| abstract | - Designer Andrew Probert explained his thought processes, when translating the script description into the first new alien ship for the show, "The Ferengi ship I wanted to have, not only an obvious shape difference, but a textural difference as well. The original description of the Ferengi ship ship was a horseshoe crab design with a neck that would extend. The front of the ship I wanted to look fairly dangerous. Something that seems real dangerous-looking to me are the pincers on an earwig insect. I designed the front of the ship to basically have that shape. On the underside of the vessel is a boarding ramp which can be seen when the ship turns around. The back of the ship is basically used for cargo storage seeing how the Ferengi are traders." (Star Trek: The Official Fan Club Magazine issue 60, pp. 5) As it so happened, the horseshoe crab design coincided with Gene Roddenberry's dictum of warp engines operating in pairs as Probert reiterated: "Now, Gene dictated that there are no three-engine starships and no single-engine starships. When I was first designing the new Enterprise he said, "The Federation ship's engines always are co-dependent". It is the same as to say they always worked in twos. So that's why when Sternbach and I came up with the Stargazer, it had two sets of twos. And then I started thinking that, back in World War II, all the nations that had fighter aircraft and airplanes did the same thing: they took off, they flew, they landed, they maneuvered. They usually had one engine, two wings, two tailwings – so they all had the same components, but they all looked different. There was a national design bias to each aircraft, but technically they all did the same thing. So my thinking was in Star Trek – since the Enterprise used to have two engines – I came up with the idea that the engines had to reach out to each other in order to work co-dependently. In other words, there would be no obstructions between the engines to disrupt the energy fields or connecting forces between them. And, well, all the alien ships could look different but still operate in the same principle. So that's why the Ferengi Marauder is curved, is concave, because that allows the two engines to reach each other." [1](X) Further clarifying on his design, he commented: "The Ferengi people were basically space pirates, so I tried to give their ship a threatening look by adding pointed areas at the front, like the back of a pincher bug, and had had it look dirtier and was a little battle-scarred. Then to support the pirate persona, and provide for future episodes, I designed an extendable boarding ramp into the underside of the ship's nose, with a clawed front that would be used on raids. Another feature I designed into the Marauder was a large attack ship nestled into an underside docking cavity. This forward-swept wing "drop ship" could land for planetary raids or maneuver in space. The Marauder's overall length was to have been about 1,200 feet." (Starlog photo guidebook Special Effects, Vol. 5, 1996, pp. 111-112)
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