He said 'was' because the ship doesn't exist anymore. It was scrubbed from the records, everything classified.
Nobody in TOS speaks of or seems to know about the Temporal Cold War or the Delphic Expanse, either. And even Romulan cloaking technology seems to be a new thing to the crew of the Enterprise in Season 1 even though Romulans clearly used it in war with Earth and other powers over a century before. Classified records explain a lot in Trek.
Yep. We conveniently forget that even traveling to Talos IV after DSC and until TOS carried the only death penalty left on Starfleet's books. If Starfleet Command would put somebody to death for visiting a planet of powerful telepaths then what would they have done to someone who revealed the existence of time-traveling transdimensional beings who tried to turn the entire Milky Way Galaxy into their own realm, killing every living thing within?
A starship class named for one of the NASA Mars rovers? And a trait deemed a virtue by many Federation species as well? I like it.
Wait. The Federation wouldn't impose the death penalty on anybody. Because utopia...or something. That argument just keeps falling apart with each pull of the thread.
I am a little confused about the Romulan ships seen at the end of the episode. Did we see one or two classes?
There were three types of ships: the new large ships, the transports like the one Narek arrived in, and the hammerhead scouts. The transports and the scouts were already at the cube and left with the larger ships.
Chabon is sticking to the Curiosity class so I think it is part of the backstory they worked out. He says they’re mostly named after great navigators. https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/497145587951599636/688034977287372860/image1.png
It class name is probably what it is. They have name a starship class name off screen after they were seen on screen in the past.
I wonder if this means we'll get to see one of these cruisers. Why bother with a new ship class if you're not going to show it?