with a starship flying through space. Jefferies, who was a pilot, based NCC on United States aircraft pre-1949 registration codes. In such pre-1949 usage, an "N" first letter refers to an aircraft registered in the United States. A "C" for a second letter refers to a civil aircraft. Jefferies added a second "C" because he thought it looked better. The Franz Joseph Blueprints, the book The Making of Star Trek, and a handful of Star Trek novels speculate that NCC is an initialism for "Naval Construction Contract". In an interview with the BBC, Jefferies explained that NC is the designation for U.S. commercial aircraft and the Soviet Union's space program used the CCCP designation. He concluded that any major future space projects would likely be a combined international effort, thus he invented the combined designation NCC. The 1701 had two functions, it represented the first (01) ship of a 17th federation cruiser design, and that the digits were unlikely to be misread, unlike 6, 8, or 9. In Gene Roddenberry's original Star Trek pitch, the starship is described as a "United Space Ship", and in two episodes of The Original Series (TOS), Kirk refers to the "United Space Ship Enterprise". Redesign for Star Trek: Planet of the Titans In 1976, before Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Paramount had planned a Star Trek film to have been named Star Trek: Planet of the Titans. Early in the production, Ralph McQuarrie had been hired to redesign the Enterprise. The major feature of the redesign was to replace the cigar-shaped secondary hull with a larger, triangle-shaped "delta wing" section. McQuarrie's design was discarded in favor of keeping the general shape of the Enterprise intact for the redesign unveiled in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Three decades later, the McQuarrie design for the Enterprise was adopted as the basis for the design of the USS Discovery in Star Trek: Discovery, a 2017 series that takes place ten years earlier than the original Star Trek. Captain's yacht The captain's yacht is a large auxiliary starship built into the design of several Federation starship designs including the Galaxy-class and Sovereign-class. It was docked to the underside of the saucer section. On USS Enterprise-E, the name of the captain's yacht is the Cousteau. In 2375, the crew of USS Enterprise-E used the Cousteau to travel to the surface of the Ba'ku homeworld, in the film Star Trek: