ST Picard - Starships and Technology ADVANCE Discussion

[Timo]

The Vanguard series of novels already has a TOS-style Miranda class in operation, the Bombay. Some fan-art has shown her with a more simple hull design (like the TOS E) and TOS-style nacelles. I find that highly plausible

OTOH, might be that the TMP style of nacelles was originally launched in the 2260s and was installed on all Mirandas from the get-go. Refitting these modern things to the ancient Constitution, a tub so old that Starfleet had skipped ever refitting the boxy 2240s-50s DSC style nacelles onto it, would have been rather tricky and resulted in the need for extensive trials and lots of nail-biting in the movie, even if the engines themselves were already in service elsewhere.

and with DSC set before TOS, Magee's still flying around during TNG isn't something I find odd.

But the Magees and Zimmermans in the post-TNG short weren't supposed to be "still flying around" - the story implication was that they were being built from scratch at that late date to fill an acute need. (That is, unless the camera pointed at a rare dock where refitting instead of building was ongoing. After all, the pictures themselves did not show any construction in progress, only fully completed ships.)

Why Starfleet would choose to build to old blueprints, we don't know. But they may be doing that with the Oberths in the mid-24th century, too - and NCC-1701 may herself have been built in the 2240s to old blueprints harking back to the NCC-1017 era when round nacelles were still the height of the fashion.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ronald Held]

Building older ships should be cheaper and faster to construct.

 

[Timo]

In the age of replicators, it might indeed be possible and affordable to build things to specs that are fifty years old. Today, it most definitely isn't, and e.g. building a Saturn V now would be totally impossible, while keeping the B-52 flying takes lots of ingenuity, vast warehouses full of outdated spares, and even vaster vaults full of money to burn. In TNG, the concepts of "spares" and "money" no longer exist!

Separately, newer things might well be faster to build than old ones, because all the silly and complex things have been pruned out of the design. Or then newer things have accumulated silly and complex add-ons, depending'.

But the most important thing here I think would be that if Starfleet wants to build cheap and fast, the absolutely best thing to do is to design something from the scratch. After all, it doesn't really need to work - it's probably only ever gonna fly one sortie and then be scrapped. So you can skip installing complex things like weapons or shields or toilets or floors that can take a full year of walking. But you can't do that with blueprints intended for a durable vessel, and still expect it to fly, so you specifically set out to design a throwaway ship. (The Soviet trucks of the Cold War were really like that: they only ever needed to cover the couple of thousand kilometers from Russia to the West in a one-way trip, after which they would no longer be needed. Sold to the insufficiently wary Soviet satellites, they duly broke down as designed... Trucks built to very similar specs but without the "added affordability features" were used in Russia instead.)

So building barely working tugs on the cheap, and then building custom-designed trailers for them to tow, would make sense. But building old rather than new tugs probably would not.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Dukhat]

Building older ships should be cheaper and faster to construct.

Why? All they are doing is replicating parts. There’s no money involved and it would be no faster than building any other ship design. Actually it would be more time-prohibitive since Utopia Planitia would have already been dedicated to constructing contemporary ships.

 

[XCV330]

Building older ships should be cheaper and faster to construct.

Depends.

If a modern shipyard was tasked with building a 19000 ton passenger ship, and given the choice of building a modern ship vs rebuilding Great Eastern using the materials and methods used to make the original Great Eastern, there is no way Great Eastern would be faster. They'd have to build foundries to make that much wrought iron, train people to rivet it, etc, and that doesn't begin to deal with the engine.

I don't think any ship yard could even build a Liberty ship now for anything close to the speed or cost of a ww2 shipyard, and those were designed to be cheap and fast to build.

Then there's the sad case of NASA's Orion capsule, essentially a modern Apollo CM, but 14 years into it's history, it's flown once and STILL isn't ready for crew.

 

[Lakenheath 72]

There is another consideration when using older ships. When built, the laws and regulations were different. Decades later, the laws and regulations have changed for a variety of reasons, making it no longer feasible to bring these older ships to current specs. This has happened within the airplane industry, which explains why so many older designs are no longer in operation as the cost to bring them up to current specs is prohibitive and it is cheaper to keep them grounded.

 

[Timo]

This could also work the other way, though.

"We need ten thousand ships and we need them fast. Screw regulations. How would you do it?"

"Screw regulations? Why, in that case I'd build ships without that extra radiation shielding integrated to the secondary hull, and I'd put the fuel tanks right next to the impulse drive again to save tons in piping, and..."

"Great. Design a ship like that for me."

"Why? I already got one. Wasting time de-safing a modern design makes no sense."

This assuming that issues of "tooling" and "materials supply" no longer exist in the replicator era.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Dukhat]

Everyone’s assuming that these ships were supposed to be old designs. They’re not. They’re supposed to be newly constructed, new designs, and we’re supposed to just ignore the fact that they look exactly like ships from a show taking place 150 years before. So there’s no need to justify why Starfleet is using old designs.

 

[fireproof78]

Trek nerds have been justifying inane details for years. Why stop now?

 

[Dukhat]

Trek nerds have been justifying inane details for years. Why stop now?

I’m not saying people shouldn’t discuss it. I’m saying that it’s just kind of pointless since it was never the producers’ intention to make those ships old. If that was their intent, then it might be interesting to justify their logic. But those ships were nothing more than background filler. They are production assets to be used without a second thought as to where they were used before. My only hope is that this was just relegated to the Short Trek and not to STP proper.

 

[fireproof78]

I’m saying that it’s just kind of pointless since it was never the producers’ intention to make those ships old.

But, that's par for the course. I can find several instances where the producers intent was never what we made it out to be as fans. I don't see the difference now with these production assets.

The fun of Trek fandom is recognizing that there are those limits but I'm willing to play inside that sandbox any way.

 

[Timo]

Okay, new trailer stuff up, from the end of the first ep, complete with an era-appropriate tugship, containers and Argo'ish shuttles. Anybody have access to a version where we can do proper screencaps?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ronald Held]

Maybe wait until the episode airs and Trekcore has the screenshots?

 

[Dryson]

The ships of Star Trek:Picard might seem a little different then we are used to seeing. With the Romulans completely without the ability to rapidly build large fleets, the D'deridex class Warbird would not be an option for use in the Romulan fleets. Smaller ships such as the reborn Romulan D-7, Mogai and Valdore class ships with smaller scout ships serving as the mainstay of their fleets.

The hair on the back of my neck is telling me that the Romulans have something up their sleeve that they are keeping no key about.

The Enterprise E should be seen in a few years as the NCC-1701-F.

 

[Racefuel]

The Enterprise E should be seen in a few years as the NCC-1701-F.

What?

 

[publiusr]

They moved the weapon emitter to the sides near the wings, though that means the beams in the trailer are coming from nothing.

updated

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The Borg cube
https://www.thetrekcollective.com/2020/01/cherrytree-launch-their-picard-borg-cube.html

Now to kit this:
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8T9sHBOh_cU/XjyTZVK7VuI/AAAAAAAA_T0/Vw0svkSj4G8r36hm-PQd5b-vcbFbl1RVwCKgBGAsYHg/s1600/Michael+Chabon+Star+Trek+Picard+La+Sirena+model+kit+mock+up.jpg


Other thoughts
https://treksphere.com/star-trek-picard/star-trek-picard-theory-mars-destroyed-geordi-in-danger/