Niagara Class

The Niagara class USS Princeton is another of those ships built for the Wolf 359 graveyard scene, and is one of the ones we get a moderately good look at. We see the ship above and to the right of the E-D as it moves into the graveyard, and a vidclip of this scene is used on the images page.

There are some size comparison type images of the Niagara floating around which come from the Star Trek Fact Files and some of these are seen below. I originally took these images at face value and based this entry on them, but on later examination it appeared that these images cannot possibly be right - you can see a capture of the Wolf 359 scene on the images link above, and it clearly appears that the Niagara has a nacelle directly above the engineering hull flanked by two more, one on either side. This lead me to discount the Fact Files version of the ship entirely and come up with my own version of the ship, together with a rather extensive version of this comments page to support it.

Unfortunately, as it turns out the Fact Files was right after all. On a recent visit to the Ex Astris Scientia site - one of the best on the web for stuff like this - I found an image of the actual model used for the USS Princeton. Various damage had been inflicted on it for the battle, including having the nacelle struts significantly bent out of shape. In addition, the shot we see in Best of Both Worlds is not in fact from directly above the ship, but rather it is turned at an angle to us. This makes the elliptical saucer section look fairly circular, and also further distorts the positions of the nacelles.

So, we're back to where we started from with the Fact Files version of the ship being correct. Those who want more detail on this - including the picture of the Princeton model - should go to the Ex Astris site via my links page.

Below, then, is the real layout of the Niagara class nacelles.

Fact files front view

My speculations for the ships specifications and history are pretty routine, giving it a history that roughly fits the political situation as we know it for the pre 2364 era. The most notable detail is the idea that the ship was actually launched with Ambassador style nacelles. This is to explain the apparent discontinuity between the technology level of the nacelles and the rest of the ship - to have Galaxy nacelles from the outset, the ship would really need to be built around 2360 or later, but if so then it makes little sense that it would have a hull that dates back to the previous generation. However, I'm a little unclear on just what generation the hull actually is, so it's quite possible that we're not finished toying with this beastie yet.

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All of the above classes of star ships and all of the
named ships are copyright Paramount 1996/97.