Spoilers Starship Design in Star Trek: Picard
- Thread starter pst
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Sure it could. All I’m saying is that the ship as it appeared on screen looked more advanced than the Titan did to me.
Of course, that's not saying much as pretty much ever ship we've seen post-2293 looks more advanced than the Titan. I still shake my head at that decision.
I wouldn't say it breaks the universe. I just think it sticks out like a sore thumb.
It's not how I'd design a ship for that era, but I can head canon reasons why it does exist in that time frame. Half the ships in Season 1 of DSC don't feel like they belong in the mid-23rd century but it's possible to head canon most of the oddball looks and nacelle shapes into some kind of logical evolution of Starfleet from the NX-01 days to Burnham's and Pike's.
Then you're a better man than I.
Exactly. And it's part of the fun. If Trek looks exactly how I imagine it then I think it shows too limited of a creative space.
I don't always agree but I'll welcome their efforts.
It takes some heavy lifting sometimes, but I've conditioned my head to do it.
Ideally it should look better than I can imagine.
What lore explanation was that?
The only one I remember is that Eaves rationalized to himself that all the ships had weird engines because they were all involved in spore drive tests, but I don't know if that was something he deduced himself or actually something under consideration by the writers during Discovery's hectic pre-production phase.
I remember the Cardenas, in particular, was designed under the impression that it'd be the ship that ended up being the Glenn, Discovery's twin prototype. The big black stripes on the saucer were intended to mark it as an experimental ship.
Personally, I view the square nacelles as hot-rodded Warp 7 round nacelles, which need extra heat sinks and other components attached outside, like a muscle car with the engine poking through the hood, so they've got an extra cowling around them. The Constitution-class and other newer round-engine ships had fundamental improvements to the design that allowed for greater speeds without a bunch of extra parts bolted on, making most of the Disco-fleet an evolutionary dead-end or intermediate patch between the Kelvin and the Constitution.
That's the first I've heard of all that. Was that in his DSC ships book? None of that even makes sense to me. Why would the shape of the nacelles have anything to do with the spore drive? And if big black stripes on the Cardenas's saucer denotes an experimental ship, why didn't the Crossfield class have them?
Or use "NX" in the registry?
I like the theory on this but it's easy to paint oneself into the corner and get twisted into knots over it, especially when there are so many holes to fill in the logic on all the stuff that went on in DSC.
I really wish Fuller didn't feel the need to reinvent nearly every damn thing in the Trekverse. He really didn't do the franchise any favors with all that shit.
I like the theory on this but it's easy to paint oneself into the corner and get twisted into knots over it, especially when there are so many holes to fill in the logic on all the stuff that went on in DSC.
I really wish Fuller didn't feel the need to reinvent nearly every damn thing in the Trekverse. He really didn't do the franchise any favors with all that shit.
Both the EM book and the Eaves general Artbook, I think.
Page 64 of the Discovery Season One Eaglemoss book: "The shape of the nacelles was a particular concern for Eaves. Star Trek: Discovery's co-creator Bryan Fuller had specifically requested that all the new designs have square nacelles, but both the NX-1 and Kirk's Enterprise had round ones. Eaves and the rest of his art department came up with their own theory that explained this. 'When you're drawing stuff you want a reason why youre doing something. We came up with this idea: what eventually became the spore drive was going to be the new power system and all these ships were designed to eventually be fitted with that, so they have a traditional warp nacelle but it's in a new housing. If it didn't work, they'd have the traditional warp nacelles inside.'"
I'm not sure if he's speaking in-universe or out-of-universe when he says "what became the spore drive." Probably the latter, given how messy the development process for the show was. Remember, they hired an entire VFX team who built all the Binary Stars Starfleet ships, then were laid off because the show was being delayed for so long, and it went to a totally different team once they were finally ready to start doing the CG, at which point plenty of original context for those designs could've been rewritten or dropped.
Page 79, on the Yeager/Cardenas/Buran: "The ship was given a heavier kind of color separation than previous ships, with very definite black stripes. The idea for this came from the design of another ship, the U.S.S. Curie. Originally, this was going to be an experimental ship that was testing the spore drive. The art department had the idea that all experimental ships would have a red pattern on them. That idea was dropped, but the pattern persisted and found its way on to several of the ships that Eaves was designing at the time."
You know, now that I read this, I actually believe that Eaves is being sincere. I mean it's not much of an explanation, but I don't doubt his info about Fuller or concepts that were dropped but still made their way into the show without explanation.
Oh, I know what Matalas said. I also know that Drexler came up with some other explanation for the design; that Starfleet figured out that round saucers work better at separation and crash-landing than elliptical saucers. Or something. Both of these statements were made after the fact, are not canon, and don't make any sense anyway.
I don't have it on hand but in a Star Trek Online Starships Collection magazine, the strange nacelles of the Age of the Discovery were explained due to Starfleet trying a brand-new warp drive instead of the "Cochrane-Archer" drive, the "Kurztman-Beyer" drive. During the Klingon War, Starfleet was decimated. Finally, in 2259, a shipyard with many such ships was abandoned due to a stellar event, prompting Starfleet to abandon the Beyer drive in favor of the Cochrane drive, ergo focusing on round nacelles again.
"Kurtzman-Beyer" drive??? 
The lengths we fans will go to try to shoehorn explanatory rationale into the canon for completely irrational decisions made by the show runners...
The lengths we fans will go to try to shoehorn explanatory rationale into the canon for completely irrational decisions made by the show runners...
