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Spoilers Starship Design in Star Trek: Picard

Boris Skrbic said:
Totally different since including older ship classes is an artifact of legacy production precisely like the ones you just described (“must reuse expensive physical models”), not the desired state as we move into the future where older CG assets are hard to reuse and creating new ones is almost always required, which also makes it possible to create ship designs for a new era.
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"New era"? It's been twenty years, not two thousand, and they're starships, not cell phones. Realistically, starships with minimum planned lifespans of 50-100 years (and I doubt that line in the TNG Tech Manual was written with an eye towards reusing the Galaxy studio model in the background of Star Trek: The Nth Generation) would still be not merely around, but pervasive. The entire premise of Picard depends on the Federation having a limited ability to produce new matériel, but it's realistic to assume they scrapped and replaced tens of thousands of ships, something like eighty years' output, in a decade, after their main shipbuilding facility was destroyed? Now who's stretching to justify production realities in-universe?

We already have four uniforms changes in the span between Nemesis and Picard, isn't that enough change for change's sake for you?
 
The TNG tech manual is just an official publication often trying to justify production realities, which changed significantly after 1991 when Rick Sternbach was able to design so many more CG ships for VGR than he ever was for TNG as physical models. Who would want to build an old Ambassador when here was a ship designer sketching out or even blueprinting a new ship for you? That’s how we got the Equinox and the Prometheus and the Dauntless. We even had new shuttle designs for new ships as opposed to standardized classes. The Federation never had nowhere near tens of thousands of ships in active service during the Dominion War: perhaps a couple of thousand at most, and how many of those would’ve be Defiants?

Uniforms are different since they’re not tech, so we have to wonder what Starfleet sees in the need for redesign, but perhaps it’s just a harmless artifact of the ability to put the old one a replicator and get something new for the same molecules, as opposed to changing entire production lines. Starship parts also go through industrial replicators and can be put together via automated construction, so as technology evolved in the late 24th century you’d be able to decommission and commission classes more easily than before, in accordance with the real-world CGI revolution.
 
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Dukhat said:
Except they were not that outdated. Based off of their registry numbers, production of Excelsior, Miranda and Oberth class ships went from starting out in the late 23rd century and going well into the 24th.
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Did we see registry numbers on the Disco ships in "Children of Mars"? And since changine a decal costs far less than building a new model in the 90's, how much does that really mean?

Especially since when DS9 switched to CG, one of their Miranda class ships had the registry NCC-1864...
 
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King Daniel Beyond said:
Especially since when DS9 switched to CG, many of their Miranda class ships had the registry NCC-1864...
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No, since the CGI vendors had no reason to apply that registry number, which had also been replaced on the physical model. I’m fairly sure the baseline version for distant shots was the Majestic (as seen during the debut of LightWave models in “Sacrifice of Angels”), since that’s what the model appeared as in Starship Spotter.
 
If I was in control, I'd have a scene where the Registry Information changes in real time right before a battle, this way it's harder for the enemy to identify which ship is what when you have to fight a fleet of similar ship types.

The less information the enemy has, the harder of a time it is for them.

No need to show your Ship Names & Registry Prefixes if you have to.

But all that would take is one shot of a ship turning off their Ship Registry for a battle, along with a zoom out of other ships doing the same, then you can go on to render all your ships in battle without having to worry about Registry Issues.
 
Boris Skrbic said:
No, since the CGI vendors had no reason to apply that registry number, which had also been replaced on the physical model. I’m fairly sure the baseline version for distant shots was the Majestic (as seen during the debut of LightWave models in “Sacrifice of Angels”), since that’s what the model appeared as in Starship Spotter.
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Yet there is a screenshot on Memory Alpha Click!
(And apparently only one with that number is confirmed in DS9)
 
In that case it probably was built as the Reliant, then left with the original number since it was thought to be illegible. (Or maybe there was another CG model?)
 
That moment when you either remember to your astonishment or learn for the first time that the Reliant was technically around in TOS but didn't yet have an assigned name.
 
King Daniel Beyond said:
Did we see registry numbers on the Disco ships in "Children of Mars"? And since changing a decal costs far less than building a new model in the 90's, how much does that really mean?
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By the late '90's, Star Trek ship VFX has switched primarily to CGI rather than filming models, so changing decals or building new physical models wasn't an issue.

And if the CoM ships would have had registries in the 1500's, or registries in the 80000's? That would just mean that they were either incredibly old DSC ships docked at Utopia Planitia for some strange reason while the facility was dedicated to building Wallenberg transports, or that they were brand-new active duty ships of the same class whose designs hadn't changed one bit in over 130 years. I don't find either of those scenarios to make any logical sense. Here's the possible IRL scenarios:

1. The VFX people for CoM actually deliberately wanted DSC ships in the shot, if for no other reason than that they wanted to keep the actual Wallenberg ships a secret from the audience until PIC premiered.

2. The VFX people were on a tight budget with little time, so they just used the production assets they had available to show something above Mars.

3. The VFX people just didn't give a crap.

I don't find options 1 or 3 to be particularly believable, because knowing that VFX work was done at the last minute for Riker's fleet, I'm sure the VFX work for the Wallenbergs wasn't ready in time either, and I do believe the VFX people did the best they could with what they were given. So, to me, those Magees and Zimmermans were completely different, newer classes that coincidentally just look like those former ships. You know, just like how the Discoprise is meant to be the same ship from TOS. We just can't trust our own eyes anymore with CBS Trek.

Especially since when DS9 switched to CG, one of their Miranda class ships had the registry NCC-1864...
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That particular ship was a deliberate easter egg.
 
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