ST Picard - Starships and Technology Season One SPOILER Discusssion

The Americans had a Casablanca-class escort carrier named "USS Bismarck Sea" three years after the sinking of the German battleship. Not named for the prior one, but one does wonder if someone had thought of the ship had had taken down the illustrious HMS Hood...

Mark

 

Has anyone seen a good enough zoom in of the USS ibn Majid profile view, seen in Rios' box of leftover stuff?

Mark

 

The USN is naming two of its Virginia-class subs after the Oklahoma and the Arizona, both ships sunk at Pearl Harbor.

 

@Mondragon posted one in the Chris Rios thread:

 

It look like the USS Ibn Majid has the same type of nacelles as a Sovereign class starship, but they're sideway instead of upright. I'm thinking that the nacelles are below the saucer, but above the center line of the engineering hull. Probably the same type of saucer as a Sovereign.

 

Or then this supposed "Curiosity class" ship is markedly smaller than a Sovereign. After all, onscreen, she's a mere "heavy cruiser", which in classic relative terms means expendable second-rate scouting asset... And in Starfleet terms has covered Kirk's and Keel's ships but never Picard's.

Not as small as a Nova, or the smoothly oval primary hull probably would show more detail than just those impulse engine bumps. But perhaps closer to Kirk's ship than Picard's anyway.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Bear in mind though that Starfleet isn't shy about reclassifying vessels later in service life. I doubt the Ambassador-Class was originally designated a heavy cruiser... like the Galaxy, she was probably an Explorer back when freshly minted. Only after the appearance of larger ships like the Galaxy did she get relegated to cruiser duties.

The Miranda would have been a cruiser back in the Kirk era. By TNG, she's probably considered a frigate.

The Sovereign is now over 30 years old. I doubt she's the most advanced ship in the fleet any more, so the Heavy Explorer title may have dropped away (she always seemed better-suited to combat duty than exploration, anyway)?

 

I've never considered the Sovereign an explorer anyway - in none of her three movies did we see the Enterprise-E actually doing Exploration far from home as her mission, let alone actual scientific duties. Three movies is hardly a true sample size, but IMO the Sovereigns are used as troubleshooters closer to home, along the lines of what the Enterprise-D ended up doing rather than her intended mission of long-term exploration. Closer in mission to the TNG Excelsiors ("hauling my butt back and forth between starbases", per Captain DeSoto), but at the upper end of the fancy scale.

As for the ibn Majid, it's impossible to tell mission from shape, other than it doesn't seem terribly specialized to any particular one. She's a contemporary of the Sovereign and Intrepid classes by her general look and NCC number (and by the Gods I hope they meant this number on purpose, versus the percieved giant shoulder shrug of the DSC numbering), and there probably shouldn't be too many starships of similar size and mission capacity made at the same time. The ibn Majid could be a smaller contemporary to the Sovereign, with sideways nacelles and saucer-mounted primary impulse drives.

It's pretty clearly a John Eaves design, so hopefully someday he'll release some sketches when no one is looking. In the meantime, I'm sure the Trekyards nerds will mock something up or show off someone's attempt at an overall design. Back in '95 there was ONE fuzzy, overhead sketch of the early E-E partially hidden behind Rick Berman during an interview, and the internet of the time managed to make some pretty close guesses!

EDIT - the Trekyards nerds seem to think that the ibn Majid is based on the USS Emmett Till. I can see that, with some clear modifications.

Mark

 

Her NCC number implies that she was built not long after the São Paulo/nuDefiant at the end of DS9, which was 2375, which would make the ibn Majid, and the Curiosity class in general, almost 25 years old in 2399 (assuming the ship still exists) and would have been built even before the newer tugs for the evacuation fleet. So some sort of Sovereign variant is logical. I’m hoping it’s smaller than the Sovereign, but that silhouette gives zero indication of scale.

 

Anybody have a guess as to La Sirena's maximum warp? She's said to be slower than Kar Kantar's bird-of-prey, but still makes it good distances pretty fast (when using standard warp, not transwarp conduits). Earth to Alpha Doradus (Freecloud) is 169 light years. At warp 8, that's a 60 day journey, and it sure didn't feel like there was two months between leaving Earth and getting to Freecloud, even with the side trip to Vashti. Could advances in warp tech since Voyager's return 22 years ago mean that speeds of warp 9+ are easier to achieve and much more commonplace in 2399 than in the 2370s?

Incidentally, when I brought this up over on Reddit, someone got mad when I reminded them that Voyager's "maximum sustainable cruising speed" was warp 9.975, insisting that Voyager couldn't be that much faster than the Enterprise-D, if at all. They kept harping on Voyager's average distance traveled of "three light years a day," forgetting that Voyager wasn't going at top speed most of the time.

 

When was she said to be slower than the antique BoP? If she was, wouldn't that be in the context of impulse speeds for combat?

I'd imagine an unregistered freighter needs to be pretty damn quick to make illicit cargo runs, so I wouldn't be surprised if she can do at least warp 9+. Though yes that's still a lot slower than she was presented as being in terms of transit time.

 

Well, small craft can hop from star to star in meaningful time - that's our starting point, not isolated datapoints of warp factor vs. perceived speed.

Is it meaningful for Cyrano Jones to spend two months crossing 150 lightyears? For Harcourt F. Mudd to spend at least thrice that getting his frontier brides to what could count as frontier in the world where Starfleet ships treat distances between 400 and 1,000 ly as mere tactical considerations, not strategic ones? Probably warp 8 is significantly faster than that (as opposed to Cy's and Harry's ships being capable of much higher warp factors than Kirk's).

It's sort of curious that PIC on one hand tries to keep the action very local, stating that just crossing the former Neutral Zone takes time Rios isn't keen on giving - and on the other arbitrarily enters Alpha Doradus into the equation, in a suggestion of sorts that they aren't playing by the rules of the maps they so faithfully seem to consult and flaunt. And then they give this explicit "Wow, 25 ly in a quarter of an hour is amazing!" which only means it took them more than an hour and a half to go Freecloud, but the moral back-and-forth during that trip (or the bulk of it) didn't really appear to take much longer anyway...

Speaking of local, should we consider it amazing that this important hub of AI activity is basically right next to Earth, Romulus and Qo'noS, that is, within a couple of hundred lightyears of each at most? Or should we start looking for things that would result in places like these three emerging around an AI hub...? (The eight-star wonder, I mean, not Coppelius.) Or are there several of the Admonitions around?

Timo Saloniemi

 

An interesting question about Aia's home-star system. They'd have to be hidden from easy surveillance if such exist, given the dialogue in "Broken Pieces". Voyager and the missions to Gamma Quadrant spaces depicted in DS9 - and the databases accumulated by Xahea from its more rimward vantage point, or New Eden/Terralysium on the Beta-Delta Quadrant border in DSC - can't have found any systems like it, or they'd have been cited.

 

Indeed, while we can't rule out the existence of hundreds or perhaps thousands of Admonitions (Xahea and Terralysium and most of the stuff done in Gamma are just spot checks, and the VOY line a fairly narrow sensor swath through that space), we can rule out their existence every thousand lightyears in a grid of some sort. Which then leaves the proximity of the one known Admonition to the trio of Trek-crucial planets a statistical oddity - or a cue to a causal relationship.

Timo Saloniemi

 

According to Memory Alpha:
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/USS_Voyager

Voyager's Maximum Sustainable cruising speed @ Warp 9.975 was only rated for 12 hours of sustained operations at that speed.

I suspect their Constant Cruise Speed (Assuming Infinite Fuel, nothing stopping the ship be it outside force or mechanical failure) would only be Warp 8 based on the original estimate of 70,000 ly journey home taking ~75 years in their original projections.

According to the TNG Warp Formula, Warp 8 is 1,024.0 c and in one Gregorian Year, you would cover 1,023.97897330595 ly

Based on that calculation, Voyager would've taken 68.36 Gregorian Years if they had all the supplies necessary, but they didn't have those supplies, so add in ~6.64 years for pit stops, exploration, refueling, misc excursions, etc.

I think the Intrepid Class having a Constant Cruise Speed of Warp 8 is a reasonable extrapolation given the evidence provided.

The Galaxy Class had a "initial average cruise velocity" of Warp 6 which I interpret to be equivalent to a "Constant Cruise Speed" since that's probably what the ship can hold if given infinite fuel / resources and nothing going wrong to stop the vessel.

 

I would assume so since the need for faster Warp Engines are always necessary given that Space is constantly expanding in all directions, even if space expansion was STL, it's had plenty of time to expand and is constantly expanding, that ever growing gap between the stars and Galaxies is only getting larger.

According to my calculations @ Warp 8 it would take "La Sirena" ~60.281 Days which is inline with your calculations.
@ Warp 9 it would take "La Sirena" ~40.707 Days
@ Warp 9.9 it would take "La Sirena" ~2.843 Days

I base my evidence on the on screen statement of Tom Paris for Warp 9.9 in the episode of VOY: "The 37's"

Which is very close to my Warp Factor 20 if you take the TNG Warp Factor formula, and let it run it's course onto infinity instead of using a hand drawn curve after Warp 9 (NOTE: I still think it was a dumb move on the Creative staff to do that)

WF 20 according to my TNG scale unleashed: Speed = 21,715.3409327592 c
Tom Paris statement of "Warp 9.9. In your terms, that's about four billion miles a second." is equivalent to ~21,473 c

@ WF 20, the closest equivalent to Warp 9.9 on my scale, it would take the "La Sirena" ~ 2.843 days to get there at continuous speed.

Near the end of ST:VOY, we have Voyager being able to hit WF 9.975, USS Prometheus hitting WF 9.99

So having smaller vessels like the "La Sirena" hitting Warp 9.9 for days on end 20+ years after VOY era seems reasonable.

 

Strangely enough, we've heard nary a warp factor or any indication of any velocity in this show at all. The closest thing we have is that the Romulan fleet is 24 hours away from its target, but we have no idea where they are in transit from their last known position, the Borg Cube's location, which is at LEAST 25 light years from Synthworld. However, the fleet is likely closer than that as we know they've been en route for more time than since the cube detected them, we just don't know by how much...

Mark

 

Damn virus. Partial notes on 109 follow. Reposted from the DSC thread after being mistakenly posted there.

- Agnes' "old school medical tricorder" has never been seen before, and would've been a good chance to see a TNG-era prop (and used a remixed TNG sound effect regardless). Still, given that Rios seems to have Starfleet weapons, uniforms and equipment from around ten years ago, it may follow that he grabbed all his stuff on the way out and has since used / replicated / scrounged what's familiar to him.

- More to the point, Agnes seems to grasp a doodad sticking out the side of the tricorder as though it were possible to pop it out a la hand scanner. Nice touch.

- This episode marks the first time in this series that any planet is named in the classic Trekkian format of "Star Name + Number". Even if the locals call it Coppelius, Picard reports back to Starfleet that it's Ghulion IV. Perhaps all this time it's been more of a Starfleet thing? And that everyone else we've heard over the years have just had it universally-translater to System + number for our Starfleet-accustomed ears?

- Rios orders a Red Alert, which comes complete with Nemesis cut scene automated seat belts and a TOS-inspired klaxon. But why wasn't any of this used a few episodes ago when they were attacked by the ex-Romulan warbird? They had ample time to belt in and change the bulb when they were fired upon.

- And would Emmet have belted in too?

- After crashing, Rios opens La Sirena's shutters, including one shining down directly over Picard's face. Oddly though, the sickbay should be directly under the ship's transporter pads. Perhaps La Sirena comes with a sort of periscope system to allow natural light into an otherwise windowless room?

[Skipping stuff on Synthworld because other stuff more interesting IMO]

About the Romulan fleet:

- So we have two types of ships in this fleet, the wide-winged "Albatross" type warbird, and a bigger bird which is commanded by ex (?) Commodore Oh. I say "bigger" a bit sarcastically, as these ships are comparatively tiny compared to pretty much every TNG Romulan capital ships seen. These are much more comparable in size to the scout seen in TNG "The Defector", its larger cousin which used a modified version of the same model in "The Next Phase", and maybe even the Runabout-sized ship seen in DS9 "In the Pale Moonlight".

- Even if you consider the warbirds seen in "Nemesis" are already smaller than the big birds seen prior, it's almost wierd to consider how the fleet ship size has shifted. Granted, this is the Zhat Vash, so them using smaller, nimbler ships seems to make sense, even if the Tal Shiar had no problems using full-sized warships for their secret attack on the Founder's homeworld in DS9.

- On the other hand, we don't know what the state of the Romulan infrastructure is even fifteen years after the supernova. For all we know these could be fifty year old ships the ZVs have pulled out of mothballs somewhere, while the Romulan Free State is still using the bigger ones.

- Regardless, Oh's flagship bridge seemed like a virtual one to me. Her CO chair and raised platform bay be real, but the walls and doors look CG. I guess we'll see soon!

Mark

 

https://www.engadget.com/2020-03-25...gn=homepage&utm_medium=internal&utm_source=dl

Any comments?

 

Getting in here with details on THAT bridge, because I'm a bridge snob:

Yup, that was Discovery's bridge alright. Back wall, side consoles, and CO chair. They must have flown Frakes up plus a couple costumes (or filmed this while he was directing an episode of DSC in Toronto) for this scene.

- They filmed this in front of the side wall of Discovery's bridge, moving the flanking consoles over there and dropping (or maybe just rotating) the CO chair in front of them. There were a few cosmetic changes to the light panels higher up on the walls too - they pulsate, which suggests that they're an upgrade to the Discovery set we haven't yet seen.

- The look forward at the viewer however is CG, meaning Frakes is looking at a green screen. Notably there is a lack of traditional Helm and Ops consoles, instead having a pair of freestanding consoles on small daises right in front of the viewer - unmanned, kinda like what was in front of the viewer on the Enterprise-C.

- There MAY be a pit of some kind directly in front of the forward viewer / window / whatever, you can see what might be a chair just to Riker's left in that shot. There's also a kind of railing down the side which might be stairs to the pit. I'd love to see a full diagram of at least the CG part someday.

Mark