It's just that need seldom translates to ability or capacity. And lack of Starfleet starships is a persisting and fundamental part of the Trek universe, so ability to cope with that lack is guaranteed to take us by surprise. Yet surprising mass production is exactly what Starfleet was up to before the Synths intervened. While half of UP was churning out Wallenbergs, perhaps the other half was creating Inquiries that were equally vital to the evacuation plan? Perhaps the capacity was lost not with the loss of UP alone, but with the loss of the ability to use Synth labor - yet it no longer mattered since the Fleet now had this generic starship available in the hundreds (in addition to the possibly more specialized Wallenbergs in the thousands)? Riker boasts that the Zheng He is of the toughest, fastest and most powerful ship type in Starfleet ever. He never mentions newest... Timo Saloniemi
We still don't know how many shipyards there are working with and/or owned by Starfleet in toto, when they were built, when they started on Starfleet projects or where all of them are.
Inquiries do not seem like transport or colony ships.i still think they could be cached in shipyards throughout the Federation. Periodic upgrades would make them state of the art.
The lead ship artist for STO said that CBS didn't give them a size for the Inquiry, so they scaled it to their Avenger class so it could be a skin for it. It's also poetic, the STO Avenger Class loosely inspired by the same (at the time) unused John Eaves concept art that the Inquiry is based off. I have no idea where Eaglemoss got their numbers from, either the size of CG model, or CBS came up with a size after STO released their model. Side note, when I pointed out the Eaglemoss size on EAS, the site author had his own estimation being a little under 600, based on the size of the windows and by assuming the deck height is the same as previous 24th century federation ships.
Just about the only other actual, show-derived datapoint we can use is Lower Decks, where the 2380s ships consistently are a third smaller than their window rows would suggest (two decks on the saucer rims that feature three rows of portholes)... Are we ever going to see an Inquiry again? If so, it will be different: they're bound to draw in the pennants and the phaser strips and adjust the lighting, and possibly some all-new shapes and details will be added in that process, too. Timo Saloniemi
I don’t think we’ll see them again, except as background ships. Any episode that focuses on a specific ship will have a newer, more detailed CGI model built for it.
Those things should have been Ancient ships. The Cylon resurrection ships or Monk like Warhammer craft should be Ori vessels. Now, we made a lot of Liberty Ships, right?
I threw this together a couple weeks ago. It’s just to bring the La Sirena more in line with what I would have expected from a hero ship. It’s still missing a lot of details, and I won’t claim it is better, but I like it more.
Picard Hercollector ship discussion at 5:00 and the Xheng He discussion at 5:40 with Ben Robinson himself. They mention that there is an intention of showing more Starfleet ships in season 2.
Ben also says the Inquiry fleet was added to the story late in development. It was also originally intended to be a different design? I assume this is info he got while they were doing the booklet. He says there are 4 variants of the Inquiry in the final scene: 2 that have physical differences and 2 which are just different paint scheme differences, which lines up with what I observed months ago. Some of the ships have different shades of red/blue on their warp nacelles.
So it’s the same class of ship, just with different nacelles and different coloring on those nacelles. NOT four different classes of ship.