Spoilers ST Discovery - Starships and Technology Season Three SPOILER Discussion

[Mark_Nguyen]

Yes, but my point is that you have to PROGRAM the matter. It's probably not just a jar of peanut butter that you open up, smear onto the hull with a butter knife, and voice-command it to "make it look and work better". To be fair, there are probably a bunch of bored Starfleet engineers with extra cycles hanging out on the rain forest ship, as their own assignments are in maintenance mode for want of dilithium; they would surely jump at a chance to refit a gently used relic from 900 years ago AND do it on a tight schedule.

Extra notes, some of which comes from Trekcore screenshots:

- Cameos from planet Hunhau include a bunch of Disco-era ships floating around, including Cardenas, Hoover and Hiyawatha types. I guess this was previously a 23rd century depot like Qualor II? Or maybe they've been working on dismantling the ships in reverse order from newest to oldest to strip the more relevant bits of tech first?

- What's the logic of keeping them floating? If you're looking to cut things up, why not simply array them on the surface so bit aren't falling off and crushing unsuspecting escapees?

- Green Nephew plucks out a Type-II, later-TNG-era phaser with the more curved handle, as seen on later Voyager and DS9. There's also a bucket of combadges from assorted eras, including a Klingon one!

- We get another look at the Voyager-J. Frustratingly, a display in HQ confirms her as "Intrepid Class". It's also entirely possible that the ship's two hulls are also not connected by a traditional dorsal, for whatever logical sense that would be.

- I've noted that the Discovery deflector seems to have been removed, or at least replaced with a rather nondescript shape of the same texture as the rest of the hull, from what I can see. There's no deflector in the traditional place on the Voyager-J, nor on any other ship we've been able to dissect so far. Are deflectors now a thing of the past? MOST starships in this franchise don't have them, so perhaps Starfleet has finally gotten with the times?

Mark

 

[DEWLine]

"- Cameos from planet Hunhau include a bunch of Disco-era ships floating around, including Cardenas, Hoover and Hiyawatha types. I guess this was previously a 23rd century depot like Qualor II? Or maybe they've been working on dismantling the ships in reverse order from newest to oldest to strip the more relevant bits of tech first?"

That would explain the absence of more recent designs from the scenery.

 

[Dukhat]

"- Cameos from planet Hunhau include a bunch of Disco-era ships floating around, including Cardenas, Hoover and Hiawatha types. I guess this was previously a 23rd century depot like Qualor II? Or maybe they've been working on dismantling the ships in reverse order from newest to oldest to strip the more relevant bits of tech first?"

That would explain the absence of more recent designs from the scenery.

But not the late 24th century phaser pistol and self-sealing stem bolts.

And Burnham's dialogue made it clear that the ships in the graveyard were there because of the Burn, which implies that they were operational (and presumably intact) only 140 years before, and brought there later. So I'm not sure why they would need to differentiate them based on their age, when the implication is that they are no older than the other 'new' designs we saw go kaboom in the Burn flashback, despite their resemblance to mid-23rd century starships. On the flip side, the Orion guy's remark that the ships are 'older than dirt' was probably meant to emphasize the VFX personnel's use of S1 DSC assets, the implication here being that 800-year old ships were still actively operational right up to the Burn.

It's all very confusing.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

If AI is in wide use in the 32nd century, there's hope for the Genetic Engineering ban to be lifted.

 

[Dukhat]

If AI is in wide use in the 32nd century, there's hope for the Genetic Engineering ban to be lifted.

I think you mean the Synth ban. What does genetic engineering have to do with AI?

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

I think you mean the Synth ban. What does genetic engineering have to do with AI?

It's another field of technology that was banned by the UFP in the 23/24th century

 

[Timo]

We never heard of an AI ban. Picard's holodeck life continued unabated even when Synths were shot at sight; a holodeck can't work without an AI that can outsmart all of its humanoid users.

It appeared the Synths were a simple case of a product recall: they were of a very specific sort technologically, just like Soongian positronic androids had once been, and were found defective, so there was a ban while a remedy was no doubt frantically sought by Daystrom which seemed to hold the rights and other pertinent interests.

Cameos from planet Hunhau include a bunch of Disco-era ships floating around, including Cardenas, Hoover and Hiyawatha types. I guess this was previously a 23rd century depot like Qualor II? Or maybe they've been working on dismantling the ships in reverse order from newest to oldest to strip the more relevant bits of tech first?

Interestingly, all these Hiawathas are completely intact, save for the one in the process of being torn apart down below. The Burn apparently treats active ships quite differently from that... Furthermore, this single class is greatly over-represented here.

One might presume a depot, and further that the Hiawatha was a common type of transport or civilian freighter and thus found in very large numbers. A depot specializing in those is a distinct possibility; so is a Burn incident where modern visitors to the depot blow up and spew shrapnel in between the intact old hulks. The place could be a neph... I mean niche market suited for the dimw... I mean debuting members of the crim... I mean corporate family.

Alternatively, there might have been a big transport fleet in the process of establishing a colony, with most of the (ancient but still serving) transports having their engines not just idled but shut down for the lengthy offloading; the Burn would then do away with the modern escorts and the couple of active transports, but leave an atypical collection of ships in orbit.

What's the logic of keeping them floating? If you're looking to cut things up, why not simply array them on the surface so bit aren't falling off and crushing unsuspecting escapees?

The only way to make artificial gravity fail is to shoot at it, as in TUC and here. And the surface appears already strewn with piles that can be hand-sorted thanks to being on the surface; bringing the ships down, too, would necessitate spreading out the whole operation.

We get another look at the Voyager-J. Frustratingly, a display in HQ confirms her as "Intrepid Class". It's also entirely possible that the ship's two hulls are also not connected by a traditional dorsal, for whatever logical sense that would be.

Even more agility at really tight turns?

Are deflectors now a thing of the past? MOST starships in this franchise don't have them, so perhaps Starfleet has finally gotten with the times?

Good point. The old argument has been that deflector dishes aka sensor dishes are great for exploration, which only Starfleet ever bothers to do (combining a big FTL beam projector with FTL sensing assets and all). Perhaps Starfleet already gave up this exploration business some time before the Burn, back when they first started to build these floating-nacelle ships. That is, some time after the era of the "new Constitution" school of design which still relies on archaic structural solutions such as, well, structures.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Dukhat]

I got the impression that there were supposed to be old ships from different eras throughout the last 800 years to make it more believable that they’ve scavenged parts from all those eras. But instead they just made wrecked versions of the Hiawatha, Hoover, and Cardenas, and for some reason created one wrecked ship of an unknown design or era.

I’m curious as to why they did this. I’m assuming it was easier to take the original DSC CGI assets and make wrecked versions of them rather than making wrecked versions of ships like the Excelsior or Sovereign classes that they didn’t have CGI versions of already (although they did have the Galaxy class Enterprise-D and the Inquiry class from PIC...) But then why throw in one random ‘new’ design we’ve never seen before?

 

[Timo]

I got the impression that there were supposed to be old ships from different eras throughout the last 800 years to make it more believable that they’ve scavenged parts from all those eras.

Then again, it's never stated that Tolor would have items to offer outside the narrow time range of DSC through VOY.

Two possibilities there: anything beyond the mid-23rd century is in a distinct minority in this special shoppe, and Georgiou is just being redundant in asking for stuff from that era; or there is a broad and even range of stuff available, which is why Georgiou has to specify.

But Georgiou is winging it here, so she probably doesn't know. And Tolor would not be put off by redundancy when being put off by Georgiou probably means him becoming redundant; but he also wouldn't comment on this if specifying the range were what one normally expects from a customer.

I’m curious as to why they did this. I’m assuming it was easier to take the original DSC CGI assets and make wrecked versions of them rather than making wrecked versions of ships like the Excelsior or Sovereign classes that they didn’t have CGI versions of already (although they did have the Galaxy class Enterprise-D and the Inquiry class from PIC...) But then why throw in one random ‘new’ design we’ve never seen before?

Again two possibilities, I guess: they are going to use that design in an episode, or they were going to use that design in an episode back in the 2250s but never got around to doing so.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

Space IS big... Perhaps they were working on the 23rd-century part of the floating scrapyard, after having rotated the 24th and 25th century portions out of the way.

Besides, as I understand it there were HUGE problems with the CG assets built for DS9 et. al. in terms of formatting and overall quality, that couldn't simply be translated over to rendering systems that are several generations newer. Better to grab models that were readily available and that no one would notice were out of time / place, except for us REAL nerds. My wife certainly didn't notice when we watched it, and does a familiar eye roll when I point these things out.

As for the absence of the Galaxy, Zheng He or even La Sirena and Wallenberg models, I'm guessing it's as much because those are over in the Picard production offices and someone didn't want them touched. As it stands, the Hoovers we see look pretty copy-pasted in terms of their state. Not meant for real scurtiny.

Speaking of orientation of things over things, has anyone noted how odd it seems that everything at SFHQ is not level with each other? Not that they really NEED to be, but typically in a good ol' fleet scene everyone is oriented along the same plane as the biggest ship / station in the shot. Not so here. Most notably in the recent episode, there's a ship of some class (could it be Voyager-J? I can't make out the reg) floating what seems to be nose-down above Discovery as we pull back from her beautiful new saucer plating...

Mark

 

[Ronald Held]

Rotation of all ships from the same relative attitude helps to maintain the isotropy of the distortion field?

 

[Go-Captain]

I’m curious as to why they did this.

The same reason they use the Discovery shuttle everywhere and everytime, even Burnham's ship is just a Discovery shuttle with detached wings. It would take a day of modeling to make a shuttle, a couple days to make a decent background starship, but even time doesn't explain it, because in Picard they used the Discovery shuttle despite having at least one completely new shuttle, and an Argo shuttle model.

They are not lazy, nor time crunched, there is an inexplicable thought process going on specifically putting DIS ships everywhere in space-time.

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

I'm pretty sure that from a production standpoint, any of Paramount's digital assets from pre-2015 (like the Argo shuttle) would not be considered. I'm sure it's the analog equivalent of someone wanting to make a playlist for Spotify, and then being given a vinyl record to source it from and an 8-track player to extract it - not impossible, but for the same or less amount of effort they can modify an existing asset on hand.

Furthermore, there's always been a Hollywood pressure to keep things in house - IIRC, when TOS-R came out, there were fans who had created extremely detailed and compatible models of the Enterprise that could have been used (and had even been offered); but CBS opted instead for their own, less detailed and less accurate models. There's almost certainly some of that at play here.

Mark

 

[Tuskin38]

So today's episode showed Discovery's nacelles reattach when they spore jumped.

despite having at least one completely new shuttle, and an Argo shuttle model.

All the DSC shuttles we see in Picard appeared to be in civilian use, I don't think we see any in use by Starfleet. One could chalk that up to military surplus.

The one certain starfleet shuttle we do see is on Mars during a flashback, and it's a design of Eaves' from the mid 2000s (originally made for ST09) that was never used in a show or movie until now.

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

In addition to the re-docking nacelles, the Excess Energy Cavitation is now much more swift and occurs within a second of the spin out. I guess the improved spore drive is more efficient to the point that they don't have as much excess energy to cavitate.

Not ALL the signage has changed... A lot of the internal sets still have the big ol' 23rd century Starfleet logo on the walls and flooring. Not high on the list of things to update, like the uniforms.

And following on my earlier comment on the removal of mass from the ship last week, I've noticed that the ship has actually GAINED superstructure in some places, notably the neck of the ship which is now flared as it joins the saucer, not unlike a Galaxy-class ship. Does this mean there are new rooms and corridors in that area, and if so, would they be simple replications of the existing corridors, or stuff that is more to 32nd century spec?

Mark

 

[Go-Captain]

All the DSC shuttles we see in Picard appeared to be in civilian use, I don't think we see any in use by Starfleet. One could chalk that up to military surplus.

Then we would have seen shuttles from every era.

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

Not necessarily. This shuttle design may simply be a civilian version of a the DSC era shuttle, and not literally built to serve in the fleet. The C-47 transport of WWII was based on the then-new DC-3 airliner, and while neither are built anymore, lots of DC-3s are still miraculously in the air and earning their living.

Mark

 

[Go-Captain]

Not necessarily. This shuttle design may simply be a civilian version of a the DSC era shuttle, and not literally built to serve in the fleet. The C-47 transport of WWII was based on the then-new DC-3 airliner, and while neither are built anymore, lots of DC-3s are still miraculously in the air and earning their living.

Mark

We never saw it before in all of Trek, and all shuttles until DIS were indicative of their period. They would also need an airframe life span of over a thousand years since Burnham used one as her ship for a year before Discovery caught up to her.

DC-3's would have to be literally everywhere in just about every flying role for a proper equivalent to the DIS shuttle.

 

[Timo]

Burnham's private ride is quite unlikely to have been a C-type shuttle, despite using the same interior set heavily redecorated. The exterior is even more heavily redone, with the detached perhaps-nacelles bearing no resemblance to the original ones and all.

Nothing wrong with thousand-year-old spacecraft still working fine, not in Trek. We get examples of carefully mothballed, merely idled/abandoned, or actively used ones all. It's just not necessary to believe in such in this specific case.

The PIC ones aren't a thousand years old. For all we know, production of those things is still ongoing as of 2399, even if there are minor changes to the power train and possibly major ones to the user interfaces. More like the VW Beetle than the C-47, is all.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[matthunter]

We have companies today that make cars that look - externally - like classic 60s vehicles but have modern engines/steering/electronics. If you CAN, why would you not?

STO plays with this a lot, with Starfleet of 2409 making ships to honour the design of Connies, Constellations, etc. The latest one is a 25th Century Miranda (Reliant-Class).