Strange New Worlds’ XCV-100 Is a Missing Link in Star Trek History

This article contains spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New World season 3 episode 6.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3 episode 6 “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” concluded with one the great classic science fiction twists. The feared and near-mythical scavenger ship the Enterprise encounters, the one that had been flying through the galaxy wiping out planets and spaceships with abandon, was not a mysterious new alien threat, but in fact a long-lost space mission originally launched from Earth.

It’s not exactly a new twist (even before Planet of the Apes did a variant on it, numerous versions of it had appeared in The Twilight Zone and beyond), and in this installment it even bordered on being a little problematic. The episode did leave you wondering if Kirk would have been quite so upset about those 7,000 deaths if the space helmet had opened to reveal a new kind of bumpy forehead.

But it also gave us a glimpse into a fascinating period in Star Trek’s future history. The 21st century of the Star Trek universe is littered with lost and doomed space missions. In Kirk’s very first adventure on screen, “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” he encountered the flight recorder of the SS Valiant, and later the space probe Nomad. The Next Generation’s crew came across the wreckage of the doomed NASA spacecraft Charybdis (as well as the corpse of its sole surviving crewmember trapped in a reconstruction of an old pulp novel). Even Voyager ran into the long-lost Mars mission Ares IV (presumably making The Martian movie’s Ares III mission Trek canon), and the experiment warp probe Friendship One.

But even among these jaunts into the galaxy, this scavenger ship stands out thanks to what we see when the viewscreen zooms in on the remaining Earth-originating features of the ship.

We see a familiar emblem now known as the “Starfleet Delta” (there’s a whole other article to be written about the history of that) and the letters and numbers “XCV-100.” Those numbers give that ship a lineage that leads to none other than the USS Enterprise NCC-1701 herself.

“All these ships were called Enterprise”

The first time those numbers appear together on screen (although too small for you to actually read) are in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. An alien entity has possessed a member of the ship’s crew (later it would turn out this entity was yet another Earth probe that had gone astray, this time the Voyager VI probe). In search of peace and understanding, the entity is given a tour of the Enterprise, including the ship’s recreation room (not to be confused with the holodeck, which was also called the recreation room in Star Trek: The Animated Series and the recent “A Space Adventure Hour.” Here the entity is shown a wall of pictures, including a sailing ship, the real-world aircraft carrier the crew would eventually break into in Star Trek IV, the prototype NASA space shuttle (which in real life was named after the fictional starship), and the Enterprise we know and love. Between those spaceships was another, never-seen-before spaceship, some previously unseen part of the Enterprise lineage.

A small, cylindrical capsule on the end of a long rod, surrounded by a pair of large ring shapes. If viewers had been able to look closely enough, they would have seen the name Enterprise XCV 330. It was a tiny, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it detail, so naturally Trekkies have been obsessing over it for decades.

Put a Ring on It

That picture has its origins right at the very beginning of Star Trek’s story, when Matt Jefferies (the man who the famous “Jefferies Tubes” are named after) was sketching out potential outlines for what would eventually become the Enterprise. You could go through those sketches and find cool outlines for a dozen new sci-fi shows, but one shape that kept recurring was the idea of a ship with a large set of rings at the back – sometimes with a saucer at the front, sometimes with other shapes. But one of those discarded sketches, sketch “22L” would go on to have a far longer continuing mission.

Mark Rademaker is a digital artist who has worked on a wide range of Star Trek projects, including several based around that very sketch.

“About 10 years later sketch 22L got picked up again when Gene was developing a new series called ‘Starship’,” Rademaker tells us. “That series never came to fruition. But for that series Matt Jefferies did make some more detailed interior and exterior blueprints and artwork of the ‘22L’ version.”

This new show was not going to be Star Trek, which meant its interior would have some extensive differences, even if ultimately those differences might turn out to be more cosmetic.

Instead of a bridge based around one man in a chair, it was based around people sitting in a circle around a computer console – a design with ideas that would still find their way into Star Trek: The Next Generation’s early set designs.

“People would not transport to a planet, but step into the ‘metafier’ (The dome on the right side of the command module) and ‘project’ themselves onto a planet,” Rademaker says. “I assume this was another cost saving mechanic, just like a transporter.”

When Starship failed to materialize, another attempt to relaunch Star Trek with the spinoff Phase II turned into a movie production and that design finally found its way into Star Trek canon.

“When they were building the ship wall in the rec room, Gene [Roddenberry] asked Rick Sternbach to do a high contrast ink version of a Matt Jefferies’ painting, to add onto this wall,” says Rademaker.

The Space Cruise Liner

For a long time that detail would remain a tantalizing tidbit of canon. For decades the only further information fans would have on the ship was the Star Trek Spaceflight Chronology. Published in 1980, written and edited by Stan Goldstein and Fred Goldstein, and illustrated by Rick Sternbach, this book was for years the “official” history of the Star Trek universe.

This chronology, which ran from the earliest days of spaceflight to the Enterprise as depicted in the Star Trek movies, described the ring-ship Enterprise as “Declaration Class,” operating from 2123 to 2165 as an interstellar cruise liner, with three theaters, three nightclubs, and a zero-gravity gymnasium, among other things. The book also claimed it was the first kind of ship to be equipped with a subspace radio.

That was where the ship remained in canon for decades, until 2001, with the launch of a new show chronicling the adventures of the Enterprise that came before the one in the Original Series.

Probably correctly deciding that the show’s hero ship would need to be more recognizably “Star Trek” than the historic ring ship, the show opted for a different design, one that for some reason never made it to the rec room wall of the 1701.

Back into the Canon

But while the Enterprise that would appear in Star Trek: Enterprise was reassuringly saucer-and-warp-nacelle based, the show would also need other ship designs. For the first time, Vulcan starships would play a major role in the show, and such iconic aliens needed an iconic starship design.

Like many designers before and since, their first idea was to dive into Matt Jefferies’ wastepaper basket.

As designer Doug Drexler said later, “My main impetus was to get another classic [Matt] Jeffries concept on Star Trek as a signature ship. So the Enterprise Vulcan spaceship design ethic came from Matt Jeffries ring ship for Gene Roddenberry’s Starship!”

Enterprise would go a step further in cementing the ring ship’s place in the canon with the episode “First Flight.” This episode provided a flashback to the early days of the warp program, where 80 years after Zefram Cochrane achieved Warp 1, Earth was still trying to get to Warp 2. We saw young Jonathan Archer competing to be the first person to command an actual starship, and are introduced to Club 602, the San Francisco bar where all the Starfleet flyboys hang out. The bar is decorated with various photos and insignias celebrating the history of flight and spaceflight, and in another blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance, the Enterprise XCV-330 mission patch, with a picture of the enigmatic ring ship, is right up there on the board.

Which raises the question, once again, of how the XCV-330 fits into Star Trek’s chronology.

“My personal theory: Somewhere between 2055 and 2110, XCV ships were developed,” suggests Rademaker. “I assume the XCV-330 was a human design based on some sub-light XCV platform but engineered to combine it with a Vulcan low warp ring template. It might be a later and perhaps even the final version of this line of ships. This would explain the rings, a rather dated cylindrical and thin internal layout, and a long neck so the crew is far away from the danger bits.”

Relaunching the XCV-330

Rademaker has had plenty of time to think about this. He first came into contact with the ship in a professional capacity when he met Andrew Probert, who among other things designed the Enterprise for The Motion Picture and The Next Generation, as well as the XCV-330 for Star Trek’s “Ships of the Line” calendar.

“Andrew and I mailed back and forth about the general shapes and a lot about the details, with Andrew sketching over my renders to illustrate what direction to take,” Rademaker remembers. “This collab with Andrew really opened my eyes, I improved a lot because of it.”

The work caught a few eyes, including that of modeling company QMx. They asked Rademaker for a file of the 3D model so that they could use it to create an “Artisan model”.

“Later, when I sat in the cinema, I found out that QMx used the model to do a prop for Into Darkness!” Rademaker says.

The miniature appears on Admiral Marcus’s desk, between the real-life Ares V rocket and Zefram Cochrane’s experimental warp ship “The Phoenix.” This places it before humans achieve lightspeed. According to the QMx website (which is sadly no longer online), this Enterprise was “Earth’s first sublight, interplanetary, and interstellar space vehicle.”

Rakemaker’s model would continue its voyages, with Eaglemoss using it as the basis for their own Enterprise XCV-330 miniature. Most recently, in 2023, 100 years before the launch of this Enterprise according to the Spaceflight Chronology, Rademaker was recruited to work on the ring ship once again.

“I was just about to do a refit on this ship to make it compatible with my current render software when Mike Okuda reached out and asked me if I could model the bridge for the Roddenberry Archive. Great gig!” Rademaker says.

You can visit Rademaker’s reconstruction of this Enterprise, inside and out, at the Rodenberry Archive, including an explorable 3D reconstruction of its bridge and “metafier” room, based on Jefferies’ blueprints from the defunct Starship show.

The model even gave the ship its first actual appearance, depicting its eventual demise in the short film “Memory Wall.” Rademaker has also continued working with the ring ship shape for NASA. You see, the workings of Star Trek’s warp drive are very close to the ideas of physicist Miguel Alcubierre. His theoretical “Alcubierre drive” would be driven by an engine that is most likely, you guessed it, ring shaped.

“In 2011 Dr. Harold ‘Sonny’ White (Then working at NASA) asked me to modify the XCV-330 to create a ship for STEM outreach,” Rademaker shares. “We eventually decided to do a whole new ringship that would conform better to his theory. (The IXS-110 aka IXS Enterprise.)  The idea was never to present that ship as an actual new NASA Starship, more like a good motivator for students to get into STEM/STEAM, but the media decided otherwise. It was good fun.”

The Continuing Voyages

The ring ship design is finding its way into Star Trek shows for the first time as well. As Star Trek: Lower Decks drew to a close last year, with what is now a Hugo award-winning finale. The story featured an alternate 21st century, parallel universe traversing ship called the USS Beagle. Its design was clearly a variation of the Enterprise XCV-330, with some extra solar panels and added details, and a nifty new landing mechanism.

And finally, we come to the XCV-100 in last week’s episode of Strange New Worlds. It gives us a lot of clues about how the ring ship Enterprise fits into Star Trek history. If this ship has a ring like the Enterprise, that is obscured, and the ship appears much bigger than the ship in Rademaker’s models.

“The XCV-100 was not a warp capable ship, and the larger size was a requirement for their mission. The XCV-330 compared to the 100 seems to be a scaled down version but with very similar parameters of the nose/front end, like that was an optimized shape for some reason,” Rademaker hypothesizes. “Or maybe they just made this shape in a couple of sizes. Not unheard of in shipbuilding, some hulls in terms of hydrodynamics can be scaled up from for example 60 to 120 meters, without significant changes in characteristics.”

In the brief glimpse we get of the ship, we notice the ID number, the American flag, and the iconic Starfleet delta (many decades before Starfleet could have actually been established).

“The 100 probably was constructed somewhere between 2055 and 2063. Hence it still shows a US like flag alongside an UESPA logo that we also see on the Friendship One probe that was launched in 2067,” Rademaker suggests. “However, that probe does not carry any nation flags on the outside. That makes me assume that 2067 is when UESPA is well established and Earth’s unification in terms of space related things has been formalized.”

We even see the crew’s spacesuits, which are clearly based on the prototype of NASA’s “Z2” spacesuit being developed for a potential Mars mission. In that way, the XCV-100 is a missing link, a very concrete connection between Pike’s starship Enterprise, and our own time’s NASA space program (however much longer that might last).

Look closer though, and there’s a bit more to it than that. Through “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” we are told the legends and rumors about this scavenger ship. Even the Gorn call it a monster.

As Scott describes it, “Its needs are bottomless. All it does is consume and make itself bigger. The bigger it gets, the more it requires. Then it moves on to devour the next resource, like it will never stop.”

When he says it, we think he’s describing an alien monster. Something consumes, destroys and assimilates everything it encounters, like the Doomsday Machine from TOS, or the Borg.

But of course, it turns out he’s describing us – humans as they exist in the 21st century, viewed by the inhabitants of Star Trek’s perfect future.

To a paraphrase another old Enterprise, it’s a long road getting from here to there…

New episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premiere Thursdays on Paramount+, culminating with a finale on Sept. 11.