Starship design history in light of Discovery

When I first saw it I was hoping the well lit front of the nacelles housings would be hangar bays but no such luck.

The saucer does look thicker at the edge than the Enterprise so every other deck could have windows while those without could be storage, it looks like there is space for at least 2 decks with matching windows, it would make sense as that is the only space available for living quarters and guest accommodation.

Mind you we dont know the crew complement either.

A cut away diagram would be nice to really see how much sapce the nacelles take up.

 

So Hiawatha at one point had a ball shaped forward section, like the Daedalus/Olympic.

 

Much better!

 

The D7 nacelles were inspired by the Season 1 ship designs, and the 'bridge' was inspired by Eaves work on Enterprise.

Concept art for the Federation 'Tactical flyers'. I like these a lot more. I really recommend watching the video, some neat stuff in it.

 

Hope we get to see one of those at some point in the show.

 

There is concept art for a bridge for the D7, inspired by TMP. Some of the shape made it into that bridge we saw L'Rell on.

 

It keeps the traditional Klingon colors we've seen since TMP. Even the viewscreen is roughly the same shape as the one on the bridge of the Amar in the first film, just a lot bigger.

 

That video confirms that the Ba'ul obelisks were designed with the Preserver obelisk in mind. I feel vindicated. Didn't think that design could be entirely random.

 

I didn't realize he did some of the concepts for the sets.

Seriously, I didn't even know he was working on the show until he was mentioned in the Eaglemoss booklet for the Festoon

I really thought Eaves designed the S31 ship because of the bottom of it resembling a sea plane. But nope, it was Ryan Dening.

 

The Section 31 ships were clearly patterned after the USS Vengeance, which was an Eaves creation.

 

I love the idea of all of the S31 designs being Transformers, with even the various four-nacellers folding their stuff for stealth. I really hope we get a full listing of the variants used; this is my sort of kitbashing, with different nacelles used for the different ships, with appropriately scaled bridges for establishing the size, with all sorts of crazy detail inherent in using stuff originally created for a centerpiece vessel.

Also, nice drop-pods for the Hiawatha, even though I would have preferred the spherical hull.

The concept of the Discovery having two warp cores, with one dedicated to Stamets making his mushroom stew, is cool beyond belief, and in no way contradicted by anything in the show. We also get visual hints that the engineering bay we see is offset to port, and angled along the surface features rather than along the centerline.

Too bad we got no concept art on the final design stages for the onscreen tactical pods. Of the four options seen, I have a soft spot for the TUC-shuttle-on-steroids variant, even if it may be considered an adaptation of Darth Vader's TIE as well. The others are a bit too generic, and/or better fitting the TNG computer game scene where we sort of already saw all the other three shapes.

Timo Saloniemi

 

At what "point"?

 

A branching point...

The sphere-hulled ship looks more "done" IMHO than the eventual version: the slabby horizontal pylon in the latter just seems lazy, especially when paired with the far more interesting ventral pylonage we never get a good look at.

On the other vessels, I think good choices were made, out of the options shown!

Timo Saloniemi

 

During the design process.

According to the video they went back and forth between the two designs for quite a while before settling on the one seen in the show.

 

It's just a hospital frigate. I do like the ball being a callback to the Daedalus and a precursor to the Olympic class from AGT, but a hospital ship needs the space a blocky thing like the Hiawatha we saw provides.

Making the interior a warehouse is the lazy part

Gotcha

 

For the one in the show, Ryan designed the bottom as a series of containers that could be deployed



He also said he was inspired by the shape of the Botany Bay for some of his concepts for the ship.

Other than the colour scheme, I don't see anything in common in the designs.

 

So it drops Cap Troopers??
I do like the Spherical hull one better, just looks better to me

 

I do prefer the Hiawatha to have just two warp nacelles rather than the four on the final screen model.

 

Eh? The Hiawatha has 2 nacelles.

 

My mistake. The conjectural design with the spherical primary hull had four.

The only area where it was inferior to the final version.