Spoilers Starship Design in Star Trek: Picard
- Thread starter pst
- Start date
Sorry newbie here, if you include the book "Elusive Salvation" as canon it includes in the very last paragraph the passage -
"Because if the people of Earth possessed a single line of defense, then that line began where Daniel Wheeler now stood: Pentagon Sublevel B14, Section 31."
^^^ Interesting notion, but the canonical origins of Section 31 were already established on-screen (books have never been considered a part of official canon in any capacity, that I'm aware of). @DEWLine helpfully provided the exact wording here: "Article 14, Section 31 of the United Earth Starfleet charter", as mentioned in the DS9 episode "Inquisition". Memory Alpha's reference to it is here (paragraph 3).
Or, maybe the Klingons are an entire species with billions of people and hundreds of national cultures, and they simply have multiple design lineages. I mean, hell, just compare the Apollo spacecraft to the Soyuz -- or heck, even within the United States, there's a clear design lineage from Apollo to Crew Dragon that isn't shared with the Space Shuttle design. Or just compare, say, a B-52 to a Boeing 777. Multiple design lineages are perfectly plausible.
The novels are not canonical, that is true. Author Dayton Ward's point in that novel was not to establish a definitive origin story for Section 31, but rather to suggest that there were black operations organizations that early Section 31 was descended from and possibly named in honor of.
And Article 14, Section 31 of the UESF Charter comes from ENT "Divergence." DS9's "Inquisition" established only "the original Starfleet Charter."
The Romulan ship is easily the best ship in Picard. The only issue with it is the animators made the beams come from those three forward hatches instead of the obvious weapon emitters at the pylons roots. It would also have been a thrill to see it firing dual FTL plasma torpedoes instead of beams.
It really doesn't reconcile with ENT though, the changes are all encompassing, overwriting everything which came before.
I have no problem with that, especially given the kind of technology Trek has, and I would expect them to be rebuilding the ships as needed. It would be a ship of Theseus thing going on.
Originally that's what I wanted the explanation to be, along with the new Klingons being the human equivalent to Neanderthals, or vice versa, also rendering them immune to the Augment derived humanizing disease the other Klingons would be suffering. But when it turned out every house ship has the same aesthetic of a type we never saw before, and every house has the same style of Klingon, it throws that idea out the window.
It really doesn't reconcile with ENT though, the changes are all encompassing, overwriting everything which came before.
Last edited:
Precisely so. One doesn't need to like the new Klingon ships aesthetically to appreciate the expansion of cultural design.
Personal head canon is that the older ships and designs were far more expensive. L'Rell;s use of the D7 desgin was designed to be more practical and less resource intensive, due to the Klingons having more resource poor worlds.
*looks at Star Charts' Klingon maps again*
From Omicron Leonis to Epsilon Canis Majoris...
We need a few more two-pagers explaining the growth of Imperial space across the centuries, as well as which Houses hold which systems.
Back to starship design in PIC...
I have no particular complaint about the design of the ships in PIC, but what bugs me was that there were too damn many of them in the finale.
In ST, a single starship should be a major character that has a name, history, meaning, gravitas. When there are hundreds of them, they become nothing but a mass of mooks. Specks on the screen.
Each side should have had no more than four ships. Four big, dangerous ships with serious mass and presence.
In ST, a single starship should be a major character that has a name, history, meaning, gravitas. When there are hundreds of them, they become nothing but a mass of mooks. Specks on the screen.
Each side should have had no more than four ships. Four big, dangerous ships with serious mass and presence.
G
Gonzo
Guest
One large Command ship and some escorts on either side would have had more impact.
The command ships could have been previously known classes like the D'Deridex and Sovereign or new ones.
Don't get me wrong the huge fleets looked good at the end of Picard and certainly showed just how afraid the Zhat Vash are (honourable mention to Clancy for sending in the heavies) but you cant have a proper Mexican standoff with so many participants, the numbers have to be small.
The command ships could have been previously known classes like the D'Deridex and Sovereign or new ones.
Don't get me wrong the huge fleets looked good at the end of Picard and certainly showed just how afraid the Zhat Vash are (honourable mention to Clancy for sending in the heavies) but you cant have a proper Mexican standoff with so many participants, the numbers have to be small.
So I guess you didn't like the big battles in DS9 either?
Sorry, but I cannot agree that every single ship in Star Trek must have its own identity for a battle to mean something. The context in PIC was sufficient to establish the stakes and the tension of the moment comes from the characters themselves not the ships as characters.
Maybe I'm not a romantic enough but the whole "ships as a character" thing has always struck me as odd.
Maybe I'm not a romantic enough but the whole "ships as a character" thing has always struck me as odd.
Well I accept that they were major battles, where the fate of the whole Federation and Alpha Quadrant was at stake. Still I'd have preferred them too to be a bit smaller in numbers.
40 ships was supposed to be a lot at Wolf 359, the Klingon-Romulan border was barricaded with 20.
Matter of preference, I know. I'd just like the ships of Star Trek universe be formidable units, tough to kill, not used in masses and killed with 1-2 shots like fighters in other 'verses.
I would like to think that each battle indicated the need for Starfleet to ramp up.
That's how I see it. I expect PIC Starfleet is a bit more like TOS starfleet, unabashedly a military force along with its other roles.
The only issue both fleets having 200 ships means the Romulans should have been capable of building and crewing fleets on their own to rescue the remaining 900 million, unless that's somehow the whole fleet. It also means Starfleet should have had enough spare crews to continue their, presumably, low level aid. That fleet came together faster than the Wolf 359 fleet, and is over 5 times larger.
Well, there is two things that might impact that. One, the Romulan ships may be Tal Shiar vessels and not Romulan government vessels. If that's the case then they might have been building those elsewhere, possibly as part of the recovery effort from the losses when they tried to nuke the Founders homeworld. With all the government upheaval the Tal Shiar may simply not have trusted the Romulan government with those vessels.
On the Starfleet side we don't know the compliment of those ships and how long it took to assemble them all together. I imagine that those type's of vessels were designed in the wake of Utopia Planitia as being something simple, modular and able to be quickly built. But, that doesn't mean they were available before then.
Like with the Obsidian Order building ships without the knowledge of the Cardassian Central Command, you might wonder how they could manage it. Well, space is deep and you can't be everywhere.
