Really surprised that the OTL Connie couldn't even make Warp 8 though, I guess that's one of the tradeoffs of a much weaker Warp 8 engine than what we designed and being the first ship to get the Warp 8 Engine.
Yeah, not only was their Warp 8 engine explicitly not as developed/future-proof as ours (the price they paid for making it refittable), but it was also
heavily tuned for high efficient cruise speed at the cost of sprint speed, warmup time,
and maintenance complexity. Canon Connie cruises at one of the highest percentages of its maximum speed of
any Trek ship,
ever.
a horizontal "two semicircles" arrangement rather than the hamburger bun arrangement there, with the engineering hull acting as the bridge between them and the nacelles conformal to the interior edges of the halves.
This is a really neat idea, and I'd love to mess around with it at some point (maybe for our internal workhorse light/medium cruiser?), but for an explorer I
reeeeeeeally want to do something with vertical nacelles. They look cool, they're different, and they cruise fantastically (which is key for explorers); when we get the new nacelles to go with our new engine the result should be something amazing.
Also, we haven't gotten to do much with inline engineering hulls in a while on grounds of "the bulge needed for a forward deflector takes up precious internal space, precious frontal area for weapons,
and interferes with fields of fire for the remaining weapons on top of that". An explorer with a huge new hull (and with any luck, the next-gen deflector occupying at least marginally less space) can
afford to mount a forward deflector.
My dream Excelsior-equivalent is a slightly-elongated-oval full-saucer (hinting at the teardrop saucers to come) and a big inline engineering hull mounting vertical nacelles, but I admit a pure circular saucer+vertical nacelles conformation with no engineering hull at all would look
incredibly cool, even if it'd be rather less practical.
