• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Spoilers Starship Design in Star Trek: Picard

Another new ship - a 23rd century Stargazer. It is seen in the ready room aboard the newest Stargazer in a display case of ships given that name. LIke the other two Stargazers, it is a four nacelle ship. The artist responsible for its creation, Bill Krause, identified it as a Radiant-class starship.

There is more info on the ship and pictures of it on Bill Krause's twitter feed. (I am having trouble with making links to the twitter feed.) It is a nice looking ship.
 
This seems to be the most accurate labelling of the fleet I've seen yet.
https://www.reddit.com/r/sto/comments/t5sfp6/picard_season_2_ships_with_labels/
SPOILER_501-4c7269aa-53c6-4550-a320-207616cc551a.png
 
I don't know STO at all so I just assumed they were regular Nebula and Akira class ships. I actually thought the Ross-class was an Ambassador with that round deflector! I also thought the Excelsior was an Obena-class.

Big fan of the new Stargazer!

Seeing them here in detail I have to say I'm not a huge fan of the Ross-class. It kinda feels like they took a picture of the Enterprise-D and made everything uglier, like the worst kind of fan art.

But I completely appreciate that this was a cheap way to give us a recognisable and diverse Starfleet instead of just another ctrl+v Inquiry fleet, so I'm not going to complain.

Looking forward to more Starship porn to come!
 
I'm sure if they hadn't gone the STO route we would have still had new designs, or more older ones.

The Copy and paste fleet in Season 1 came down to very little time to make more models. The fleet scene was only finished 2 days before airing and was apparently a last minute addition to the episode.

While this has been worked on for the last 2 years.
 
Don’t get me wrong: I’m happy to see new ships, regardless of where they came from. The only nitpick I have is that if they were going to use four designs from STO, it would have been nice if they’d chosen ships that looked a bit different from things we’ve already seen. We have ships that look very similar to the Galaxy and Nebula classes, a ship derived from the Shepard class from DSC (which happens to be my favorite of these new ships), and a ship derived from the Miranda class. I know STO has designs that look far different than these, but apparently they wanted ships that resembled older classes for some reason. Maybe something like this would have looked more original:

https://ktarnfleet.fandom.com/wiki/Maelstrom_class
 
Last edited:
Don’t get me wrong: I’m happy to see new ships, regardless of where they came from. The only nitpick I have is that if they were going to use four designs from STO, it would have been nice if they’d chosen ships that looked a bit different from things we’ve already seen. We have ships that look very similar to the Galaxy and Nebula classes, a ship derived from the Shepard class from DSC (which happens to be my favorite of these new ships), and a ship derived from the Miranda class. I know STO has designs that look far different than these, but apparently they wanted ships that resembled older classes for some reason. Maybe something like this would have looked more original:

https://ktarnfleet.fandom.com/wiki/Maelstrom_class

The fleet shown here was really good at being both "familiar" but at the same time "different enough" from what we have seen before & also very diverse. They did a pretty good job here (especially compared to the season 1 finale). This felt like a proper "Starfleet fleet" like it could have appeared on DS9, VOY or one of the TNG movies.
 
Thank you!

I do like how she's a Galaxy-class offshoot. The perfect base from which to develop her design.
 
The Ross Class was also designed for a streamed Star Trek TTRPG series called 'Clear Skies', not just for STO.

Here's Cryptic's lead ship designer revealing the fact the ship was going to show up in the show to the cast.

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

He also confirms that the STO models in the show are the original game quality models, just converted into whatever format they use in the show VFX. They're far away, so they didn't need to be very high poly.
 
Last edited:
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top