For the Luna: I got the impression from Star Trek: Nemesis that the 'Titan' was supposed to be a supership, even larger and more powerful than the Enterprise-E. Why name it 'Titan' (obviously in honor of the Greek gods of the same name) if it's not meant to evoke power? Instead, Pocket Books decided that it was supposed to be a small ship named after the moon, not the Greek gods.
I don't see anything about NEM that implies the
Titan was a supership. All we know about her is that she's Riker's new ship, and she's being deployed to Romulus post-Shinzon for a diplomatic mission. Your interpretation is perfectly valid, but I for one never got the impression you did, and I don't think that calling her the
Titan was "obviously" a reference to Greek mythology. I rather liked the idea of giving a class of ships a theme name, and I liked the idea that there's a
Luna class and every ship in it is named after moons. (The novels restricted themselves to moons from the Sol system, but I think it would have been cool for there to be a
Luna-class ship named, for instance, the USS
T'Khut or the USS
Jaraddo.)
With such a massive fleet, would it have made any real difference if there were several classes of ships all low res?
Nope. It wouldn't make one bit of difference at all. This is all just spitting at the wind, especially since the episode really wasn't about the ships in any meaningful sense. If it had been ten
Sovereign-class or
Galaxy-class starships, or a mix of dozens of
Sovereigns, Galaxies,
Ambassadors,
Prometheuses, or what-have-you, the episode out have played out exactly the same.
Well JJ and his current and former people came in. For various reasons they decided on prequels. Simultaneously they wanted to introduce new tech. So rather than wait for 2399 to bring in time travel suits, interstellar beaming and instantaneous jump drive over 50,000 light years, they decided to say that the Federation of the 2250s can do these things.
1) J.J. Abrams has never been involved in the creation of DIS. He and Alex Kurtzman haven't worked together since
Into Darkness back in 2013, long before DIS was conceived.
2) I, too, wish that they had set DIS in the late 24th Century -- because nothing about the story they told
required it to be set in the 2250s, and that setting didn't add anything to it, and because Michael's being Spock's foster sister adds a weird subtext to his family scenes in TOS and in the TNG Vulcan episodes. But, the idea that if they set something in the 23rd Century, that they shouldn't depict the 23rd Century as being more advanced than us, is just impractical. A multi-million dollar television program trying to get a mass audience is not going to re-create an aesthetic that is clearly based on outdated ideas about what "advanced technology" means in the 2010s and 2020s. It's just not gonna happen. Sure, ENT and DS9 re-created that aesthetic for one-off (or two-off) throwbacks, but that's not the same thing as a sustained setting for a TV show trying to attract an audience beyond niche Trekkie obsessives like us. And
Star Trek is always supposed to be showing us a vision of the future, not a vision of the past.
Been looking at the eaglemoss Discovery ships because I’m board at home.
Man, if you just tweak the nacelles a bit on the Shepard Class and the Buran they really would fit in the “Picard” era. They would be perfect designs for the 24th/25th century.
Yeah, I've often thought that the design aesthetic they chose for DIS looks more like it would flow naturally out of the design aesthetic of the late 2370s rather than the 23rd Century. Yet another reason I would have chosen to set DIS in the late 24th or early 25th Centuries if I had had the choice. But that's also a very subjective thing that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of whether or not something's a good show that's gonna attract a loyal audience.