goal was to create something different. This was never going to be just another starship- based show, it was to be set on an alien space station at the edge of Federation space. Co-creators Rick Berman and Michael Piller wanted it to feature a different kind of storytelling and, as they told production designer Herman Zimmerman, they wanted it to have a very different look.

Fortunately, Zimmerman remembers, he was given the time to come up with new approaches: work began three months before the cameras turned over. “Most shows give you a couple of weeks or maybe a month,” he says. “This was an enormous gift in terms of creative noodling. We had a chance to try things that didn’t work and try things that eventually did work.”

Zimmerman had left STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION four years earlier at the end of season one. He was delighted to be back at Paramount and to be given a blank slate for the new show. He set up a new art department to work alongside the TNG team, but several key members of his staff worked on both shows, in particular concept artist Rick Sternbach and graphic designer Mike Okuda. “Mike, Rick and I were among the first hired,” he recalls. “Mike and Rick had a lot to do with the look of the exterior of DS9, and we had a wonderful sketch artist, Ricardo Delgado.”

While Sternbach and Okuda were working on the exterior of the station, Zimmerman’s new art department started work on the sets that would be found within. “We had a couple of really good set designers who added a great deal to the look of the show: Nathan Crowley and Joe Hodges, both of them English.”

Hodges had worked on TNG’s third season under Richard James before departing. In the interim he’d worked on two massive films: ‘Hook’ and ‘Dracula,’ where he’d met Crowley, who he brought with him to STAR TREK. As Hodges remembers, they were both young and massively ambitious. “We terrorized Herman,” he laughs. “We had just come off ‘Dracula,’ this huge movie and it seemed as if we were beating him up every day about things we wanted to do. We were totally into building things and making molds of t