Whatever about the Fed fleet bit given the state the Romulans were in at the time I just wish "all they had" could have looked a bit more rag-tag. God I would have killed for the odd Warbird
Spoilers Starship Design in Star Trek: Picard
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Whatever about the Fed fleet bit given the state the Romulans were in at the time I just wish "all they had" could have looked a bit more rag-tag. God I would have killed for the odd Warbird
Unfortunately, all the odd Warbirds were destroyed and the even ones don't arrive until Tuesday.
I'll show myself out.
Eaves is constrained by the desires of the producers and executives, he has to give them what they want. For instance, he wanted to just do some surface detail updates to the 1701 but was told to make a more substantial update. In Picard, if anyone cared enough they could have asked him for something original instead of a rehash, or look up who worked on the older ships and ask them to collaborate. Given how rushed the final FX of Picard is I assume the schedule for designing a new ship was non-existent so Eaves just grabbed what was available.
This is just flat-out false. The fall-out from the destruction of Romulus informs damn near everything about this show. It informs Jean-Luc's depression and self-destructive impulses, and his desire to get out there and start making a difference again. It informs Jean-Luc's feelings about the most important relationship of his life until then, his relationship to Starfleet (and therefore the destruction of his own self-identity in the 2380s, since he cannot conceive of himself outside Starfleet at that point). It informs the six different Romulan factions we see in the show -- the Zhat Vash, the Tal Shiar, the Free State, the Reclamation Project, the Qowat Milat, and the Vashti refugees. It informs the basic setting of most of the show, the now-lawless borderlands between the Federation and the former Romulan Star Empire. It informs Seven of Nine's arc as a Fenris Ranger. It informs Federation political culture, as it struggles with its own nationalist/isolationist elements. It informs the strained relationship between the Federation and the Free State, as the Free State is clearly trying to establish a better relationship with the Federation than the Star Empire would allow. It informs the conflicts that clearly exist between the Zhat Vash, the Tal Shiar, the Qowat Milat, and the Free State government. It informs why the Free State is administering the Reclamation Project and studying the Artifact. It even informs the Riker-Troi family, as it ties directly into the death of their son and the slightly haunted life they lead as a result. The destruction of Romulus and the collapse of the Romulan Star Empire permeates and informs everything about this show, and to claim it's not a big deal is just an absurd thing to say on its face.
I don't know how you can say that -- we only catch a glimpse of what might be the Imperial Fleet in the form of the ships that seem to be surrounding the Artifact to control traffic to and from it. The rest of the time, the Romulan security forces we see are Tal Shiar.
ETA:
Something interesting to think about: The ships in the Tal Shiar fleet in "Et in Arcadia Ego, Part II" looked surprisingly small -- honestly they look like they're barely any larger than a Boeing 747, so we're looking at ships that are somewhere in the range of 80 or so meters long. By contrast, a 22nd century Romulan bird-of-prey from the ENT era is 130 meters long, a 23rd Century bird-of-prey from the TOS era is 131 meters long, the 23rd Century D7-class Klingon ships they imported were 228 meters long, the Mogai-class warbird from NEM is 604 meters long, and the D'deridex-class warbird from TNG is 1,353 meters long. The ships in PIC seem more on the scale of the Romulan science ship from "The Next Phase" or the Romulan scout ship from "The Defector" (95 and 89 meters, respectively).
Seems likely to me that if the Tal Shiar can only muster ships on the scale of around 75 to 90 meters in length, that's an indication that its ability to project force is significantly depleted from that of the Star Empire's Imperial Fleet.
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And that’s why I give the producers and Eaves a pass for that fleet. They could have easily reused assets from DSC (the storyboards show Cardenas class ships as well as Nova class ships, so at least the person making those storyboards thought that the Cardenas looked close enough to a 2380’s-‘90’s style starship), but they didn’t. And while I’ve stated several times that I’m not crazy about Eaves reusing old designs, at least those Inquiry class ships make sense design-wise for a ship built in the 2390’s.
That they did.
They do have the right look, but they're also poorly made, so much so I became disillusioned almost immediately upon the fleet's arrival. Even though I'm grateful they didn't use a fleet of DIS shuttles, or any DIS ship, they still look bad. I can only imagine the flowers were far harder to make, rig, and animate than expected and it killed the time frame to properly create the ship from the Eaves concept. It would have been even harder if there were no orthographic drawing.
They do have the Galaxy model though. I might have been confused if the whole fleet had been Galaxy class ships, but I'm not sure I would have been disappointed. Definitely not in the same way, not if they updated the Galaxy in certain ways. If they had mixed the two classes I think it would work for me, because I would see how bad the new design is and be happy they had at least the well made Galaxy.
Well, I didn't say they were great ships, just that they fit the period design-wise. And they were fine for the one minute or so that we saw them on screen.
I would prefer that we not see the Galaxy class in PIC. The point of showing it in Picard's dream was that it was an aspect of his past, and to just use it as a background ship in 2400 would dispel that intent. That being said, if they wanted to take that CGI model and make TNG-era kitbashes from it for flashback scenes, I would totally love that.
Indeed.
This is actually something I want to see a lot more of is this kitbash style work. With CGI models I would hope that they could mess around more with them.
I would have been completely fine with what we got if it had been so far off in the background we could only make out the outlines. Like with the low res First Contact ships and especially the Wolf 359 fleet. Then it would be a game of what does this actually look like, and when we finally see the model the lack of detail would make perfect sense.
The Galaxy model is just superior, but not really expressive of a desire to see the Galaxy specifically. I wouldn't want a Galaxy showing up without good reason.
Galaxy kit bashes would be awesome.
Even I, who doesn't care about HD type stuff, would find it very odd to have low res fleet after the CGI quality of this season.
Plus, do we want to add further fuel to the fire of starship debates? O_o
Jim Wright?
My point is if the Inquiry were only seen further off it would have worked better because the model is of such low detail.
I would argue the Inquiry is lower detail than the First Contact Steamrunner and Saber models (since they have phasers, escape pods, sensors, pin stripes, numbers, names, and maneuvering thrusters) despite those being far lower resolution. I feel seeing those two ships closer up is better than the Inquiry, so long as they are in motion. With a still shot it gets iffy.
If it was just one lacklustre minute long sequence then it wouldn't be so bad, but my issue with the USS Copy Paste (Inquiry Class sounds so stupid), is that they're not just going to throw the design away, it'll show up again and will no doubt be this era's main Federation ship. Apart from the fact that they copied and pasted it 200 times, I find the design itself incredibly ugly. Made worse by CBS's poor lighting and framing and ultra contrasty space shots.
To each their own. I personally like the Inquiry class in terms of 24th century ships (which are generally not my personal favorite, aside from something like the Nova).
I don’t quite agree. I think that if a particular episode calls for a particular ship, then they’ll make something new, especially if that ship will have lots of screen time. As for the Inquiry class, who knows? Maybe next season they’ll remap the CGI model to have more details and even names and registry numbers.
I found DIS S2's depiction of Section 31 as a commonly-known legitimate division of Starfleet frustrating, because DS9 had clearly established them to be an illegal conspiracy within Starfleet rather than a legitimate division thereof.
Having said that, a major portion of the S31 storyline involved an artificial super-intelligence capable of lying to and tricking the Starfleet admiralty, so I reconcile the two by assuming that S31 was never legitimate and that Control had used falsified documents and other trickery to fool the admirals into thinking that it was a highly-classified division they had only just learned of.
Eh, I didn't mind Section 31 in Into Darkness because it was clear that Admiral Marcus was using his position within Section 31 to launch a coup against the Federation government. I imagine that in the Kelvin Timeline, Section 31 was exposed and its agents brought to justice much sooner than in the Prime Timeline.
I mean, I don't necessarily think hiring a former CIA or MI-6 agent is going to make such a series all that much more realistic, since the CIA and MI-6 are legitimate agencies answerable to the democratic state (at least in theory). Honestly, it seems to me that if you're doing a Section 31 series, you have to look at known illegal conspiracy within the government (e.g., Oliver North's conspiracy to sell arms to the Iranians to fund the Contras in Nicaragua, or Nixon's White House Plumbers), or at organized crime syndicates like the Mafia.
There was nothing in DS9 that would be against them being legit in the past.
The events in S2 is probably what made them go under ground and become what they were in DS9.
And even if S31 in DS9 was extra-legal, the higher ups in the Federation/Starfleet seemed to turn a blind eye to their actions.
They endorsed them through their inaction, and not trying to stop them.
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They existed in the gray regions of legality. Their very name comes from Section 31 of the Articles of the Federation (or maybe it was the Starfleet Charter, can’t remember exactly). Because of that, they were never illegitimate, nor 100% illegal, despite how distasteful their actions may be perceived.
