Think of it this way --

I intendeed it to be a TOS refit of the much earlier Baton Rouge design. A clunkified, bunch o' add-ons stuck in place, butt-ugly scow relegated to explore systems that had been scouted in the interior of the Federation over the last 140 years but hadn't been revisited since. The place Atra has the "ring" actually defines a huge version of the lower sensor array. The little groove you see on the silhouette is the demarcation line between this huge, specialized sensor array and the rest of the saucer.

So I'd say the blue light ring might be right, but everything beneath it should be sensor array stuff.

The overlong neck was harking back to Matt Jefferies' early construction blueprints of 1701. They showed the ship with a more-upright and longer neck. Though we never showed the Constitution in Ships of the Star Fleet or any of my publications, I always felt it was a little different at launch and included details like the longer neck that later might have been changed in the refit process. Thus the long neck was meant to define a possible cruiser feature from the 2200-2220 era.

I also hated the double-pylon Rick had on Baton Rouge and intended this ship to have instead a very wide, single pylon.

The big impulse deck is straight from the Baton Rouge -- I don't like it but included it to make the ship have that ungainly, ugly character I mentioned above. In retrospect I think I'd get rid of it -- by the TOS era this older propulsion plant would almost certainly have been swapped out for something more "current."

The dish has been replaced by five of the big, lit circlular deflectors on the bow saucer edge of 1701. I believe they were the primary deflectors, and that the rings behind the sensor dish were the secondary deflector. This ship originally had a rudimentary dish / deflector combo but it has been replaced by the big-ass sensor dome and dedicated bow deflectors.

I do intend to illustrate this on www.federationreference.com at some point, so I will be very interested in seeing your take on it, Atra. You always seem to be able to read my mind about what I was thinking on those silhouettes. ;)