ST Picard - Starships and Technology Season One SPOILER Discusssion

I like that Planetary Defense Grid, simple but effective =D

 

IMO,every power should have a different transporter effect due to different tech advancements.

 

I agree

 

But there could also be just one optimal way of doing it, in which case differences would disappear as this goal was approached.

Before reaching the optimum, different players would no doubt find their own local optima. We just don't know how far our players are from the ultimate goal here. But the true masters like Q or the Sikarians do it with a white flash of light, which is what we more or less have here, too.

Timo Saloniemi

 

So no Verity, either seen or name-dropped, and no other starships at all in the flashback scene, but tons of DSC shuttles. I’m assuming they’re warp capable. They seem to be standard 2385 Starfleet shuttles, rather than the ‘old shuttles being relegated to grunt duty’ hypothesis that has been previously assumed by some. I’m pretty sure the Verity will remain in the realm of the non-canon.

The tugs get an official class name: Wallenberg, named for Raoul Wallenberg. One of the tugs was named the Nightingale. Also, Soji allegedly arrived at the Artifact cube on a ship named the Ellison, although it’s unclear whether it was Federation, Starfleet, or civilian.

There’s also some new Romulan ships flying around the Artifact, although no really good closeups of those.

 

Does anyone have any good screen shots of La Sirena? So far I think I really like it.

Someone may have mentioned this, but does anyone else think the paint job of the ship is inspired by Eddie Van Halen's guitar?

 

That’s totally what they were going for. I can’t believe I didn’t notice that before.

 

Beyond the synths, thus far we haven't actually seen any technological advances over TNG/DS9/VOY (holo-interfaces are a nope due to DSC), except for the Quantum Archive in ep 1. Warp might be faster, but we've got no indicators of such. Certainly no evidence yet of slipstream/transwarp systems as we've seen in the novelverse.

 

The holographic tech in Picard is significantly more advanced in appearance and displayed utility than what was shown in Discovery.
In Discovery, the holograms were transluscent, being described by Pike as ghosts. In Picard, holograms that people are meant to interact with appear solid until touched, except when they use forcefields to allow interaction (previously seen with the doctor from Voyager).
With regards to free floating holo-interfaces, the only implementation of them that I can think of in Discovery was the time-suit, an S-31 tech that, like comm-badges, was likely withheld.

 

Nope, we've seen crewmembers "grab and flick" their displays to show to colleagues on a bigger screen or central display. The ep where Airiam gets her pre-death show in the limelight is a prime example.

 

My notes, just in time for the next episode!

- Vashti had its secondhand defence net already in place at the time of the Mars incident. We don't know exactly how long the Romulan settlement had been there by that point, but it stands to reason that for a planetary exodus, not every designated resettlement target could be covered by either Starfleet or the Romulan navy. Odd though that in the flashback the only visible craft were Federation, and no Romulan smaller ships were seen, though we know those assets exist. Presumably the Fenris Rangers were active back then too, as they helped the locals install it.

- Picard is super-busy with the evacuation plan, but gets to take three days off to visit Elnor and his Sister Act crew. I'm guessing someone forced him to take a bit of leave.

- When Raffi calls Picard with the Bad News, he takes the call privately by pressing a finger to his ear. It's reasonable to assume a man in his 80s would have a hearing aid (implant?), but we don't see it - and his combadge is still attached to his jacket which lies nearby. Incidentally, today's hearing aids can come with bluetooth control from one's phone and can take calls exactly like this.

- Picard walks down the stairs as he dematerializes, which is one thing. Another is where is he going? A waiting shuttle? The USS Verity* in orbit? Or some other planet - there is ample evidence these days to suggest interstellar beaming is commonplace by now.

*I'm being part sarcastic, I have little confidence his prequel comic starship will ever be mentioned, let alone seen

- La Sirena is first shown in this episode jumping into warp, suggesting they haven't taken a straight line from Earth to Vashti. Most starships are often shown at impulse when an episode kicks off. Did they just finish a stopover adventure? Side quest? Excuse to move the background crates around since the previous episode? Or are they following the "faster than light, no left or right" doctrine from Voyager and changing course only after dropping from warp?

- We've yet to see what's on the lower deck of the ship since last week, but twice now we've seen people come up from there. I'm sure we will, all these crew quarters and holodeck (holosuite?) have to be somewhere. Maybe the sickbay is on this main deck, the EMH walked onto the scene last week from an off-set room (that may not fit into the CG model of the ship, but I digress). No lifts though, which is a thing.

- Agnes was "going to watch a holo" when she discovered that the ship's memory only had Klingon Opera available. A holo... movie? Holonovel a la Voyager? Or have movies made a resurgence in the past couple decades?

- Is at least one of the Romulan ship designs swarming the Cube a variable wing design? Or are we looking at the same one in different wing configurations?

- It's great that a Romulan defence net allows transport windows in nice round increments of terran time units.

- Did anyone else see the triangular bread the sisters were making and think that it was actually Elven lembas bread?

- The bottle of Romulan Ale seen here is a different shape than the one seen originally in TWOK, but has the same label as in another appearance of the drink in some other episode, according to evidence from TrekCore.

- Narek and Soji go skating in a "ventilation return" corridor. What are they sliding on? They took off their shoes but are still wearing socks. Sliding on ice in one's socks doesn't work, the moisture in the socks increases friction. And if they're slipping around on ventilation grease / goo / whatever, is it their magic space boots that keep them from sliding around?

- Raffi is alerted to "POSTITIVE ID: FORMER ADMIRAL JEAN LUC PICARD" on her screen.

- The former Romulan senator was brought to Vashti aboard the Wallenberg class USS (?) Nightingale. The implication is that this ship is of the class that was being built over Mars, but my read is that everyone brought here was aboard some fleet that Picard managed to scrounge together, and starting the move before the synths attacked. From last week's episode, it did seem that Picard was keelhauled pretty quickly after the attack. Or, as I suggested previously, the exodus was well underway with new ships as they were being completed. Either way, I wonder if the ships of the exodus fleet had names already assigned to other Starfleet ships, as "Nightingale" would be a pretty early target name to assign to a ship, IMO. "Captain" Kim's command aside.

- The Romulan BoP is seen firing both beam and pulse weapons, the latter of which is likely a torpedo. No sign of the classic plasma weapon, though.

- Said BoP is disabled when La Sirena fires on the shields on the ship's starboard pylon, and then Seven's fire neatly cuts through the hole made and then the pylon itself. Smart and nonlethal.

- What does this say for the state of non-Starfleet weaponry? The BoP is an antique, but between La Sirena and Seven's little ship, they were able to take care of things much more swiftly than Kirk and his crew did some 130+ years prior.

On to this week's episode, and the realization that ad-blocking software is NOT a standard feature on all starships!

Mark

 

Really? Where?

"Romulan death squads are operating on Earth - that could only happen with the help of a collaborator within Starfleet" - well, no, if interstellar beaming is a thing.

And if it is a thing, why does La Serina have to hang around in close proximity to Vashti to beam Picard in and out? Why, in fact, does Picard need a ship and pilot rather than an off-the-books transporter?

And why was evacuating Romulus so tricky if it just took O'Brien getting carpal tunnel sweeping the three up/down swipey things a few tens of thousand times to beam 'em all off, rather than using a rescue armada?

 

Perhaps I could focus my deduction by saying that the bigger Alpha Quadrant powers probably have access to interstellar transport. The Dominion had it after all, to the point that they could go between stars with relative ease, AND let a renegade like Dukat use the technology to his own nefarious ends, suggesting it doesn't take a transport buffer and transmission pad the size of the Argus array to do it. This was following the "experimental" version used by Bok in the last season of TNG.

Also, Picard's flashback is at about the point in history when Spock zapped himself into the JJverse, where he promptly whipped up a transwarp beaming device out of the primitive technology of one 2250s Starfleet shuttle and one Scotty; and only a couple years later a portable version of this was able to beam Khan from Earth all the way to the bloody Klingon homeworld. Granted, the technology base was slightly askew by that point, but the concepts were there.

As such, I'd hazard to guess that interstellar beaming is advanced to the point of being used by at least the major powers. Not to say that there wouldn't be any countermeasures to it, to for example prevent Romulan death squads from causally using it to strike anywhere on Earth; having a conspirator to lift whatever jamming tech is in use would be helpful. Otherwise, the tech could be outlawed, expensive, or otherwise tough to come by, and La Sirena simply wasn't equipped with one.

Mark

 

Additional: OTOH, if it WAS commonplace, why not just set one up to allow everyone on Romulus to simply walk to another planet, like the Iconians did?

There could be range limitations - the Domnion transport tech had an upper limit of around three light years (ref: Memory Alpha), so perhaps there wasn't a suitable place for everyone to go (or for a daisy chain of transporters to be feasible). Or the tech was very energy intensive, or needed a rest, could take a huge amount of stuff at a time, or other factors that would make large-scale transport unfeasible.

Mark

 

Dukat could have been using the same as Bok. Come to that, so could the dominion, Kirk/Scotty and Kahn. It was probably dangerous - certainly after a few uses (ala folding transporters from the high ground), but why would that bother any of the instigators?

 

When they kidnapped Kira, they needed a transponder planted on her for them to get a clean lock on signal at up to 3 ly away.

So there seems to be technical requirements to beaming a target that far away.

I could see distant targets have transponders linked to each other such that transporters between space stations and planets within a system can have easy access.

But Planetary Systems greater than the maximum range would still require a starship since beaming even longer distances must come with unnecessary danger to the signal integrity or matter stream of the transporter at such long ranges.

 

Agreed. The closest star to Sol is more than four light years away after all, so even the Dominion transporter wouldn’t have been useful for someone wanting to beam to Proxima Centauri for dinner. OTOH, they may have been able to daisy chain relay stations into play like they did in “Stargate Atlantis” at one point. This could really increase the risk.

Mark

 

I wouldn't want my matter stream to transport through subspace over multiple ly if I can avoid it.

To many random anomalies, wierdness in subspace along with god knows what ship zooming around that may play havoc with the integrity of my matter stream over long distances.

Imagine trying to transport somebody over multiple ly and a ship warps by through the exact vector that you're transporting through at that moment in time. The Warp Field could potentially play havoc with the matter stream since the Warp drive distorts subspace by nature of it's operation. And then your matter stream is lost in subspace because you didn't know some random ship was going to cross your matter streams path. Or imagine if there was some random anomaly that screws with your matter stream.

Short range transports over normal space for me please =D.

 

I can see SubSpace Transporters used for easily replaceable goods, items, and materials.

Imagine sharing resources with nearby Space Stations that are only a few LY away.

Not having to send out a Shuttle Craft with parts/personnel unless it's a critical component that you don't want to risk loss over transporting over SubSpace.

 

1x05 random observations:
- Planet Vergessen, Hypatia system, is where they "deassemble" Icheb. I wonder if there's any significance to the "Seven Domes" - other than the fact that the colony (?) is made up of seven domes. The title card mentions it.
- The scene takes place 13 years earlier, he's wearing the "old" new uniforms we saw in other flashbacks and the VOY-style communicator.
- The "nurse" mentions his missing cortical node. Nice callback to Voyager.
- Stardust City is the capital of Freecloud, which is located in the Alpha Doradus system. Alpha Doradus is a real star, 169 ly away from Earth, according to wikipedia. That's around 6 weeks at warp 8, if online charts on warp speed are to be trusted.
- Rios' ship is a Kaplan F17 speed freighter, according to the hologram on Freecloud. And it can land on a planet.
- The action takes place at or next to Quark's Bar (which seems to be a franchise). "Quark of Ferenginar" is explicitly mentioned as part of Rios' backstory.
- Maddox is served Tranya, which popped up at Quark's before on DS9. The cooler easter egg is Rios' cocktail. He orders a Temtibi Lagoon, which is a place on Risa (from that episode with Worf and the eco terrorists).
- I'm getting Maquis vibes from the Fenris Rangers. They are not affiliated with the Federation but stayed behind on planet Fenris to maintain order after the supernova and the collapse of the Neutral Zone. Icheb was on leave from the USS Coleman where he served as science officer. The group that was dealing with back market Borg parts set up a trap for him when he was on a recon mission.
- Seven's ship from last week was referred to as a Corsair. Not sure if it's the class name or a more general designation for the type of small craft.
- They didn't explicitly mention it, but not only did I get Maquis vibes from the Fenris Rangers, I also got some strong Orion Syndicate vibes from Bjazyl and her group.