New Deep Space Nine Station
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Doug Drexler has unveiled designs for the new Deep Space Nine station.
The new station is to be built in a Starfleet, not a Cardassian, style.
The original station, built by the Cardassians and seen in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, has been destroyed in the continuing story of Deep Space Nine, and a new one is to appear in future stories.
“Where the original DS9 was designed over many months, this project would have to be completed in matter of weeks,” said Drexler. “My plan was to bring Andrew Probert in to flesh out the design, as described in the first novel, which would be written by David R George III.”
A published description of the new station explains how the new station will look. “Despite the radical design, it shared many characteristics with other Starfleet facilities: the gray-white surface of its hull, the curves and proportions of its components, the familiar lettering along one arc that read United Federation of Planets. The overall, essentially spherical shape of the station, though, reminded Ro of its predecessor. The new facility would ultimately comprise three rings, oriented at right angles to each other. They would all surround an inner sphere, connecting to it via half a dozen crossover bridges. The rings would provide docking and cargo services, while the sphere would house work, commercial, and residential sections.”
More images and sketches can be found on Drexler’s Facebook page.
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Hideous. Thumbs up if you’re tired of everything getting destroyed only to be replaced again. A characters death has no meaning or drama involved if you’re just gonna bring them back anyway.
Original Enterprise destroyed and replaced. D destroyed and replaced with the E. Defiant destroyed and replaced. Delta flyer destroyed and replace…..
Makes no sense, why would the federation mimick the look of a cardassian space station? They would just build a normal, federation space station to replace it.
Not only that, even if they were to go out of their way to mimick the cardassian aesthetic, I HIGHLY doubt they would make it look worse than the oldschool tech that was available in ENTERPRISE.
Bah
Strange, this is so not Doug Drexler.
That looks like balls…..plain and simple.
I mentioned this on anther site with this story, but will repeat it here. Looks very retro, like what we saw in “Far Beyond The Stars”. And with 4 arms it looks to dense to be useful. If they wanted to go for Federation inspired design, why not something as an update to the K7? I loved the original DS9 station, but this just seems very odd and toyish.
Looks like a torpedo turret…
I don’t like it. They should have just left it the way it was. If the people in charge at Pocket want to blow something up they should have blown up Voyager and rebuilt it. A truly ugly starship.
Looks like an easy target. Oops, did I say that out loud?
I like it a lot.
I’m really disappointed to hear they did this. DS9 had something in common with the TOS that none of the other Trek shows did: its setting was an established place with a long HISTORY to it. In the station’s case, a very interesting history indeed. Amidst a bunch of other Trek shows set aboard ships that were clean out of the yards, DS9’s past was part of what made the show so fascinating.
The place was nearly a hundred years old! The ghosts of Cardassian occupiers, of Starfleet administrators, of Dominion invaders, all lingered on DS9. Blowing it up is like tearing down the Alamo and building a modernized Disneyland version of it on the site. The aging alien station with so many years of mystery in its hallways is now just another shiny-new Starfleet facility with no past, no stories, no legends. Very sad.
As for the design of the new station, it’s hard to fault Starfleet for trying to replicate what had been such a logical and successful layout for a space station; what it can be faulted for is building something so F’n UGLY. This is, indeed, the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too school of drama that’s given us lines of starships with infinitely progressing numerical suffixes that pop out of the yards like vending-machine drinks within months after their predecessors were destroyed (it took literally two episodes from the Defiant’s destruction to its replacement with another “Defiant” exactly like the old one). Sometimes you CAN’T go home again.
I was with you up until the “rebuilt it” part….
Just checked the big versions of the pics over at Trek Collective. This looks worse the more I look at it…. what IS the point of fusing all the docking pylons together like that? Now they’re just a series of arches that serve no practical purpose other than as a design callback to the old station. So even the “functional design” argument for this new station is out the window.
Gah. If there’d been ONE constant to the DS9 universe in the relaunch series, it should have been the station. Characters could come and go, political alliances could ebb and flow, every last member of the old crew could have been replaced as the years went on; the station was always the anchor to everything.
I dunno, have you seen his design for the Ent-J?
This Federation DS9 is very poor. Why are the docking pylons connected? doesn’t that defeat the point of having them? never mind the fact that it’s ugly.
I think the great Andy Probert was involved as well – how could these guys mess up so bad?
I never thought I’d say this, but I want to go back into the toy-box mode of novels. While the DS9 relaunch novels where spectacular in both story-arc, writing, and character, not much else beyond the talent of the authors has continued to be above par with the books over the past decade. We’ve got a ton of talented writers doing their best to write good stories, but the stories they’re being told to write are just decimating and destroying the Trek 24th century we all knew and loved. It’s an on-going disaster year after year anymore. The TNG and Voyager relaunches have both been train-wrecks, frankly. The co-mingling of everything (or the half-attempt at such) has been abysmal. The changes being made to the characters and stories are constantly against their grains. If not for the quality of the writing, I couldn’t stomach them. So many good authors and yet the directions for the story arcs being given by whomever is randomly in charge of things have been like directions given by a drunk dyslexic…
Time to cut the losses and go back to the mode of novels where nothing really changed and everything was status quo by the end of the book.
And now, there’s a new station to replace the old, which means that the series will go on-so what if the previous one was destroyed?
Deep Space Nine was my favorite of all the Star Trek shows and movies. I haven’t kept up with the books, but this would have pissed me off. It looks like those toys Galoob designed for TNG and then promptly loss the rights. It’s too bulbous. It looks like a rejected design. The Terok Nor design was amazing visually. It was very distinctive. They had a mandate to come up with a design for a space station that if you saw it on TV from another room, you’d instantly recognize it. This just looks awful
The Defiant was the first of her class. There were many other ships of the Defiant class built. This is an extension of the way modern navies will build several copies of each class of ship. Of course the replacement Defiant looks exactly the same. It’s the same class of ship and was originally designated the USS Sao Paulo. Deep Space Nine (Terok Nor) wasn’t the only space station of its class either.
I think everything falls into place once everyone understands that the design description was handed to us (me) by the novel’s authors, with NO chance to deviate from it – three circles at right angles to one another and joined,… a spherical main body at it’s center.
If you are Andrew Probert, then I’d just like to express my admiration for your work. I have great appreciation for you guys who created the fantastic designs for Star Trek. For me though, this design just doesn’t work. I’d be interested to see your redesign without having to work with those tight design parameters…..
Incidentally, I have a framed painting (from 1979) which seems to have been the inspiration for the magnificent Enterprise-D.
http://ottens.co.uk/forgottentrek/designing-the-next-generation-enterprise/early-enterprise-d-by-andrew-probert/
I appreciate the kind words,… and, yeah, this Design doesn’t work for me either – but it was the best I could come up with in the short amount of time we were given, staying within their already locked-in description.
As for Starfleet needing to re-establish a new space-station in the same DS-9 location, I agree with a lot of these comments and don’t know why it’s look would need to suggest the DS-9 ‘arms’ which, frankly, never worked for me. Why would someone design such a tight docking area (between those three arm-ends) when they could have gone outwards instead? It’s a matter of coming up with some sort of “spacy” look, I think, regardless of the usability,… and the scale of the docked Enterprise-D is way too small.
As for the new one – those docking clamps & boarding connectors, seen on each arm near the horizontal ring (main repair level) should have been added all the way up both sides of each arm, but were left off because I failed to be more explicit during my hurried Design output. Having them available all along each arm increases the station’s ability to service many more ships (of decreasing size, getting closer to the station’s ‘poles’) and would further explain the reason for connecting those arms – containing multiple internal transport resources.
Also – you have an actual painting of this in-between Enterprise? I did that right after working on TMP as kind of a proof-of-concept, coming up with an alternate Design, had I been allowed to Design the Motion Picture ship from the ground up,… another story-
Thanks for sharing the sketchup images. What I do like is the large observation windows. I always liked the large windows in the Star Wars films (and the Ent-D bridge) as I think it gave an epic feel to the stories.
Regarding the painting, yes, I have the original. I need to check out the COA – but I think it came from the ‘it’s a wrap auction’. It’s quite small and has a black oval frame . It currently resides in my living room, which is impressive as my wife isn’t a big trekkie 😉
Occasionally I play with Blender 3D – one of these days I hope to have the time to create a 3D model using this concept painting.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/76566612@N03/6938059212/in/photostream/
I’m from austria and I’ve seen every single episode of DS9 and 3 years ago I discovered that there where books which carried on to tell the story of the tv show and I was really happy since I enjoyed the show alot. The books are published here by cross cult. They translated the books and also created the covers for them which look pretty good. They have somekind of ds9 corporate design which makes it obvious that they all belong together. Currently I’m reading the worlds of ds9 ferenginar (that would be the translated title and also the original title i think). So i thought it was time to check if there are new titles available and now imagine how shocked i was when I read that the original station was destroyed and they replaced it by a federation station – which honestly looks just ugly and fat – i doesn’t even look federation . No offence to Mr. Andrew – but it really looks like a bad joke and I know thats the best thing you could have mad of it after some superbrains already had written its describtion into the story. If it was just another station I wouldn’t mind at all. I was really happy that they kept on writing stories – but now I really don’t think I’ll keep going to read the books, the one who start with “the fall”. I don’t know how you guys see it but when I read the books – and the story took place for example at quarks bar – i knew what to imagine and i could easily imagine how the whole “scene” would look like. Now here comes an author, probably a really bad one who lacks of fantasy and thinks “hm… i’ll have to write something very memorable and put some drama in it” and destroys ds9. Like the one commentor already said – the station had history – the station was a big part of the show which gave the show its unique style. The hallways with its bluish lights, the promenade with the big windows – the cardassian architecture (interior/exterior). As i said above – everytime i read a book of the series and there is something going on on the ops i totally get the same feeling as when i am watching the tv show. Now when there are stories which take place on a planet for example i’m still able to imagine how it might look likr there. But everytime i read quarks bar or promenade i got that ds9 feeling. The Author killed a franchise and the pleasure (thats of course just my opinion) i had when i was reading the books. I’m no author – but i guess thats the worst thing an author can do. Poor.