but you said he worked out every detail of what the ship would look like, the principles, the technology, the theory of propulsion,..thats not true.....
Look, I don't know what your problem is but it is EXACTLY true. No one ever claimed Roddenberry didn't do it all himself locked in a closet, no one does that, it is a stupid infantile argument. For the first time in the annals of TV, Roddenberry took experts in related fields and consulted them on various ideas and concepts looking to make ST believable and "real." What is so damned hard to understand about that? So instead of a cigar shape with a rocket engine spewing sparks on back and a few windows on the side, we got the Enterprise driven by anti-matter. Instead of missions to planet Lorax 7 in the Gummybear galaxy, we got missions to Altair 6. Warp speed was defined and quantized. Roddenberry was actually an LA cop turned writer, director and producer and unlike Lost In Space (which CBS turned down Star Trek for), we didn't get a wobbly Jupiter 2 saucer with about 4X the interior space as outdoor volume getting lost and finding 15 other planets and dozens of other star systems just trying to get to the NEAREST one, and getting forever lost at that, Gene tapped the best minds and talents he could find to help him flesh out the details of Star Trek as scientifically credible as was possible, with HIM as the director, coach, coordinator and final arbiter of what he wanted and which became Star Trek.
Jeffries didn't design the Enterprise, he produced HUNDREDS of drawings which Gene went through and slowly took a bit of this one or that he liked, going back to the drawing-board again and again until they got closer and closer to the look and design that Roddenberry was searching for in his guts, and when he finally saw what he was looking for, he knew it. Where Jeffries really sailed, was on much of the interior set designs where he came up with the bridge layout, so good that the Navy borrowed the idea and built some ship control layouts based on a similar concept, just as medical experts demanded to know where he got the idea for the medical bed scanners, as they were working along the same ideas. And the Enterprise design continued to evolve and be fleshed out further in smaller details through the 3rd season as budgets allowed. There had been thought to making the back of the engines do a little optical effect as the front but they simply ran out of money.
What next? You gonna claim Elon Musk is a fraud who didn't really design Tesla EVs just because he hires others to do most of the work? Is their any doubt there would be no Tesla or Space X today without Musk? Likewise, there would be NO Star Trek without Roddenberry who fought tooth and nail against intransigent studios and network execs to get it hammered through at a time when TV studios wanted to produce TV shows on the same budget as 'Laugh In.' Coon was without a doubt a stupendous asset and contributor to the Star Trek world, but it is a world that NEVER WOULD HAVE EXISTED in the first place to be built upon without Gene Roddenberry. Make no mistake about that.
And Gene was not happy with some of the additions Coon made to it, but then, Coon was the Producer and Gene was off trying to develop other ideas (like The Questar Tapes). But then, Harlan Elison was FURIOUS over changes to his script to make 'City On Edge of Forever' fully Star Trekized, and while a fantastic story, in his original form, it just wasn't Star Trek. Gene, Fontana and others took Ellison's basic story and made it into the best episode of all time.
Gene was even against the 'Family' episode of TNG where Picard goes home to France after the Borg. I can see why--- I hated the episode too, but have warmed to it a bit after a fashion. But in the final analysis, Everything Star Trek began and ended with Gene Roddenberry, at least until the 2nd season when much creative control was turned over to Coon, and by the Third Season, none of it, where by then, Gene had lost all interest in the show and divorced himself from it, fed up with and exhausted fighting the networks who never stopped trying to kill it off.
