Starfleet's Rival: The D7 Battle Cruiser

The Klingon D7 Battlecruiser was the height of the Klingon Empire's Defense Force in the 23rd century and saw several variations and revisions over its decades of service. A powerful starship in its own right, the D7 set the trend for consistent Klingon design going forwards, even with the revisions added by Star Trek Discovery and the various TOS and TMP versions we see.

00:00 Real Origins
01:47 Development Variations
04:48 Specifications
07:00 Summary

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This Video is for critical purposes with commentary.

Outro Animation made by @icarogabriel17

[thebaccathatchews]

I like Klingon ships, but I can't stop seeing them as birds wearing hats.

[snowts]

Not to mention it had great theme music to accompany it's reveals.

[kevinramsey]

If the High Council had listened to me, we would have had D7s at Axanar and we would have broken the back of the Federation!

[raideurng]

More of the Klingon Excelsior than anything else, variants still in use until the end of the Dominion war, 120 years.

[robertfarr]

I always saw (in TOS original unaltered episodes) the “deflector” was the main forward torpedo tube.

[mikedicenso]

One of the facts that you left out was that there were TWO D7 models commissioned by AMT as part of their licensing agreement with Desilu/Gulfstream/Paramount to produce the kit; one was taken for use by the studio for filming and the other was used as the master tooling model for the kit. The master tooling model was pantographed to make the kit at half-scale to the master, and each of the two main models were slightly different in details, leading to discrepancies between the model kit and studio model. Both were finished and painted by Howard Anderson Studios in the same two-tone livery with Jefferies designing and applying the markings.

The two models after Star Trek was cancelled had two very different journeys: the model used for filming was taken by D.C. Fontana to the Smithsonian, along with other Star Trek artifacts, while the other went home with Roddenberry for a time, and then given to Stephan Poe. The filming model was loaned back to Paramount around 1977 for use as a reference, but was apparently damaged in the process of taking molds to create new models for the series. It was sent back in less-than-ideal condition. This was also about the same time that the 3 foot model Roddenberry had loaned back to the studio was "lost", and would not turn up again until last year.

The master tooling model was kept by Poe until the late 1990s when it was sold at auction and then several times through the early 2000s until billionaire Paul Allen obtained it and it now resides at the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle, WA.

I was very fortunate to see the model, not only in-person, but without any display case or anything else in the way because Rick Cigel brought the model with him to San Diego Comic Con in 2001 as part of the promotion of his disastrous Unobtainium Ltd. model company. I got very close up to it, snapped photos of the model in great detail, and took notes on the two-tone paint scheme and the markings. What you see online just does not do it justice. The craftsmanship is incredible, a real testimony to the work of Jefferies, Gene Winfield and AMT's Custom Speed Shop, and Howard Anderson Studios!

[IN-tmmw]

I had this ship as a toy. LOVED IT. I also had a Enterprise refit and a large Enterprise D, that had sound effects. I always wanted this one to be larger too.

[TheGameGetterKuzuri]

The D7/D7-A
absolutely love these ships.

[bipolarminddroppings]

The D7 is such a great ship, both in universe and as a sci-fi Starship.

[matthewsalazar]

Star Trek the Motion Picture showed Klingon D7’s firing torpedos from the rear…giving them 2 torpedo launchers.

[insanusmaximus]

I love this design almost as much as the Constitution. Those TOS ships were fantastic, and they got even better on the big screen.

[grieverzer]

Love the D7/KTinga design, but that neck is such a weakness

[randyranderson]

This is my all-time favorite ship. The Pod in the front of the ship was for officers, while the enlisted bunked in the aft section. In the blueprints I have, the aft section also housed cryo freezers used to freeze marines and spec-ops units.

[rubaiyat]

Liked their reuse in TOS as Romulan ships. With the fanon reason being a military exchange between the Romulans and Klingons. Romulans were yesterday’s existential threat and thus were old news in the TOS era. The spent a century stewing on their defeat coming up with 2 wonder weapons that were basically neutralized in their first encounter with Starfleet. Which is rightly how it should go if the Federation is intended to be aspirational and a model society for TV audiences. And so now on their own, a century later, the Romulans are just a minor border threat to a single ship, not a peer power to the Federation as a whole. Just as the Klingons should have been relegated to a lower league in the TNG era for the same reason. This is one of my gripes with TNG, where the writers rushes to their security blanket to bring back the Klingons and Romulans as peer nations without explanation when TOS accidentally showed how much help the Romulans (and even that eras Klingons) needed to keep up with the ever advancing Federation. Undermined the entire point of Trek especially when TNG and the following shows revealed how corrupt and backwards both empires were with a militaristic feudal monarchy for the Klingons and a slave holding police state for the Romulans. Doubly bad, since it also overshadowed the work done to make the Ferengi and Cardassians the new big bads. One thing I’d like if we ever get a TNG rework would be resetting of the era with this progress in mind (which also makes Q's admonishment for thinking too much of surpassing the Romulans and Klingons as any kind of major feat much more telling). Though if what happened by the time of TNG was that the TOS antagonists: the Klingons, Romulans, Tholians, Gorn, Orions all joined up in a Confederation as a response to the existential threat the Federation posed to all of them I’d accept the state of the galaxy in TNG. Ironic in that this fear is exactly what drove the formation of the Federation to begin with.

[twitchew]

Thanks for going back to the FASA ship construction manual :)

[zomfragger]

Well the original D7 model is in the smithsonian museum. However when filming started for The motion picture Paramount asked for both the enterprise and D7 filming models to be loaned. The Smithsonian only lent out the D7 since the enterprise was under restoration for display. (insert refit joke here). However by the time Paramount returned the model it was altered to such a degree that it was irreversible. Due to this alteration the museum will not let the original enterprise filming model leave.

[BrowncoatInABox]

As an American I also pronounce it the British way mainly because I can never say aluminum the American way due to my speech impediment. I love the British way

[thanqualthehighseer]

So that's how D7's cloak

Transparent Aluminum.

[tonygoochafanchi]

The D7 is a CLASSIC and the best Klingon ship of the line.

[Obiwan]

Fun Fact: The T'Liss class Bird of Prey of the Romulans lasted from the 21st-24th century in activity.