Not sure if this has been mentioned elsewhere (hard to keep up with the threads in the Discovery forum!), but according to the Eaglemoss website, the Discovery is a Crossfield Class starship. I guess I was hoping for something more spacey or majestic (like, say, "Discovery" ), but apparently in this era Starfleet likes to name their class ships after test pilots.
US-American test pilots. Anyway, seeing this for the first time. I thought the class name was supposed to be a big reveal/major secret?
Was it? Not sure why that would be, but sorry anyway. The thread was spoiler-tagged, so I assumed it was OK to talk about spoiler-ish stuff?
"This era" would appear to span quite a lot if it's a plot element that Georgiou's ship is "old" and Lorca's is "new". Although the registries don't support that... Are those Klingon ships perhaps also victims to this cult of bolting corpses to the outside, thus hiding the fact that they are just standard dee-sixes? (And are the fighters covered in the caskets of beloved and brave pets?) Timo Saloniemi
Well, I for one think that the Discovery looks way older than the Shenzhou. Probably because the Shenzhou looks more like 24/25th century vessel, while the Discovery is based on a design from the 1970s.
The fact that NX-01 looked like a 24th/25th century vessel muddles up the issue somewhat... How old would NCC-1031 be? Did she, too, originally sport either those "lateral transporters" or even their predecessors? Are her exposed twin phaser turrets a new or original feature? The design aesthetique seems to be more or less in line with the Kelvin, but the age of that ship (and the number of refits undertaken before 2233) is unknown, too. And what does this mean wrt NCC-1017? We can argue that registries are not strictly chronological and e.g. that NCC-500 and NCC-1200 may be contemporary but denoting some sort of a difference in X. But 1017 and 1031 aren't from "different worlds", they're basically next-door neighbors. Timo Saloniemi
Don't even attempt to explain the registries debacle throughout each and every series. Per First Contact, its clear the Akira, Norway, Saber and Steamrunner class starships are newer type starships yet have lower registries than Galaxy and Ambassador class starships. Then there is the Enterprise and Constitution being NCC-1701 and NCC-1700 yet the Intrepid, Excalibur, Exeter and Potemkin have much lower registries. My headcanon blames insane Starfleet bureaucracy just putting aside registries and names at its formation, not really planning ahead.
Every single "registry debacle" can be chalked up to a mistake. 1017 was a simple rearrangment of 1701 and should have been fixed in TOS-R to 1710 or whatever. The First Contact vessels were all created by John Eaves who either didn't bother to clear his registries with Okuda or just isn't capable of designing an older looking vessel. Lack of communication was responsible for the two Prometheus and Yamato registries. The way how Intrepid, Excalibur, Exeter and Potemkin received their registries is beyond ludicrous. If it turns out that 1031 is indeed supposed to be a newer ship, the registry is probably some inane in-joke.
Clearly the DSC folks are thinking that showing low registries is the way to go with a prequel, though. And even that 1200 is fine for "very old" while 1600 is good for "almost there for TOS". How is this clear? Older types sounds equally likely as an explanation to them looking different from the current stock. Not "much", and few of them are onscreen. But we don't have to think that NCC-16XX would be part of the class launched by NCC-1700 unless this is stated, and it isn't. Timo Saloniemi
Hey Timo, good to see you're still around No offense to the artist, but the Shenzhou is very definitely a John Eaves design, a lot of his ships work for any century between the 22nd and the 30th. That means that purely design-wise, we can't really say which is older. I'm also not convinced registries are purely sequential, at least not in the TOS era. If Enterprise was launched in the 2240s, then 17xx numbers have been in use since that time. But that doesn't really mean that 0-1699 were used up. Different ship types or classes start at different numbers, roughly grouped by class or type (so that Jefferies' idea of "1st ship of the 17th cruiser class" sort of makes sense). So NCCs (before TNG) are also not really a indication of age. I don't know if the USS Discovery is brand spanking new or a regular old space cruiser. Or maybe a refit of an older cruiser. In my head, NCC-1031 places it as something like an eary 23rd century cruiser (near the fandom Horizon/Archon class), but only time and Netflix will tell.
...My big fandom concern at the moment is whether to consider 1031 a Horizon, heavily refitted for this "new way to fly". Would "original" Horizons have the triangular hull, the punched-through saucer, or both? How does one refit those into Constitution lookalikes, as the classic fandom explanation for 1017 goes? In canon, there's no NCC-1000. But there's NCC-1024, the Whorfin remaining in exploration service as of ST6:TUC... Timo Saloniemi
Are we even going to bother explaining the gaps in the saucer? I love the McQuarrie design in all its brutalist ugliness, why did they have to give it random "cool" gaps in the saucer. Other ships have perfectly fine saucers, so its too late to play the "but we had spheres and saucers are new" card, I think.
All the ships in the second episode look "conventional", with familiar saucer-plus-traditionally-sized-nacelles-in-pairs configurations. There's less variation there than in Trek in general. So the Discovery really stands out with her secondary hull of unconventional shape, and with her atypically long nacelles in relation to both the hulls. There's still some demand there, then, to "explain" why the ultimate hero ship is different. Her fancy secondary hull may be there for a "reason" that we will eventually either hear spelled out or be able to deduce. Or at the very least we will get the boundaries within which to invent a "reason" of our own without fear of contradiction, even if the actual writers and designers have not thought of a "reason" at all. Not quite so with saucers: the current DSC stock has full round ones, round ones with sectors cut out and/or filled with junk, round ones with lengthwise chasms, bow cuts, super-and substructures, differing edge shapes. Add the rest of Trek, or don't. In either case, in this respect, anything goes. It's not as if there couldn't be a "reason", of course. Just more vertical wall for more portholes (the ship has many of those, atypically many for any pre-TNG era)? The ability to split the primary hull in three and have each fly in different direction? The need to keep the three physically separate to better contain things within (say, prisoners)? I sort of suspect that eventually a character in-universe will comment on the odd looks of the ship. And while the secondary hull is odder, the saucer might be the one that gets the comment, and possibly a response. Timo Saloniemi
The Armada ships are a mix of older and newer ships? Cannot tell just by looks. Maybe Episode 3 will tell us the vintage of Discovery? What about the primary hull cutouts? What sense does that make for the movement of personnel and equipment, especially in an emergency?
Saucer interiors must already be blocked to a large degree by turboshafts. Four radial bridges might not radically alter that... Timo Saloniemi
I think that the Discovery is an older ship, not NECESSARILY older than the Shenzhou but definitely not brand new. I'd love for Michael to emerge from her shuttle next week and bring this up upon meeting Captain Lorca: BURNHAM: This is a Crossfield-class ship, but not like any I've ever seen. I saw one last summer. That ship's nacelles were shorter. The saucer was a different configuration, as was the deflector. LORCA: This isn't just any Crossfield-class ship. Discovery has undergone a major refit, to win this war. We're learning a new way to fly..! In reality, it was probably Eaves himself who chose the Shenzhou's NCC number without really thinking hard about it. He puts "227" into many of his works somewhere, a tribute to his dad's police badge number. This could easily be that. Mark
To tech it to the hilt, we now "know" (due to similar real-word, in-joke reasons) that Starfleet didn't really start building a fleet from scratch in 2161 and gradually labeling it from NCC-001 up. Rather, a prewar ship was pressed to UFP service with the registry NX-326, suggesting either the similar adoption of at least 325 other ships overnight, or then some sort of a process allocating relatively high numbers from the get-go. Just 300 legacy ships adopted after that big war? There might well have been more. But not a thousand, as we wouldn't like the Discovery to be Romulan War surplus... Perhaps Starfleet subsisted on the surplus ships until the turn of the century, and then began building to compensate for the block obsolescence, creating a sudden jump in registries. If we want to think that ships in the 500 and 1600-1700 range are rough contemporaries, as in the new movies, this surge would allow for that. It would then also allow for NCC-1031 to be newer than NCC-1227 just fine. Timo Saloniemi
The U.S.S. Excelsior NX-2000 seems to be a brand-new ship as of STIII, yet there was a dreadnought U.S.S. Entente NCC-2120 in operation before it in TMP. The U.S.S. Grissom has a registry of NCC-638, even though it is clearly a newer class of ship than the TOS Constitution class. Could it have been refitted from an older class? Maybe. But again there's really no evidence of that, or that any other ship was refit other than the original Enterprise.
The registries seen a century into the existence of Starfleet establish nothing much. A registry from the 2160s tells a story, though. The story nicely allows for ships with "1" as the first of four digits to appear en masse in the 2190s-2210s, and then suffice until the 2270s when ships with "2" there surge to take their place, and ships with "3" or higher to balloon Starfleet for the upcoming Klingon war. Within the surges, the chronological order of registries can differ from the strict numerical order without yet making registries poor indicators of chronology. Without that 2160s registry, we'd be worse off, perhaps having to prefer the logical model of Starfleet starting out with NCC-001 and steadily building up. If getting up to 1200 took a long time, then the time difference between 1031 and 1227 should be long as well. If Starfleet got to 1200 in no time flat, then 1031 ought to be ancient. Thanks to Franklin, we can declare this sort of intuitive logic improbable. Timo Saloniemi