The latest developer diary on the official Star Trek Online site has arrived with details about how exactly the team chose the winner of the recent "Design the Next Enterprise" contest and how the team plans to bring that star ship to life. It's a terrific look at the design process from pen and ink drawing through the draft rendered version.

Normally at this stage of the process, with a piece of concept art and a rough 3D model, we'd jump right into building the ship. We'd pass it on to the ship team's capable hands and, in a few weeks and with some iteration, we'd have a shiny new ship in the game. However, we've got a new member to the STO art team. His name is Thomas Marrone and he loves him some Star Trek. He's a talented guy, has this infectious enthusiasm for all things Trek, and he really wanted to sink his teeth into the next Enterprise. Since we only had a front ¾ view of the ship we still had some extrapolation to do. We actually liked the fact that there was room left for us to get our hands dirty in the design. The biggest unanswered question was how that double-neck-to-saucer junction was going to work. Thomas said he had an idea, so we gave him our blessing and let him go about figuring things out.

Read more on the Star Trek Online site.