Regarding Fed ships appearing in the new Picard series

It's like that time on TNG that the Enterprise fired a phaser beam out of the forward torpedo launcher.

Discovery does seem to fire torpedoes from wherever the heck it wants to, as shown in 'Into the forest i go' and 'What's past is prologue'. I'd love for it to become a running gag.

 

They even had a POV shot of the torpedo that disabled Spock's/Georgiou's shuttle... But of course you don't see where it's from.

 

There are visible tubes on most of the DSC ships. The only ones without obvious ones are the Shenzhou, Discovery and Gagarin. Which is weird considering they were the most focused on designs in the show.

 

Maybe the Discovery is testing a radical new system where the torpedoes are transported to different areas outside the ship before they ignite and travel to the destination?

It would certainly confuse the enemy, as they wouldn't know exactly where the torpedoes are coming from and therefore wouldn't have a specific area on the Discovery to fire at to disable the launchers.

<B I G S T R E T C H>

 

The Discovery has lots of such little design issues. Another being for example that the windows don't match - the original model from the treaser trailer had only square Windows, but the practical sets have those snaggletooth Windows. So they inserted them into the inner ring in the model - but sadly the outer ring isn't visible from inside the set, as it should realistically be. Also, the long window of Lorcas meeting room is nowhere on the outside, and had to be added retroactively at the bottom. They finally added proper "square" Windows in S2 in Pike's ready room, that fit the cgi model. OTOH they also added a long corridor sideways behind the bridge, which doesn't fit inside the centerpiece sphere. In fact, for a lot of rooms it's obvious they don't know where exactly they are positioned in the ship - sometimes they take the elevator, then they walk. Lorcas ready room was at the very bottom of the ship only because only there a long, square window would fit, but then Pikes ready room is supposed to be the same room, and they can walk there from the bridge. But the biggest problems are the weapons: Not only do they have no torpedo tubes. But all the phasers are positioned on the flat surface of the saucer hull. You know? The exact part that spins around for the mushroom drive! The ship is also lacking RCS thrusters and has no docking ports at the sides (visible on that awkward evacuation scene where they had to extend corridors from the neck, whereas all previous ships simply docked at the saucer's edge.

This is simply just a by-product of a completely new creative team taking over from scratch: They will add a whole lot of exciting new things. But they will also lack the experience "the old guard" accumulated over years.

The Voyager and NX-01 are masterclasses in production design, that perfectly fit with the filming sets, and include all elements for common Trek manoevers and technologies. But that came from experience on TNG, where the Ent-D had plenty of design issues on her own (great design, but didn't always fit with the story needs or the practical sets either). I'm pretty sure the upcoming shows (PIC, lower decks, ...) will have these lessons learned from DIS applied as well. It's just a new creative team growing into quite demanding tasks.

 

Lorca's ready room was right next to the bridge, and part of the very set; it always fit perfectly there. Pike's ready room is a separate set that cannot be accessed directly from the bridge, and matches the five square windows at the back of the command sphere (well, the middle three of them) one deck above bridge level, almost as if planned.

Not really. You can see the seam: the spinner is inwards of the phasers.

...Just like Kirk's. Which also had invisible torpedo tubes FWIW. Might be ships of that era did not believe in RCS rockets. Might be they were concerned with aesthetics and used cover plates. Whatever the reason, the result is consistency...

Again just like Kirk's. Or Pike's, in that specific scene: NCC-1701 also has to use sliding cover panels to reveal docking ports and receive those boarding tubes.

Although "docking port" is unlikely to be the intent here. Rather, these are like the evacuation slides of a passenger ship today, with simple doors that are distinct from the actual boarding gangway hatches used at ports.

Or then not, as eliminating all those anachronistic steering rockets and the like would bring the ship closer to the TOS specs.

...For somewhat opposite reasons. The VOY hero ship was first created, and then the writers made use of what they had, which was the exact stuff they had been writing about for the seven years of TNG: phaser strips, torpedo tubes, tractor beam emitters, lifepod hatches. The ENT hero ship was deliberately designed so that it would have a generic hatch for every story need, and the VFX team then applied those hatches whenever the writers came up with a doodad that would be part of the story, including previously unseen ones such as grapplers or pop-up cannon or pop-down relay buoy chutes or airlocks or whatever.

I'm not - those shows will aim for a different era feel, inventing their own doodads and visual gimmicks. Perhaps we'll see phaser plates and transporter wings, or shuttlecraft-replicating boxes dotting the surface? Those will require a learning curve from both the VFX folks and writers.

Timo Saloniemi

 

No it isn't. Though they only seem to be on the saucer. (There are also quite a few shots in Season 1 where they're missing from the model)


The DSC Connie has the same style RCS thrusters but a lot smaller, labelled as such on art in the Eaglemoss model book.

 

Actually no, Lorca's ready room was on the underside of the secondary hull, below the nacelle struts. There was an episode (forgot which one, probably the 3rd?) where they showed a zoom-out from the long, angular window to the outside. Also the reason why Lorca and Burnham were beaming inside the ship to get there in "Context is for Kings".

Although "docking port" is unlikely to be the intent here. Rather, these are like the evacuation slides of a passenger ship today, with simple doors that are distinct from the actual boarding gangway hatches used at ports.

The TOS one was made in the 60s, for analog television resolutions. Notice as soon as they upgraded for cinemas (where such details would be visible) - they added all these in form of the "refit" for the motion picture.

Yes, that was very clever. But again: That came from experience with previous shows. Pretty sure the upcoming designs from All Access shows will do something similar.

I do think they will adapt the designs to be era appropriate! But I absolutely think the upcoming designs will DO have all these details - just adapted to fit.

Ah yes! Yeah, they really did adapt the CGI model over time and added missing elements. No problem with me. In fact, that's actually exactly what CGI is great at! Forgot these details in S1? No problem! Add them later in S2, and barely anyone will notice. The cgi model of the Voyager added quite a bit of subtle detail throughout it's run.

I just don't understand why they didn't add some hatches at the saucers edge as well - Then the Discovery and the Enterprise could have docked at the saucer section, like the Voyager/Defiant/NX-01 all docked with other ships/stations. Would have looked a whole lot less awkward.

 

You're talking about Lorca's mancave, not his ready room. The ready room is attached to the bridge, see Context is for Kings, Michael and Landry go to the bridge, walk by Saru in the command chair, and meet Lorca in the ready room.

 

Their own fault for not having a PIC forum at this point.

 

Protesting the lack of a PIC forum by posting about DSC in a PIC thread.

Novel, i'll give you that.

 

That same USS Voyager that has 2 warp cores and 2 computer cores in all the blueprints and diagrams, but explicitly one of each as per dialogue in the shows? That same Voyager who's shuttlebay was never the same twice, and grew to fit whatever was needed inside it (including Neelix's ship, which was suddenly there for their entire 7 year journey)??

That same NX-01 Enterprise that, same as Discovery, spawned torpedo launchers wherever the CG team felt like putting them?

Good grief.

 

Don't forget the frequent references in dialogue to "shuttlebay 2" despite the fact there in only an exterior door for one shuttlebay, and indeed only one is listed on the MSD.

Also, despite it being stated definitively in Caretaker that Voyager only had fifteen decks, and the MSD making it clear there are indeed only fifteen decks, the occasional reference to Deck number higher than 15 slipped through.

 

According to the artists on Season 1, they did create a deck layout for Discovery, but it was up to the writers if they wanted to use it or not.

 

Remarkably, DSC dialogue steers well clear of mentioning specific decks. Indeed, the only one mentioned is part of a silly joke in "Brother", regarding the location of a broom closet. (Even the speculation at Memory Alpha about the Bridge or Lorca's Ready Room being on "Deck 1" is false, or more specifically mere conjecture that is in fact unlikely to be true because Pike's Ready Room seems to be a deck higher than these things. Or at least a deck undeniably exists one level above the Bridge windshield...)

Keeping it that way might be a good idea!

Umm, what? The new launchers for S3 were very specifically introduced in careful concert with set changes: the two spatial torpedo rails of the Armory had a stack of photon torpedoes added in between them, and that's where the extra torpedo tube then appeared, too. Choosing to introduce a new set element for the new launchers was a good call, making it real that the ship had been upgraded for her new task; faithfully matching that in exterior view was just more good work.

All this despite ENT being a "new" show without a learning curve into how 22nd century tech "ought to" work and look like.

(It's a different issue how a single Armory with two spatial torpedo rails works in the context of a ship that has four forward tubes and two aft ones. Perhaps there simply were three Armories, or then three Launch Rooms of which one doubled as an Armory? But the set was truly splendid in faking functionality, with those wall racks of torpedoes that one could easily imagine clickety-clacking their way below the deck plates into the lifts that position them for the rams that push them into the tubes, and then with the photon torpedo stack that likewise could drop projectiles into an underfloor launcher, even when it all was just immobile painted plastic. Nothing seen in the movies or DSC so far has matched that...)

Timo Saloniemi

 

They fired torpedoes from the warp symmetrical field governor pod one time, from the upper side of the saucer one time, and fired a photon torpedo coffin from the smaller spacial torpedo tube one time (because IIRC they needed a close up and never actually added the photon launchers to the model)

 

Yes, exatly these two.
Whenever something happens with the ship - shuttles launched, torpedos fired, warp cores ejected, ship docking with other stations, even only people standing at windows - everytime the outside matched with the inside!

That's a fucking achievement. Proven by the fact that VOY and ENT are the only two shows that are able to pull that off consistently. And TOS, TNG and DS9 are damn well produced shows as well.

They're still only a tv shows though, so flubs will always happen. But I think it's a hard stretch to put the damn details of the blueprints against it - TNG doesn't have a giant rubber duck on it's decks, and VOY has, per canon, only one warp core. As far as VOY's shuttlebay goes - this is an issue. The shuttlebay works for all standard-sized shuttles seen in the first four(!) seasons. Only when they added the Delta Flyer it became an isse. But hell - that's 5 seasons in, and starship sizes have always been inconsistent, and the alternative would have been no Delta Flyer at all, so I think they made the right choice there.

That's a far cry from having almost nothing match at all right from the beginning. Having no visible weapon launchers, no docking ports, and not even the same standard window shape as the damn sets.

And just btw - the NX-01 has specific tubes on the outside from where it launches it's weapons from. Every. Single. One. It has a lot of those - so maybe cou can say it launched them "from wherever the CGI team felt like". But it DOES have them.

 

...They even took great care to add a tube for each launch. Sure, they added one in the aft pod, which was an odd choice as such, but they did add it there, complete with a sliding hatch and all. And it was pretty damn explicit that this was an addition made in-universe for the needs of this specific episode and season, not a "retcon" by any stretch of the word.

A torpedo fired from saucer topside? Where? When?

(Firing an empty photon torpedo casing from a "standard" spatial torpedo tube is just nice continuity with the idea that photon torpedoes do require their very own type of all-new launcher. This further meaning that a random casing that is not a real photon torpedo can be fired from anywhere, and the need for the all-new launcher is tied to the antimatter warheads specifically, as is intuitively quite acceptable!)

The one "retconnish" thing they did do was drawing phaser beams as coming out of those "turbocharger caps" on top of the booms, somewhat against original artist intent. Nothing about the show itself would be a counterindication to the "turbocharger" caps indeed being/featuring a phase gun, though.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Discovery has two docking ports on either side of its neck behind the bridge.