It's pretty lame to put different nacelles on a ship and call it "different". Kinda like saying there were two TOS Enterprises because one had those hemispheres on the back of the nacelles, while the other had the mesh grids. Also, am I the first one to notice these look like the Battlestar Galactica (reboot)? Or am I just late to the party? Lastly, do we really want to be calling these "variants" these days?
I think it's just the creators providing cover for themselves since they had to rush the effects for the season finale but hey, at least they're trying to come up with explanations. They could be really lazy and not even issue these kinds of graphics. Maybe in-universe and by 2399 these constitute different variants of one class of vessel.
Well, a ‘variant’ is one class of ship that has subtle (or not so subtle) differences within each individual ship, but that it’s quite plain even with those differences what class of ship it is. Examples include the Excelsior/Enterprise-B variant, the Reliant/Lantree and Saratoga variants, etc. I think the issue in the past was that someone was making a statement that the (4!) variants of the Inquiry actually made them different classes, which was not true. Another issue was the old DS9 tech manual, which listed ships such as the Centaur-type and Raging Queen type as ‘Excelsior variants,’ when it was blatantly obvious that they were no such thing. Scaling and design issues aside, they were their own class of ship, not ‘variants’ of one particular class. Franz Joseph’s Starfleet Technical Manual did have two externally identical ships, a destroyer and a scout, as two different classes (with internal differences), but that wasn’t a canonical publication.
In terms of verisimilitude, two different engines bolted on the same hull would ITRW be a huge thing, giving the two types of ship dissimilar performance. They'd certainly be considered 'variants' in the Wikipedia sense. If the different colors represent different innards or power settings or the like, too, then those ships would indeed be 'four variants'. Subclasses? No way. Classes? No fucking way. But 'variant' is a very nice word to describe different types of equip or performance. Timo Saloniemi
Like the various letters the US Air Force & Navy use for their aircraft? F-18A or F-18B. Same "class", all F-18's, but with many differences, including, I'd imagine, different engines as well as different armament and in some cases 1 seater vs 2 seater (maybe not the F-18, but other fighters). Variants.
And then you have the almost endless variants of old Soviet aircraft like the MiG-23/27 Flogger and Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunship.
Or, say, the different Blocks of F-16, with significant differences in propulsion and sensors even if every single-seater is a C and every two-seater a D. Military organizations often want to promote certain major guidelines, to allow even slow-witted Congressmen to follow. But where it matters, either to the operators or then to those maintaining the hardware, 'variant' labeling goes into deep detail, sometimes ridiculously deep - check out the ways the variants of Mitsubishi Zero were natively labeled, say. Starfleet could choose to call fifteen externally different ships from across a whole century Constitution class, and then differentiate between externally identical Obert, Goddard, Korolev and von Braun classes because their sensor suites are intended for different targets. But so far, we haven't really had two similarly shaped ships with different class names. Timo Saloniemi
Indeed. The bussard colors and nacelle shapes are variant designs of the same base class. Whereas in STO, we can add the Avenger- and Arbiter-class battlecruisers could be seen as subclasses of the Inquiry. https://sto.fandom.com/wiki/Avenger_Battlecruiser
Miranda and Soyuz. Also Starship, Constitution, and Enterprise depending on your interpretations of background signage.
Miranda and Soyuz are very differently shaped, immediately discernible to the eye. Whether the also immediately discernible other deviations from Miranda baseline (no torp pod, lateral pods, AWACS triangle, whatnot) have their own class names or not is unknown thus far. At most we might say Enterprise (E-nil refit) and Constitution (E-A) might qualify - if we had some reason to think the E-nil refit really was of the Enterprise class. But I like to think of that "Simulator, Enterprise Class" sign as saying "Simulator, NCC-1701 Class", since the whole point apparently was to put a new crew to that specific ship, NASA style, if McCoy's counteroffer of putting the old crew there again is to be taken seriously. Timo Saloniemi
I would say that in the case of the Soyuz (which was canonically referred to as a different class), its differences from the Miranda are not much different than those of the Enterprise-B and the Excelsior. Just some add-on parts, but the overall shape and design of the ship is relatively the same. So why is one ship a different class and the other is just a variant of the same class? Only Starfleet can answer that question.
To be sure, we have no reason to think the E-B would be Excelsior class. Indeed, virtually no Excelsior class ship gets called an Excelsior class ship in actual Star Trek. (And no Miranda gets called Miranda; mileage can vary on obscure Okudagrams.) It's just that the Lakota is one of the extremely few ships to get called by her class name, and in "Paradise Lost", that name is Excelsior... Might be the subclass designations erode away with enough time. Eventually, all the differently shaped Constitutions are just Constitutions, even if the 23rd century still saw subclass divisions. Perhaps all Excelsior variants eventually merge into the Excelsior class, but not yet as of ST:GEN prologue? Timo Saloniemi
Which isn't seen in Star Trek. We also can't see the MSD in focus, but it wouldn't mention the class identity anyway. Few MSDs do. Many dedication plaques do, but only a tiny handful of those are ever seen, hence no canon evidence for the existence of a "Miranda class", say. Timo Saloniemi
It doesn't matter that it wasn't seen. It was used in the shot, and its official. That's proof enough that the ship is Excelsior class, until someone else in charge says otherwise.