Spoilers Starship Design in Star Trek: Picard

[David cgc]

Nice close ups.

I think I figured it out why the ships dont look as great as they could.

The lack of window boxes is driving me a little nuts on the Titan. It's possible that's a deliberate choice to look more like the ships in the movies (but even that is memory playing tricks on you, there were transparent slides of set-photos put behind the windows of the TMP Enterprise to give an impression of depth and space behind them), but given the number of paint-scraping shots they like to do, it stands out that every window is a perfectly featureless white blob, except the conference room behind the bridge. The same thing happened back in DSC season 1, where the Discovery had modeled interiors and the Shenzhou didn't (except, again, for the bridge).

And they don't even need to be fancy little modeled doll-houses with furniture and crew walking around in them, just a five-sided cube with photos of some sets on the walls would be fine most of the time.

Also, the amount of visible segmentation/distortion is weird (something's up with the hull panel between the pinstripe and phaser bank on the left side of this shot, for instance, and the sharp crease as the hull curves up just inside the registry). It's like they just retextured the approval model, but didn't do anything to the actual geometry.

 

[Tuskin38]

shield grid, etc.

Shield grid?

 

[valkyrie013]

Shield grid?

if you look at the saucer, you see the hull lines, the circular grid, thats usually called the shield grid, what supposedly produces the shields. Have these on the engineering hull as well, And as seen here, I modeled mine in, there are no textures or normal maps on this particular photo, just the ship model.

with a texture, the closer you get, the worse it looks since its like a photo, enlarge it enough it gets pixelated etc. Same can happen with a model if you don't have enough poly's, most cgi models are made from ALOT of squares, more squares ( triangles, etc.) the smoother it looks but you take a hit on rendering time the more polygons you have, so you look at what you can get away with. This partiuclar picture is decent, but you can start to see lines get a bit segmented/pixilated. and i can't "Scrape the paint" like a super close up like on the Refit in first movie. you would defenatly see the segmentation.

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

Yep, "shield emitter grid", "deflector shield grid" (FJ blueprints). It's had a few names, but the same idea.

 

[NCC-73515]

Voyager's fwd torpedoes also get awfully close to the saucer belly if they fly straight forward

 

[C.E. Evans]

At least you can see where Voyager's forward torpedo launchers are. I'm still trying to figure out where they are on Discovery. Do they really come out of the nacelles?

 

[cooleddie74]

The turbolift shafts. Duh. They can hold thousands.

 

[TimeIsAPredator]

At least you can see where Voyager's forward torpedo launchers are. I'm still trying to figure out where they are on Discovery. Do they really come out of the nacelles?

In the refit the nacelles are torpedoes.

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

At the very bottom of the neck (above the two lights, poor lighting again), so definitely behind the lower sensor dome.

Should have put them on the secondary hull like the original Excelsior.

 

[Tuskin38]

At least you can see where Voyager's forward torpedo launchers are. I'm still trying to figure out where they are on Discovery. Do they really come out of the nacelles?

Their location is inconsistent. When they blew up the sarcophagus ship, they came out of the saucer. STO has them fire out of the RCS thrusters because of that

 

[Tuskin38]

At the very bottom of the neck (above the two lights, poor lighting again), so definitely behind the lower sensor dome.
View attachment 33036
Should have put them on the secondary hull like the original Excelsior.

Ask Bill Krause why he put them there. That’s their location on the Shangri-La as well.

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

Finally a great ventral view and .......... no obvious bay doors. Unless the shapes to the front are cargo bay doors.

 

[waniel]

I think some early trailers and definitely the MSD that Dave tweeted showed the Titan with a bridge window, but it seems that has been edited in the final release of these episodes to be just frontal armour plating. Does the Titan still have a retractable bridge blast shield like the Elios?

 

[Tuskin38]

I think some early trailers and definitely the MSD that Dave tweeted showed the Titan with a bridge window, but it seems that has been edited in the final release of these episodes to be just frontal armour plating. Does the Titan still have a retractable bridge blast shield like the Elios?

None of the trailers showed a window on the bridge, but I do see it on that MSD you mentioned.

There’s nothing on the front of the bridge dome that looks retractable to me.

 

[Rahul]

Absolutely love this little ship!

I always like it when Trek introduces "normal" kind of ships - we have enough "hero capital ship" designs already

But they absolutely fumbled the size of this little beauty: what looks like the windows from outside does not match at all return the size of the shuttle docked. That's egregious even for Star Trek, with it's varying ship sizes.

 

[Magistos]

Totally agree. That's a nice little ship, but the sizing compared to the shuttle is way off.

The snarky part of my brain just offered up - The ships windows say multiple decks, but the docked shuttle say glorified warp sled (a la Star Wars Prequel Hyperspace Ring).

 

[Tuskin38]

It's the shuttle that's the wrong size, not the ship. The concept art for the scene shows the shuttle smaller.

 

[Rahul]

It's the shuttle that's the wrong size, not the ship. The concept art for the scene shows the shuttle smaller.

No, it's the ship that has the wrong size:

The script asks for a ship that can be operated & maintained by a crew of 2, long-term. Something the size of the Millennium Falcon, or the La Sirena.
(Also, a ship that bounces off the hull of a larger ship if thrown against it)

The Design shows a massive, NX-01 sized capital ship with space for hundreds.

It is obvious that this is victim of some late changes in script or concept, similar to how the Titan -A is both Riker's old ship and a completely brand new 23rd 25th century ship.

Modern Trek is bad with sizes - from the supersized JJprise, Disco's Turbolift funhouse, this: SciFi-Writers Have No Sense Of Scale

 

[fireproof78]

I mean, ENT-D was mostly automated in terms of cleaning, so perhaps this class is designed for mass evacuations, with the big space, but not requiring a full crew because that space isn't used that often, save for in emergencies.

 

[Tuskin38]

The Design shows a massive, NX-01 sized capital ship with space for hundreds.

No, it's the ship that has the wrong size:

No, it's the shuttle.

I think you need to take a closer look at Eleos, it's windows and such, it looks nothing like the NX-01 size wise. It has at most, 2 or 3 decks. The NX-01 had 7. The Eleos is 119 meters long, The NX-01 was 225 meters