Is the Klingon D7 Class and K'Tinga Class Battlecruiser the same ship?

[Dukhat]

Personally, I believe that some things mentioned or shown on screen should really just be ignored in favor of simple common sense, when those things are quite clearly mistakes.

TNG pretty much beat us over the head with the term "warbird" being exclusive to Romulan ships, at least ships of the D'Deridex class. So the relatively few uses of the term later to describe Klingon ships are just misnomers, IMHO.

The K'T'inga model used in ENT's "Unexpected" was never meant to be used. The actual, more primitive-looking CGI battlecruiser intended for the scene was nixed at the last minute for something so ridiculous as the producers not liking how the lights looked on it. Having a K'T'inga in existence a century before the D7s makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. It should simply be ignored in favor of the more logical progression of technology (i.e. D5, D7, K'T'inga).

[C.E. Evans]

It really isn't that implausible at all that term "warbird" originated with the Klingons. In TOS, the Klingons and the Romulans apparently entered into an alliance against the Federation (Romulans were using the D7 design and it seems Klingons gained cloaking technology). It really wouldn't be that hard of a stretch that the Romulans started referring to their bird-shaped ships as warbirds too and the name stuck.

[Star Wolf]

C.E. Evans wrote:

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It really isn't that implausible at all that term "warbird" originated with the Klingons. In TOS, the Klingons and the Romulans apparently entered into an alliance against the Federation (Romulans were using the D7 design and it seems Klingons gained cloaking technology). It really wouldn't be that hard of a stretch that the Romulans started referring to their bird-shaped ships as warbirds too and the name stuck.

I just remember Lt Stiles going on about knowing it was Romulan because they had a bird of prey painted on them. Call me confused when we started seeing more Klingon Birds of Prey then just about any other class of ship

[Nerys Myk]

Why should hull decoration determine what the Romulans or even the Feds call their ships? All their ships have that decoration according to Stiles. Surely they have more than one class/design of ships.

Also, why can't there be "Warbirds" and "Birds of Prey" in both Empires? Could be they are just translations of Romulan/Klingon words into Federation Standard.

[Timo]

TNG pretty much beat us over the head with the term "warbird" being exclusive to Romulan ships

...And TOS beat us over the head with the term "starship" being exclusive to the class of ships Kirk's Enterprise was a representative of.

Also, why can't there be "Warbirds" and "Birds of Prey" in both Empires? Could be they are just translations of Romulan/Klingon words into Federation Standard.

Or even Vulcan terminology for starships, considering that we explicitly heard Vulcans providing our Earthling heroes with the "warbird" concept in the pilot episode, and that Vulcans would be the likeliest source for terminology relating to the Romulan war machine just prior to the big war...

We know Romulans are big on bird themes. But they supposedly were that even before the big rift, as they were known as "those who marched under the raptor's wings"... It may well be an old Vulcan thing to regard spacecraft as avians.

Regarding the D-7 designation, we might note that the term D-5 was used in an exclusively Klingon discussion (supposedly conducted in Klingonese) in "Once More Unto the Breach", making it a bit less likely that this would be a "NATO name" given to the Klingon designs by their enemies.

As for it being an overarching designation for a family of designs, it's a good idea as such - but D-12 in ST:GEN seemed to be a very specific designation for a narrow sub-type of Bird of Prey. Unless we read Worf's comments there as indicating that this is "an old type of D-12 BoP" rather than "D-12, an old type of BoP"...

Timo Saloniemi

[137th Gebirg]

Timo wrote:

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Or even Vulcan terminology for starships, considering that we explicitly heard Vulcans providing our Earthling heroes with the "warbird" concept in the pilot episode, and that Vulcans would be the likeliest source for terminology relating to the Romulan war machine just prior to the big war...

We know Romulans are big on bird themes. But they supposedly were that even before the big rift, as they were known as "those who marched under the raptor's wings"... It may well be an old Vulcan thing to regard spacecraft as avians.

Makes sense. Starfleet got its "Class M" planetary designation from the Vulcan "Minshara" class. Not much of a stretch to extend it into ship classes.

[Lonemagpie]

Even us mere humans call military planes "warbirds" - it's probably a pretty universal term

[CorporalCaptain]

Star Wolf wrote:

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I just remember Lt Stiles going on about knowing it was Romulan because they had a bird of prey painted on them. Call me confused when we started seeing more Klingon Birds of Prey then just about any other class of ship

Call me confused, too.

At least until ENT came along, I was content to imagine that the sharing of technology shown in The Enterprise Incident flowed both ways, as for instance in STIII the Klingons were shown using a cloaking device, to reconcile the designation of "Bird-of-Prey" for Klingon ships.

[Timo]

That "sharing of technology" might have consisted solely of Romulans capturing some Klingon ships, though...

Invisibility seems commonplace enough in ENT, but it also ends up being a common trick in TOS, the TOS movies and TNG. Yet this does not stop our heroes in "Devil's Due" from jumping to the conclusion that an invisible foe must be operating a Romulan cloaking device specifically! And it's the Romulans who get the Feds to sign a non-cloaking treaty. It appears that there's something special about Romulan invisibility as compared to others... Perhaps justifying the odd twist in "Balance of Terror" where invisibility comes as a nasty surprise to our heroes, even though Archer's old adventures should have prepared them well for such things already.

Another case where invisibility seems to come in different flavors is ST3:TSfS where our heroes immediately realize their invisible opponent must be the Klingons (rather than, say, Romulans) flying a Bird of Prey (rather than, say, a Warbird). Were the Klingon battle cruisers of the era incapable of cloaking, perhaps (despite their Romulan exact counterparts being quite capable)? Or was the telltale optical distortion a sign of the poor cloaks typical of small BoPs, whereas the big cruisers were invariably protected by higher-quality, non-distorting devices? This might take us back to the "D-12 with defective plasma coils" thing from ST:GEN.

Timo Saloniemi

[137th Gebirg]

^^^ I was always under the impression that Klingon cloaks just weren't all that great, much like their dodgy warp cores (mentioned in ST4) and other technology in general.

I can't remember where it came from, but there was some additional speculation that, while traveling under sub-standard cloak for so long, Kruge and his crew became somewhat mentally unstable (at least, by Klingon standards), which is why he was willing to risk war with the Federation by crossing deep into Fed space without much of a second thought, brazenly attack any Starfleet or non-SF ships he ran into along the way (Merchantman, Grissom, Enterprise), combined with his "dishonorable" use of hostages to achieve his goals. Again, by Klingon standards, he was a complete nutjob.

By the time the 24th century rolls around the technology has clearly improved, as BoP's like the Rotarran clearly didn't have such issues.

[B.J.]

137th Gebirg wrote:

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Makes sense. Starfleet got its "Class M" planetary designation from the Vulcan "Minshara" class. Not much of a stretch to extend it into ship classes.

Lonemagpie wrote:

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Even us mere humans call military planes "warbirds" - it's probably a pretty universal term

I'd be on board with that. Warbird and possibly even Bird of Prey could be a common designation, possibly Vulcan in origin, that's analogous to saying a certain ship is a destroyer or a frigate.

[Timo]

...And now we have "Raptor" to round out this collection. What to add? Might "Buzzard" be a type of salvage tug?

I was always under the impression that Klingon cloaks just weren't all that great

Perhaps not in the late 23rd century. But in the TNG era, they seem to be of very high quality, allowing the Klingons to penetrate all the way to the Romulan homeworld in "Unification"...

None of this invisibility stuff makes sense if we take literally the statement in "Balance of Terror" that invisibility as a concept is purely theoretical as of the 2260s. But if we forget about that one, it seems that Romulans had started toying with visual obfuscation technologies around the mid-22nd century, and had not quite worked out all the bugs yet - whereas other species had fairly well-working invisibility devices, either due to having started earlier on ("Unexpected") or having received aid from the future ("Broken Bow" et al.). Klingons might have achieved their invisibility tech simply by carefully reverse engineering what they got from the Xyrillians, or by stealing from a series of other players until they found a high quality technology they could understand and mass produce. Either approach might keep them behind the Romulans until the 24th century but get them ahead of the competition from that point on.

Timo Saloniemi

[SilentP]

Timo wrote:

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...And now we have "Raptor" to round out this collection. What to add? Might "Buzzard" be a type of salvage tug?

Hell, Raptor is just Latin for Bird of Prey, so it's even less imaginative that it originally appears...

[toughlittleship]

The Wormhole wrote:

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No because Flashback can be explained away as Tuvok misremembering things. Hell, he thought Lt. Valtane died for fuck's sake.

Why is he remembering things from the outside of the ship?

[C.E. Evans]

toughlittleship wrote:

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Why is he remembering things from the outside of the ship?

Visualization.