Spoilers We now have Ship Class names for BotBS

Countdown is, IIRC, tied into ST Online. There's your reason why.

 

"U.S.S. Gagarin NCC-1309 Shepard class"

 

And that's exactly what I mean. Until now, apart perhaps from NCC-1017, there has been no reason not to think that registries would be consecutive and a good way to conclude the number of ships. It's only now that we get those closely spaced classes in the 1600 range that force us to choose.

Loving the plain looks of the Gagarin. Also, since they seem to insist on making the phaser turrets glow red, we can now see that the science ship Discovery outguns this class somewhat, with six pairs of emitters per saucer side rather than four. But what the Gagarin lacks in firepower she makes up in the lack of portholes. All business?

Timo Saloniemi

 

As far as I can tell, the Discovery is the only ship in the fleet with blue bussard collectors.

I wonder why.

 

USS Europa also has blue bussards. Technically shown as more whitish but that has more to do with a change in VFX from the pilot to the running show.

 

Oh right, I forgot about the Europa.

 

If this was, indeed, their reasoning, it goes a long way to explain why the TNG movies saw such a drop in quality and how the franchise ended up on hiatus for so long.

 

Well, not to be indelicate, but it's been a while since the ship's keel was laid, hence the bad case of blue bussards.

 

Re: use of the Galaxy class in DS9, I think the argument for its inclusion would have been a story vs. background kind of thing. That is, the studio didn't want them using the Sovereign as a throw-away background prop / Easter egg, but could have possibly been persuaded if there was a real, story-related reason for the ship to appear.

The first appearance of a Galaxy class on DS9 that was the Enterprise was the USS Odyssey, which was used specifically as an analog to the hero ship of TNG to demonstrate just how much of a threat the Dominion was to the Federation. After years of following the Enterprise and seeing it survive all of these potential calamities, the exact same type of ship is destroyed after a single, five-minute battle with a newly introduced enemy. They needed that kind of shorthand to really sell the gravity of the situation. It wouldn't have worked as well with any other class of ship.

That said, I still think it was ridiculous to not include Sovereigns in the giant fleet battles.

 

Considering that I'm active duty US Navy and have had interactions with mutiple Admirals over my 15+ year career, I can say that Anderson is the ONLY Admiral in the show that actually comes across like a REAL Admiral. Kudos to the actor for that one.

Have to agree on this point. Discovery is the only ship class I actively dislike. It wouldn't take much to make the ship likable (fill in that saucer gap with the grilles we were originally shown in the teaser, make those grilles rotate instead of the saucer's surface, and tilt the nacelle pylons upward more in line with 'conventional' starship aesthetics and they'd have a halfway decent design) but as it stand the Discovery isn't all that good looking to me.

IMHO, the Shenzhou and Gagarin are my favorite ships from the series thus far. Simplicity of design and their more compact nature helps me think of them as more 'streamlined and efficient' ships. Plus they don't have large blocky components such as the engineering hull of the Discovery.

 

It's strange how every ship at the Battle of the Binaries was its own unique class, no doubles. Starfleet must have a LOT of ship classes back then.

 

Not sure what you mean. There were several ships of the same class in the battle.

 

One is tempted to speculate on what was sent. Every available ship? Or examples of ships expected to be useful against Klingons? Are ships of the T'Plana-Hath, Edison and Clarke designs perhaps particularly common in the far frontier and therefore more easily available?

I'm sort of hoping that with this many ship types to choose from, the Makers will be able to choose the dramatically most satisfying for each appearance. There are differences in that respect: the T'Plana-Hath appears to have giant shuttlebays if one needs a planetary assault, relief or evacuation ship, the four-nacellers have many satisfactorily separable bits if a spectacular wounding rather than a basic destruction is called for, the Edison is nicely compact if puny is desirable, etc.

Timo Saloniemi

 

They probably have RGB colour sliders on the engineering console.

Also, DSC is the bluniverse. Even their forests are blue.

 

Isn't that a planet in the StarGate universe?

 

The Starfleet ships in Discovery really do remind me of the background ships in DC's Trek comics from the 80's

 

That Excelsior has some weight issues.

 

Whooom! Spweeeee!

 

To be fair, that comic came out between Star Trek III and Star Trek IV.

 

And while there were loads of Enterprises, there were no Excelsior models available at the time. Hence, seeing her at angles other than those in publicity stills could be... interesting.