I'm trying to play it cool, but with all these gorgeous photos, and The Will & Prommie Show getting renewed for a new season... I'm startin' ta get antsy!
I know how you feel old friend; I ordered my HMS Bounty BoP and Excelsior from BBTS this go–around because I figured I'd have a bunch of stuff coming from them at once, and both ships are still listed as pre–order items. I'm starting to wonder if BBTS and EE have their stock coming over on the same boat. (Leave it to BBTS and EE to have delays one of the few times I didn't order my ships from NFCC.) Ah well, patience is a virtue, and I'm looking forward to watching the latest season of The Will & Prommie Show as soon as I'm back on a machine that can handle YouTube a bit better than the one I'm using. (If the Klingons saw this thing, they'd call it garbage fit for Captain Kirk's scow, and much like Scotty, I'd be reading technical journals once they did. 
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Tyjos, as always, I absolutely love your blog entries on DST's latest releases, and just read them now. I can't wait to go back and look at the full size photos you took once I'm on a faster computer again. As always, your photos are excellent, even in the smaller sizes.
Regarding the comments pertaining to the Enterprise–B's "flat deck," I'm pretty sure that was done to give the Enterprise–B a look that was consistent with an old galleon. This would be consistent with modeling the TOS movie–era's ship combat style after galleon battles. (We all know that TOS modeled said battles after submarine warfare, but that style of combat was deemed to slow for the films, hence the change in style.) The combat style changed again for TNG, trading galleons for frigates, and if you look closely, you can see that the Enterprise–D takes some design cues from said frigates as well. DS9 is particularly interesting in this regard, as the early seasons attempt to combine a variety of combat styles to match it's variety of ships. galleon–esque Excelsior–class ships act like galleons, while Frigate–like Galaxy–class ships act like frigates. This sounds like a great idea on paper, but fans at the time didn't like the results on screen, so DS9's production crew dropped the mixed combat styles and opted to model their battles after air warfare rather than sea warfare. (This is particularly obvious after the introduction of the Defiant, which is smaller than many previous Trek ships, and which moves like a fighter jet.) VOY and everything since then has also adopted the "air–warfare" combat style, with ships being designed to look more streamlined, and to move like planes rather than seafaring vessels. (Look at the Intrepid and Sovereign–class ships for two examples of this.) The notable exception is ENT, which tried to mix the air–warefare style with the TOS–era submarine warfare style of combat; while the latter style worked in TOS, it clashed with the tone of ENT as a whole, and felt jarringly out of place. Interestingly, the JJ–verse uses the same "air–warfare" combat style as virtually everything since DS9, but it's ship designs appear to largely be inspired by the galleon–inspired TOS movie–era ships such as the Excelsior–class.
No one should feel bad if they didn't realize the Excelsior–class was modeled after a galleon's hull. I personally never noticed this until someone pointed it out to me, but the design hit me like a sack of bricks as soon as I noticed it. It's really an excellent example of hiding something in plain sight. Voyager would repeat this technique when the Intrepid–class was model after a spoon; I didn't see it until someone stuck it next to a garden trowel on a star field. Once I saw the "floating space trowel," Voyager's inspiration became obvious. As for an in–universe explanation for the flat–hull, I'd think it would be similar to the explanation for removing the "neck" from the Sovereign–class: extremely rounded hulls are a more fragile target for enemy ships, so Starfleet's Engineers limited the ship's curves and tried to build a more durable hull. Likewise, the change back to more rounded hulls could be explained by the large flat hull going to the opposite extreme that succeeded in durability, but made for a larger target. This would explain why the hulls of future ships were usually sloped, but not really round, nor really flat.
