A Poster-Sized Version of Franz Joseph’s U.S.S. Enterprise Blueprints

The closest thing to fine art in the world of science-fiction blueprints, Franz Joseph’s original deck plans of the “Fabulous Starship Enterprise” fired the imaginations of an entire generation of kids, myself included, and created a energetic fandom that led to the revival of Star Trek and its eventual status as a pop-culture juggernaut.

I remember begging my parents for a copy of the blueprints back in 1975, when I was twelve years old. I vividly recall the immense joy I felt when I came home from school and found the neat plastic packet on my bed. I’m embarrassed to admit the amount of time I spent over the next few months (and occasionally over the next forty years) staring at the deck plans and wandering the corridors in my mind, imagining all the different exotic places aboard my favorite starship.

In multiple interviews Franz claims he wasn’t a Star Trek fan, but I don’t believe it for a second. He blames his daughter’s love for the show as the impetus for creating the blueprints and their companion, the best-selling Star Fleet Technical Manual. Again, I don’t buy it. The amount of love and effort he poured into the creation of these masterpieces of science fiction is astounding. Maybe he did it all for his daughter, but I detect a serious appreciation for the subject matter of his work.

Franz was an aerospace engineer with some righteous drafting skills, and his knowledge of aircraft and naval architecture is on high display in the Star Trek blueprints. These weren’t blueprints of the filming miniature used in the show, by his own admission he claimed they represented practical designs for a completely plausible spacecraft, designed and drawn with all the technical merits of the ships and aircraft of his day. In other words, he applied real aerospace engineering discipline and knowledge to the deck plans of the U.S.S. Enterprise.

It is this combination of technical plausibility and the sheer appeal of his artwork that makes these blueprints so compelling. Franz took Matt Jeffries’ brilliant design of television show filming model and transformed it into a real starship.

Modern-day critics claim that the Blueprints don’t accurately reflect the filming miniature’s shape and proportion, and that Franz took liberties with the design of their beloved starship. They are correct, but they overlook the fact that the only reference material Franz had in 1972 were crude, low-res still frame images from the TV show, along with tiny representations of Matt Jeffries’ original design drawings from the book The Making of Star Trek. Given these limitations, it is incredible what he managed to achieve. To me, the Franz Joseph blueprints are a modern masterpiece of science-fiction art.

Even back in 1974 I wanted a giant poster with all the blueprint views combined. Fast forward to 2021 and I’m stuck at home in a pandemic with my computer and a copy of Photoshop and I stumble across the high-resolution scans of Franz’s blueprints over at the Star Trek Blueprints Database at Cygnus X-1, a website devoted to preserving Star Trek’s extensive blueprint fandom.

With time on my hands, I decided to make my own version of the poster I’d always wanted. Taking the hi-res scans from Cygnus X-1, I combined all the outboard views into a single Photoshop document. Due to the limitations of printing tech in the 1970’s several of the scale views of the ship didn’t fit on the blueprint sheets, so I had to extrapolate the missing sections by duplicating and reversing the image and combining them into a whole. After an bit of cleanup and repositioning some text elements, I had the poster I’d always wanted.

Here’s a downsampled image of the 31×55 inch poster. You can click the links below the image to download the full-res versions. Please note that even though the blueprints have been out of print for decades, the original artwork is still the property of Paramount Pictures. I created the art for my own personal use, and I’m sharing it for your personal use.