This image is based on a painting by Andrew Probert, depicting the launch of the Enterprise-D.
The only source on-line is a forgotten page on Probert’s old Tripod homepage(!), so to be safe, here’s his description and the web copy of the painting.
This is how I envisioned the ceremonious launching of the first operational Galaxy Class Starship while in synchronous orbit over the fabrication facilities of the Utopia Planita Fleet Yards, Mars.
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The orbiting Assembly Station is a modified Sternbach-designed facility, sporting traditional red, white, & blue (plastic) bunting for the occasion. The attending ships are proudly aligned along the ship’s launch corridor in salute to the fleet’s newest member.
Three of them have even been repainted as a tribute to earlier ships which carried the same name as the vessel being launched.
You’ll even see a former enemy’s new ship, which also carries the same markings as this honorguard.
I made some modifications to the composition, though there are a few additional touches I’d like to add if I revisit it. Along the Enterprise-D’s port are arranged ships representing the prior Enterprises in the 1701 lineage. I’ve heard it’s bad luck to rename a ship, so I didn’t go with the idea that the ships were repainted as the Enterprises they were standing in for (though, due to an oversight on my part, there are two U.S.S. Endeavours right next to each other. Whoops). Rather than the Excelsior, I’d like to have some random Excelsior-class ship, maybe the Lakota or another ship of the same sub-class as the Enterprise-B. I should probably also model my own version of the Probert-ized McKinley-style drydock, or at the very least add the bunting.
While I’m normally all for the idea of the Constituiton-class still being in service in the TNG-era, if only off-screen, I didn’t fill out the rest of the procession with Connies, partially because I’ve only got four registries set up for the model, and two of them are Enterprises, and partially because I had another idea for what to do with the space.
The starboard line-up of ships is meant to represent non-Federation Starships Enterprise. The NX-class may well be the actual NX-01 Enterprise, since it was said to have made it into a museum. The Andorian ship is there representing the Vol’Rala, an early Federation ship which was the unofficial successor to the NX-01 (“vol’rala” being the Andorian word for “enterprise”) in the Rise of the Federation novels. Presumably, the Klingon ship is the Qu’ or whatever the Klingon word is.