Spoilers We now have Ship Class names for BotBS

[cooleddie74]

That's just a sensor pallette mounted on the bridge module that feeds into the main viewscreen behind it, but....yeah, I know. It looks like a big Kelvin timeline viewscreen. There's a theory that JJ and his design team saw the original pilot version of the Enterprise and thought that was a window, ergo that's why the Kelvin, the new Enterprise and the Franklin all have window viewscreens.

 

[Markonian]

I like the idea that ship size is determined by mission profile and technology, rather than advancement. That’s how a Galaxy class can match a D’deridex that’s twice as big, or how the Gator class got stronger over time. The Connie is a powerhouse, maybe even the 23rd century equivalent of the Defiant class.

 

[pst]

It is. It predated Nero's incursion.

and yet potentially not.

 

[Captain of the USS Averof]

it's almost like they're precursors to some other, much larger starships, from some other universe...

This proves that DSC doesn’t take place in the Prime Universe continuity...

Whether it’s part of the Kelvinverse that’s for the lawyers to decide.

 

[Christopher]

and yet potentially not.

That timeline theory Pegg relates in that link (which actually originated with the revised Star Trek Encyclopedia by the Okudas, though Pegg apparently got a look at an advance copy) isn't meant to say "none of this happened in Prime." It's just meant as a patch for any minor continuity glitches hard to reconcile otherwise (like, say, the oddly built-up Earth cities in Kelvin compared to Prime), or as a license for future filmmakers to take more liberties if they find it useful to do so. (Although the irony is that the movie Pegg wrote, Beyond, had much less need for this license than the first two movies did, because it meshed more smoothly with Prime continuity.)

After all, these are ultimately just stories. "Canon" doesn't represent anything real or binding (just ask Bobby Ewing on Dallas); it's just a shorthand for the way the creators of a fictional property decide to depict their reality at any given time. And whether the people telling a story choose to reference something from a related story is usually a matter of popularity. Something that's part of the same continuity but widely hated will generally be ignored or quietly erased from canon (e.g. Voyager: "Threshold"), while something that's a popular part of a different continuity can be added to the main continuity (e.g. Harley Quinn, Agent Coulson, etc.). So whether the Kelvin and ships like it end up in Prime isn't a matter of timeline physics or what-have-you, it's a matter of whether future storytellers like the idea enough to integrate it. And the Kelvin and Captain Robau were pretty popular elements from the 2009 movie.

The main thing that might get in the way of crossover elements is that the movies are produced by Paramount and Bad Robot. CBS owns all of Star Trek, but Paramount and BR have a stake in the elements created for their movies, so a CBS production like Discovery might need to shell out a little more money if its makers wanted to use a concept from the Kelvin films.

 

[Tuskin38]

And Eaglemoss has released images of the Fed and Klingon ships

http://www.startrek.com/article/first-look-eaglemosss-newest-ships

 

[137th Gebirg]

Who is to say the Enterprise didn't have a window at some point?

IIRC, That's one of the reasons the bridge was changed for the production run, not only because of the "window" (that Roddenberry was specifically against), but that the bridge dome was too big and off-scale for the rest of the ship.

That's just a sensor pallette mounted on the bridge module that feeds into the main viewscreen behind it, but....yeah, I know. It looks like a big Kelvin timeline viewscreen. There's a theory that JJ and his design team saw the original pilot version of the Enterprise and thought that was a window, ergo that's why the Kelvin, the new Enterprise and the Franklin all have window viewscreens.

It makes perfect sense that they would have thought that, too. Since they wanted to know more about Pike as a character, they would have watched Cage first and seen that thing on the bridge instantly. The Discovery production crew would have also use the pilot version of the Enterprise to get an idea of what their ships from 10 years prior would evolve into.

 

[Markonian]

Does anyone know thlngan hol enough to tell which letters in the class names are capitalized and which a lower case?

 

[Christopher]

It makes perfect sense that they would have thought that, too. Since they wanted to know more about Pike as a character, they would have watched Cage first and seen that thing on the bridge instantly. The Discovery production crew would have also use the pilot version of the Enterprise to get an idea of what their ships from 10 years prior would evolve into.

As someone remarked above, that shot of the bridge dome is from the "Where No Man" version, not the "Cage" version. The "Cage" version is different (as seen here), and there's nothing there that really suggests a window, although the opening shot could be interpreted to indicate a transparent dome (though I see it more as a "cutaway" shot). Most of the Enterprise shots in "Where No Man" are from the side or below, so the only time that the second-pilot version of the bridge dome is even slightly visible is in this orbit shot, and it's too small to see clearly (since the only other shot of the bridge dome is recycled from the opening "Cage" shot). So there's no way anyone watching the pilots would ever get the impression the bridge dome had a window in front. And "The Cage" explicitly established its forward viewer as a video screen in the very first dialogue exchange ("Check the circuit." "All operating, sir." "It can't be the screen, then.")

Probably the reason the Kelvin and Discovery bridges have windows is because visual effects have advanced to the point where it's become easy and routine to pull off a set with big windows displaying CGI imagery, rather than needing to confine the FX footage to the occasional cutaway shot of a viewscreen. They're showing off because they can, and because it "looks cool."

Also, in the case of the Kelvin movies, the design may have been influenced by Abrams's fondness for Star Wars, in which the spaceship cockpits and bridges have always had prominent windows onto space. And DSC may be following suit because it has one executive producer (Alex Kurtzman) and at least one production artist (John Eaves) in common with the Kelvin movies, so maybe there's a similar aesthetic sensibility guiding it. Or maybe they just want to emulate the Kelvin look because that's what the modern audience expects Star Trek to look like. Or maybe they just wanted to do something that hasn't already been done by decades' worth of past Starfleet bridges, which is probably why the Shenzhou bridge was on the bottom of the ship and had windows in the floor.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Sean Hargreaves, who designed the USS Franklin (and loads more) for Star Trek Beyond said his masters liked the bridge windows for scaling purposes.

 

[David cgc]

Sean Hargreaves, who designed the USS Franklin (and loads more) for Star Trek Beyond said his masters liked the bridge windows for scaling purposes.

It's also been said that it motivates why the bridge is on the outside of the hull, rather than someplace more central. Plus, people seem to think the fly-through-the-bridge-window shot is really cool. I say, once per movie for the KT is fine, but one or twice per episode in DSC is pushing it a bit.

 

[The Wormhole]

I got to be honest, having a bridge window instead of a view screen on Discovery really doesn't make much sense. After all, there's so much computer graphics, readouts and displays overlaid on the window anyway, having a view screen seems a more practical option, IMO. It really looked silly at the end of Into the Forest I Go when they filled the window with static and "snow."

 

[Christopher]

I got to be honest, having a bridge window instead of a view screen on Discovery really doesn't make much sense. After all, there's so much computer graphics, readouts and displays overlaid on the window anyway, having a view screen seems a more practical option, IMO.

Right. Also, there's nothing to see out the window on an interstellar spaceship. If the interior of the bridge is decently lit, you can't see any stars through the window, just reflections (though TV and movies routinely ignore this). Other ships are going to be way too far away to see with the naked eye. Nearby stars will be dangerously bright, not to mention the radiation hazard from various cosmic phenomena and just the space environment in general. The only time you'll have anything to see is when you're orbiting a planet, and only if the ship is oriented the right way around. So it's a pretty pointless design feature, and even a potentially dangerous one.

In my cancelled 2010 Abrams Trek tie-in novel, I had some aliens beam through the Enterprise's shields by using line-of-sight targeting through the bridge viewport to achieve a "photonic entanglement" lock. Once Spock explained this, McCoy remarked, "I knew it was a dumb idea to put a picture window at the front of the bridge."

 

[137th Gebirg]

Is that last line why it was cancelled?

 

[Christopher]

Is that last line why it was cancelled?

No.

 

[cooleddie74]

and yet potentially not.

I have nothing but love for Simon Pegg, but no. He's full of it on this one.

 

[pst]

I have nothing but love for Simon Pegg, but no. He's full of it on this one.

i think evidence in this case is actually on his side. but this has been litigated before.

 

[cooleddie74]

Meh.

 

[Mudd]

There's no reason to doubt that the big cut-out at the front of the 1964 pilot bridge was a window.

Obviously the point of the modern JJ version is to give a greater sense of immediacy to what happens. It works.

 

[Christopher]

I have nothing but love for Simon Pegg, but no. He's full of it on this one.

Again, it's not his theory, it's the Okudas' from the Encyclopedia revision. Yes, Pegg talked about it a few months before the revision came out, but it takes as much as a year or more to get a book edited and published, especially a big, complex book like that one. So Pegg must have gotten a look at an advance copy or had a talk with the Okudas at some point.

And, again, everyone overreacts to the idea. It's not saying that the two histories are completely unconnected; obviously they aren't, since they both have Starfleet, the Federation, Kirk, Spock, Klingons, Romulans, etc. It's just a handwave for whatever minor continuity glitches or differences in interpretation are hard to reconcile with Prime continuity. For instance, maybe everything ST'09 established about the Kelvin is true in Prime except that it wasn't quite so huge. And, of course, it's an advance justification for future filmmakers if they want to diverge more fully from Prime history for creative reasons, which is always a more important consideration than any handwaves about in-story temporal physics, since after all such handwaves only exist to justify creative decisions.