All those years flipping through art & design books, working at the art college library, I have a database of images in my head. It's fun matching them up with Star Trek, but time consuming.

As someone who got a D in high school geometry, I'm going out on a limb to say the gigantic spaceship Fesarius, toward which the Enterprise is flying (or being dragged in a tractor beam, I think), is a geodesic dome.
(This shot, left, is from the 2006 remastering of the 1966 Star Trek episode "The Corbomite Maneuver." )
R. Buckminster Fuller didn't invent the geodesic dome, but he popularized it in his design, for instance, of the U.S. Pavilion for the 1967 World’s Fair, in Montreal, left.
Fuller said:
Edward Craven Walker applied for a patent in 1965 for his invention he called the Astro, but it was marketed as a Lava Lite.






(This shot, left, is from the 2006 remastering of the 1966 Star Trek episode "The Corbomite Maneuver." )
R. Buckminster Fuller didn't invent the geodesic dome, but he popularized it in his design, for instance, of the U.S. Pavilion for the 1967 World’s Fair, in Montreal, left.
Fuller said:
"When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong."Magnified on the Enterprise's bridge screen, below left (not a remastered GCI), the globes of the Fesarius make it look more like a lava lamp.
Edward Craven Walker applied for a patent in 1965 for his invention he called the Astro, but it was marketed as a Lava Lite.



