the production departments more leeway. One reason for the increase was that "Yesterday's Enterprise" would air during February sweeps, an important time for the studio to attract solid ratings. As The Next Generation was syndicated directly by the studio, the episode's performance would affect advertising revenue for the future. The script called for the creation of the Enterprise-C. In the first season, illustrator Andrew Probert – who had designed the Enterprise-D – was interested in a display of the design lineage of the ship from James T. Kirk's Enterprise to The Next Generations much larger ship, which was realized as a wall relief in the conference lounge behind the command bridge. Like most others, Probert assumed that the Enterprise-B was an Excelsior-class vessel and reasoned that the C would share design elements with its Excelsior-class predecessor and its Galaxy-class successor, Picard's ship. During this lineage project, Probert also produced a small color sketch of his version of Enterprise-C, but he left at the end of the season and his absence meant that no one knew what the drawing was intended to be. When Rick Sternbach took over Probert's duties, he believed the sketch was a rejected concept for the Enterprise-D, but the ship's design stayed with him. When he learned about the ship requirement for "Yesterday's Enterprise", he followed a thought process similar to Probert and built off the old sketch. Probert's version had a highly curved engineering hull reminiscent of a sailing ship, but Sternbach was worried that a design with so many compound curves would prove difficult to fabricate in the available time, so he made the hull entirely circular. A set of orthographic views was created and sent to Greg Jein, who fabricated the shooting model, which cost more than $10,000 to produce. The model was modified to appear as various Ambassador-class starships in later Next Generation episodes, with its saucer and nacelles spaced apart to create a larger ship. The production crew took several steps to differentiate the alternate universe from the original one. In addition to the absence of a counselor, a "military log" was substituted for a captain's log and a "combat date" was used rather than stardate. The expanded budget allowed the bridge to be entirely redressed, something that would normally be infeasible. Steps replaced ramps on the bridge, and the captain's chair was elevated and made more throne-like. Longer, spartan tables were