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Spoilers Starship Design in Star Trek: Picard

Mark Rademaker skeeted some of the early concept art (not by him) of a Vesta class bridge MSD for the U.S.S. Hikaru Sulu from early planning for season 3.


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Some concept art from Picard (not by me) showing a Vesta class starship on an MSD. I personally would have picked a very different bridge layout, but within the show this would have been a "quick" set redress. That Vesta, (USS Hikaru Sulu) + Captain Harry Kim part was dropped from the story.
 
Also, that version of the ship has four nacelles. I don’t know if that was to get out of having to pay Rademaker any royalties because it wouldn’t have been 100% his design?
 
Also, that version of the ship has four nacelles. I don’t know if that was to get out of having to pay Rademaker any royalties because it wouldn’t have been 100% his design?
I think that's a placeholder graphic (wasn't that or another weird four-nacelled version of an existing design in the photo of the bridge set Drexler posted before season 2 that he ended up redacting? I don't think it was the real Stargazer design, whatever it was). Rademaker also posted an test animation of the CG model of the Sulu, and aside from some color/texture changes (IIRC), it looked like the standard Vesta design.

I can't link to it, the original tweets were either deleted or are inaccessable because Twitter has been ruined. I think I saved it, but because I'm too lazy to rename the stupid random filenames everything on the internet has nowadays, I can't find it.

ETA: No, wait! I thought I'd renamed it but figured I was wrong when it wasn't in my downloads folder. I just remembered I made a folder specifically for all the Picard BTS ship stuff. Here's the video as well as a comparison of the original and revised color schemes.

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Vesta Color Old.jpg
Vesta Color New.jpg
 
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It would have been really nice seeing a Vesta on screen, she's a great design I feel.

The bridge is indeed underwhelming, but like Mark said, it would have made sense from a production point of view.
 
Also, that version of the ship has four nacelles. I don’t know if that was to get out of having to pay Rademaker any royalties because it wouldn’t have been 100% his design?
Some have pointed out TNG had at least one example of a mirrored layout to show both nacelles on a single MSD.
 
(wasn't that or another weird four-nacelled version of an existing design in the photo of the bridge set Drexler posted before season 2 that he ended up redacting? I don't think it was the real Stargazer design, whatever it was)
It was images of the Titan-A he blurred. He recorded the video after the set had to been modified for Season 3. You can hear Dave Blass talking about how it's been changed into a new ship.

Other details, the railings have blue lights instead of white, and the chairs flanking the captain's chair have swinging consoles, which the Stargazer's didn't. I think some of the standing transparent consoles were also moved around.

Here's an image from the uncensored version of the video someone grabbed before Doug replaced it.
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Too blurry to really tell it was a modified Shangri-La class at a glance at the time, maybe people with intimate knowledge with the design could of recognized it.

Terry Matalas also posted an image of the Titan-A's saucer before the season aired, but it's extremely close up that I doubt anyone could tell it was a modified Shangri-La. He posted this in January 2022, 2 months before S2 aired and a year before Season 3 aired.

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Eh, the same nacelles were the least of my issues. I was not a huge fan of the whole 'let's take ships that were originally designed for a century and a half earlier, and minimally change them to ships from the 25th century' schtick they did.
 
He pretty much did. The starting point was a drawing he'd done during production of TMP for a future Enterprise. It evolved until it became the familiar Galaxy class.

All the Enterprises are just variations of Matt Jefferies' work anyway.

The Intrepid was a great design, probably the best new Starship in Picard. The Titan certainly had some incongruous elements left over from the original Shangri-la, but the Intrepid is a really well developed design. IMO of course.
 
I'd agree that the Intrepid is probably the best of the 25th century designs. It feels like its own thing instead of just an update of a ship seen in an earlier series, while still being instantly recognisable as a Starfleet vessel. And the reuse of the Stargazer nacelles and bridge module firmly places it in its era.

The Titan, on the other hand, looks like a Motion Picture era ship with the Stargazer nacelles and bridge module planted on to fake that it's a new design.
 
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