Umm, yeah... …that was my thought also. You mean the leaked photo of those Klingons in armor that turned out to be 100% true and authentic?
Rama has been around here a long time. I believe what he says is true. He has no reason to be pulling our legs after all these years. Ah, yes, weed
If that is the final design indeed, I love it! There are some nice throwbacks to the Big E, with a thin neck and the thin upraised part on the nacelles struts. Looking forward to seeing the texturing and detailing.
Think it was the OP who made it then. That's my render fwiw. Was just fooling around with shapes and stuff. Any resemblance to any ships living or fictional is purely coincidental.
In german we have a word for making something worse by trying to improve it. It's called "Verschlimmbessern". And in my eyes that happened to the Discovery since the teaser trailer version. I think that the ship looked superior to the actual design now.
I think it's a net gain, but still a mixed bag, because the delta design is just not a great one to build off of. I think once we get a look at it from the front it will still have that weird look with the undersized (Enterprise-E-style dish). However, I think the body is a genuine improvement, especially how the nacelles are now RAISED rather than completely in-line horizontal. It gives it a more conventional Fed ship look where the nacelles need to either sit higher or lower than the mid-point. They aren't raised a lot, more like Enterprise-D level. It's enough. The design no longer looks early-to-mid-70s. It looks more like early 80s (lots of angular folded-paper lines and not a lot of smoothed organic surfaces) with a dash of late Berman-era in the Nacelles. So it is ultimately still anachronistic in that it seems to leapfrog TOS, but it brings it more in sync with the Shenzhou so they're establishing this as a consistent pocket-era. The gap in the saucer is stupid and thrown in just to be different, but then you could say the same thing about weird things like the physical isolation of the hulls on the Oberth class or how the torpedo crew were somehow able to move back and forth through the rollbar on the Miranda class. So implausible ergonomics has a long tradition in Fed ships as sometimes things were done just for aesthetics and not plausibility. So while at one time I though the Discovery design was a huge fail to the point of being a liability for the show's success, I'd say they managed to rescue themselves from the abyss. I don't think it's a great design but it's...good enough.
If this is the ship, I am a happy boy. That is lovely. And really the "donut" makes sense as an evolution to saucer separation. You could blow the inner connections and use the center as a massive escape pod.
But its inline with TMP reboot of the ships. Lets be honest, TMP is 4 years after TOS, it was a reboot. You do not refit a ship and rebuilt every single inch of it and add what, 16 meters to it?
To be fair, his is based off of IrishTrekkie's sketches, which are based off my kitbash of the Shenzhou's nacelles on OG Discovery.
So assuming this basic design is correct, how large would it be? If the inner side of the outer ring still has two decks on that sloping section like the concept teaser showed, it feels like the saucer should be at least eight or nine decks thick.
USS Midway in 1945 Displacement: 45,000 tons Beam: 136 ft (41 m) USS Midway in 1972 Displacement: 64,000 tons Beam: 238 ft (73 m) Lets be honest, it really can't be the same ship, so... real world reboot?!
However, they never changed her hull, you are talking about carrier top, not the hull. They simply redid the upper decks. This is not what happened in the constitution, Every part of that ship shape changed, it grew by 16 meters, not a deck on top, but the base hull, the spaceframe changed shape and size, the hallways changed size, the ship gained a few decks and grew taller. This is not a refit and not what happened to the midway.
It could be a situation similar to the USS Constellation (1854). The Enterprise is intended to be the original ship (more or less) but is in fact very different. I'd prefer to think more of the original was kept than in the building of the Constellation in 1854, but whatever they did, it changed the ship considerably.