• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Discovery starship discussion [SPOILERS]

I'm guessing they will fill the role of "generic Starfleet fleet" again. The real question of course, will we see the USS Constitution or one of its sister ships ever turn up. We can contrive reasons why a non-Enterprise Constitution class might concievably have a more DSC-like interior (I mean, squint hard and Pike's Enterprise may have had the same holographic displays hidden in consoles, and it didn't have the iconic bright TOS colors at all).
 
I don't see the advantage of these holocomms. I'd always prefer a crystal clear 2d picture over these translucent holograms.
 
The flexible tech would no doubt accommodate your preferences, then. Perhaps only Georgiou and Stamets really liked those old holocomms, while Lorca, like Kirk, is a more no-nonsense officer and prefers his images flat?

Timo Saloniemi
 
Next episode's preview shows Lorca like to have the full figure of a female Starfleet officer in his ready room. :P

Moving on...

- What deck is the shuttlebay and the engineering test lab on? There is arguably a break point between exiting the shuttle and starting to wander the corridors, but once they start running into the twisted remains of the Glenn's crew, everything seems to happen on the same level. For that matter, are Burnham and Tilly's quarters on the same deck as their test lab? The lab itself is not REALLY two decks high, more like 1.5 decks between the lower and upper levels, so my guess is that the lab is somewhere above the shuttlebay deck, or at least on the same level. That way they it'd make the most sense to head to the lab from the lower level and the shortest route (running aside), instead of climbing DOWN too far one way.

- How long could the Klingons have been on the Glenn? Hours at most. Long enough for whatever ship that brought them there to have heard the screams of fellow Klingons being eaten and apparently abandoned the place, apparently.

- When the away team bursts into the targeted lab, they do so through the doors that lead to the mush-room-room back on Discovery. If this is the identical setup as Discovery, is the mush-room-room not directly off the lab here? Or is that room not QUITE off directly off the test lab, as it's implied on Discovery? Maybe this lab is located in a different space than the one back on the slightly more brightly-lit ship?

- This is probably the first chronological time that anyone says "shit" or "piss [someone] off", fight? Unless Zephram Cochrane says something in "First Contact", we have to subsequently waif for "Generations" and "Final Frontier" for this slang..?

- Where exactly does Burnham get access to the Jeffries tubes from here? There's no specific entry we see her use. She sort of looks off to the side and upwards, but whatever access she uses has to be big enough for the kitty to use as well, unless the latter has rat-like abilities to squeeze through anything it can get its head into..?

- So are we going to assume that the next round of phaser upgrades would include a "disintegrate" setting? 'Cuz that would have been REALLY useful here, unless they wanted to avoid vaporizing part of the Glenn's warp core while they were that close to it. At least Burnham uses the "kill" setting Landry ordered earlier. And NO ONE has said "phase pistol", thank goodness.

- Back on Discovery, the fly-through of the bridge is so quick you barely get to see anything. I hope they REALLY want to save a proper introduction for next week, it's too quick to catch any real details even in freeze-frame!

- "Commander Airiam" is the latest in augmented-tech humanoids we encounter. She's science-division but seems to be sitting at an engineering console (?), as the graphic she's monitoring looks to be an internal schematic of whatever's under the floor of the engineering test lab. The supporting struts of whatever she's looking at are close, but don't quite match those seen on the actual set though, so who knows...

- The "Geneva Protocols of 1928 and 2155" is an oblique reference to stuff that happened at, or immediately as a result of the proto-Federation alliance talks from ENT "Demons" et. al. The actual big room scenes were not specifically set at any city on Earth, so they MAY have been in Geneva, but the "Starfleet HQ" livery everywhere suggests it was in San Francisco. But I digress.

- The way both Burnham and Saru speak of being a "first officer" implies they treat it as a rank, and not a position.

- Lorca uses a site-to-site transport to get down to the test bay. Wasn't this a bigger deal when they did it in TOS? Or maybe Lorca is THAT forward thinking and really doesn't want to be seen with his new bestie?

- I'll leave the "spore drive" discussion to other posts on this thread. But in the 2008 anime series Macross Frontier, the "bad" aliens were a gestalt organic life form which spanned the galaxy and were able to communicate instantly, in addition to a natural FTL jump capacity. The antagonist humans in that story were trying to tap into the aliens' ability to do both, and effectively merge humanity into a single gestalt entity as their ultimate goal. I sense some real similarities to what these mycelial spores are doing in this story. We'll see...

Mark
 
- What deck is the shuttlebay and the engineering test lab on? There is arguably a break point between exiting the shuttle and starting to wander the corridors, but once they start running into the twisted remains of the Glenn's crew, everything seems to happen on the same level.

Putting too much distance or turbolifting between shuttle exit and the point where the convicts start asking questions about silver uniforms and black badges isn't a good idea. I'd be happy with Engineering being almost back-to-back with the Shuttlebay, as implied by the Jeffries Tube Grand Prix, and presumably also level with the Shuttlebay floor. That puts Engineering between the warp engines, in the thickest part of the secondary hull, and thus arguably also in a relative location consistent with TOS and with the Shenzhou MSD.

For that matter, are Burnham and Tilly's quarters on the same deck as their test lab?

I haven't spotted signage or camera runs necessitating that yet. But I could certainly see Lorca arranging his specialists so that they don't have to spend much time in the "ordinary" parts of the ship...

- How long could the Klingons have been on the Glenn? Hours at most. Long enough for whatever ship that brought them there to have heard the screams of fellow Klingons being eaten and apparently abandoned the place, apparently.

Or then the Klingons remained in the vicinity, cloaked, seeing no advantage in blasting the approaching shuttle to pieces (and of course being too late in intercepting it on the way out, what with that crazy pilot who always hits Maximum Warp before fully closing the hatch).

Good questions about the geometry of the mushroomroom. It seems to me that when Burnham clears the breathalyzer door on 1031, she's immediately confronted by the sight of the funky fungi, there being no space or editing slot for a foyer with multiple entryways or whatnot. But perhaps a blooming accident leaves the mushroomroom empty (and harmless) and opens up an easy way into the complex, the way a 500lb aerial bomb does?

Or then the Glenn is of the sinister type when the Discovery is dexterously configured, and only the furnishing of the central room remains unmirrored?

- This is probably the first chronological time that anyone says "shit" or "piss [someone] off", fight? Unless Zephram Cochrane says something in "First Contact", we have to subsequently waif for "Generations" and "Final Frontier" for this slang..?

Heh, I wouldn't count out Earth time travel adventures from ENT or perhaps VOY before actually watching those. Haven't actually seen even "11:59", though.

- Where exactly does Burnham get access to the Jeffries tubes from here? There's no specific entry we see her use. She sort of looks off to the side and upwards, but whatever access she uses has to be big enough for the kitty to use as well, unless the latter has rat-like abilities to squeeze through anything it can get its head into..?

One would think the set would have been built with this episode very specifically in mind (I mean, what other episode would it have been built for?)... But yeah, it does seem that the spacehog fits into the tubes themselves, and thus could also utilize the (wo)manhole Burnham spots.

- So are we going to assume that the next round of phaser upgrades would include a "disintegrate" setting? 'Cuz that would have been REALLY useful here, unless they wanted to avoid vaporizing part of the Glenn's warp core while they were that close to it. At least Burnham uses the "kill" setting Landry ordered earlier. And NO ONE has said "phase pistol", thank goodness.

...Because they had the sense to use the rifle here. And it was somewhat superior to a Type 2 in burning through a starship bulkhead.

I trust "vaporize" is just "kill" propagating through an unresisting target medium, and things like T'Kumva's armored neck resist the propagation more than Kirk's average humanoid target, while kitty here is so dense that any hit just digs a tiny pit on the surface before dying out.

- "Commander Airiam" is the latest in augmented-tech humanoids we encounter. She's science-division but seems to be sitting at an engineering console (?), as the graphic she's monitoring looks to be an internal schematic of whatever's under the floor of the engineering test lab. The supporting struts of whatever she's looking at are close, but don't quite match those seen on the actual set though, so who knows...

Good spotting. I wonder how many of the cool graphics on the bridge are actually up-to-date on the ultimate set or GCI model changes.

- The "Geneva Protocols of 1928 and 2155" is an oblique reference to stuff that happened at, or immediately as a result of the proto-Federation alliance talks from ENT "Demons" et. al. The actual big room scenes were not specifically set at any city on Earth, so they MAY have been in Geneva, but the "Starfleet HQ" livery everywhere suggests it was in San Francisco. But I digress.

Ah, good point - the establishing shots for the building with the UESPA carpet show classic Starfleet architecture but a generic landscape that may just as well be a re-wildernessized Lake Geneva as a funky angle on the San Francisco Bay.

- The way both Burnham and Saru speak of being a "first officer" implies they treat it as a rank, and not a position.

Intriguing, aka how so? Surely getting the position would be considered a "promotion", especially if the two shared rank.

- Lorca uses a site-to-site transport to get down to the test bay. Wasn't this a bigger deal when they did it in TOS? Or maybe Lorca is THAT forward thinking and really doesn't want to be seen with his new bestie?

"Cloud Minders" would have us believe it always has to be site-to-pad-to-site, but they could just have edited out the bit where the two briefly materialize on pads. "Day of the Dove" suggests one "rarely" beams inside a starship, although the reason quoted, need for precision, is bunk - you can't beam Kirk two centimeters too low onto the surface of Alpha Beta II½, either.

Then again, we still don't know if that was transporting, as we haven't seen the Discovery transporter effect. Perhaps that was sporehopping, and Burnham just mistook it for an ordinary transport (or just maintained her Vulcan cool in face of the impossible)?

Timo Saloniemi
 
I really missed these discussions by the way ;)

Isn't first officer sort of a secondary position in TOS? Spock is Science Officer and First Officer. Number One was navigator/ops and First Officer. This is different from Riker and Chakotay, who were apparently fulltime XOs.

Speaking of Number One, it seems that it isn't a) the strange name of the character played by Majel Barrett (who was definitely Gallifreyan or El-Aurian or something ;P) or b) an affectation used by Picard, but rather an ordinary way to refer to your first officer. Maybe Picard was old fashioned and used "number one" anachronistically.
 
Presumably the amount of extra work burdened on the second-in-command would depend on the overall size of staff available. Lorca's ship seems to be much the same size as Kirk's, perhaps suffering from something of a shortage of officers as a consequence. (Or then Kirk's shortage was self-imposed, with him reassigning Spock from simple XO status to XO/CScO when Gary Mitchell and those other nine crocked it in the pilot?)

We're still to learn the official status of Stamets, aren't we? Is he the boss of (Life?) Sciences, the boss of Engineering, or the boss of Black Ops, on a ship where all three are one and the same?

I sort of doubt we are going to see a "reasonable" setup where Lorca has a separate crew structure for running the ship, with no-nonsense folks like his Chief of Security, and a separate one for running the Black Ops, with full-nonsense people only. Stamets might well be Lorca's third-in-command, say.

Timo Saloniemi
 
I really missed these discussions by the way ;)

Isn't first officer sort of a secondary position in TOS? Spock is Science Officer and First Officer. Number One was navigator/ops and First Officer. This is different from Riker and Chakotay, who were apparently fulltime XOs.

Speaking of Number One, it seems that it isn't a) the strange name of the character played by Majel Barrett (who was definitely Gallifreyan or El-Aurian or something ;P) or b) an affectation used by Picard, but rather an ordinary way to refer to your first officer. Maybe Picard was old fashioned and used "number one" anachronistically.

One possibility for Chakotay, overseeing Voyager's Archaeology departments.

As for Picard, he may have picked it up from Stargazer's previous captain (who may be been fairly old).
 
Or it's a British thing, and something of a family tradition to the Picards who apprently fought for the British at Trafalgar. Perhaps there continues to be a family line that sails the oceans and speaks with a British accent, and Jean-Luc spent time with them after breaking up with his brother? (They all horribly perished within Picard's lifetime, of course - it's another family tradition...)

Timo Saloniemi
 
Three dialogue bits from this episode:

Burnham: Saru.
Saru: *First Officer* Saru.

...

Burnham: Saru... [Beat] ...*First Officer* Saru. I saw a recording of the speech you gave at the Captain's funeral.

...

Burnham: ... Before I was a mutineer, I was a first officer in Starfleet. I'll never bear that rank or any other again. But it *is* who I am, and who I will always be.

It's not explicit except in the third quote (which brings the first two on-point), but I think the dialogue is confusing the position with the rank.

Likewise, on my rewatch I think that the Engineering set we've seen will indeed be *the* engineering set of this series. Stamets pretty much universally refers to their destination as Engineering while aboard the Glenn, and Saru gestures towards the Test Bay door while saying Burnham will be assigned to Engineering. Perhaps "Test Bay Alpha" specifically refers to the "It's NOT a dilithium chamber!" chamber that Burnham gets infused in? So that the computer doesn't just arbitrarily beam them to either of the upper deck areas of the space, or to the shroom-room?

But if this really IS engineering, where are the engineers? The officer Burnham speaks to when she first goes there is a Command-division ensign, Stamets is obstensibly a scientist through and through, and.. Tilly. She's wearing bronze, but her thing is THEORHETICAL engineering, so she's not really a grease monkey type of engineer, right? There are other extras on that set, including two bronze-adorned people who walk around during the "time is passing, this is not a haunted ship" montage, so it's not an engineer-free zone.

This would hardly be the first Engineering set that didn't have science or command people randomly working in the background, but it's almost as it we've flipped things around and are seeing that THOSE people are actually doing down there, especially given the propulsion science they're working on. Plus, this is obstensibly a science-focused vessel under normal circumstances...

Mark

PS - Ahh, and Lorca definitely calls the mushroomroom a "cultivation bay".
 
Re-watching the final scenes, which I didn't explicitly cover earlier:

- Once Burnham symbolically grabs Lorca's cookie, we do one of those fancy zoom-outs through the hull of the ship. This is clearly not meant to be taken literally as the Engineering space would be at a strange angle compared to the rest of the ship. UNLESS the secondary hull decks are arranged parallel to the hull's leading edge, and the power source doodads at the opposite end of the room are some offshoot of the actual core. Pretty sure I'm reading too much into this, but the message is clearly that the Engineering space is in the secondary hull and not up in the saucer.

- Lorca and Landry (Lordry? Lanca?) watch the destruction of the USS Glenn on a screen that is embedded in the actual window, much as they would be on the bridge's windscreen. However, the orientation of the room is similarly weird, as the exit door would be placed against the hull edge at a severe angle. Again, it's probably the set designers and ship designer not thinking too much about where the room really should be and how it should be arranged. The windows themselves are of a different type than the other ones on the model, suggesting this was added pretty much just for this shot. The other windows, if to scale, would be at least 6-8 feet tall by my estimation.

- Who destroyed the USS Glenn? The footage, clearly a recording, was from the Glenn's location. However, the torpedoes (?) that took her out came from a higher angle than expected if you were firing on it from that perspective. Perhaps a couple of other starships arrived shortly after Disco-1 left and finished her off? Or was it Landry's subsequent mission to return to the Glenn and retrieve Kitty on the sly? If Discovery was the one that fired, why wasn't Lorca on the bridge to give some pomp and circumstance to the event, as Picard would later do for the USS Lantree?

- TNG forcefields usually cause people to pull their hands away as if shocked, or at least make it clearly uncomfortable to touch (or easily rest their hands on, ref. the possessed Sisko in "Facets" et. al.). Here, Lorca clearly rests his hand on the field as if it were fuzzy glass, perhaps using the lightshow effect to attract Kitty.

- Yeah, Gorn skeleton in the corner. But also, vole corpses on the table?

Mark
 
Ooh, "rabbit's teeth" windows seen in the mess hall and quarters sets are actually ON the model of Discovery, albeit only on the inner doughnut of the saucer (that I can see so far), suggesting (but not foregonely concluding) that any of the sets featuring these windows are there. Late addition, perhaps?

Mark
 
In another example of two departments not speaking to each other -
Next to the door, is it blast door?, in engineering test bay alpha, there is a sign to the right. Along with identifying the shipyard, where the ship was launched, as the San Francisco Fleet Yards, it states this section of the ship is "starboard engineering". Yet, in the pullback from the compartment, we see that it is located in port engineering.

This is the diagram seen in the Jefferies tube.

DLJQqHrU8AA7Dwf.jpg:large


Oh, one last thing, The Geneva Protocol of 1928 is a real world thing. It prohibited the use of biological weapons.
 
Three dialogue bits from this episode:

Burnham: Saru.
Saru: *First Officer* Saru.

...

Burnham: Saru... [Beat] ...*First Officer* Saru. I saw a recording of the speech you gave at the Captain's funeral.

...

Burnham: ... Before I was a mutineer, I was a first officer in Starfleet. I'll never bear that rank or any other again. But it *is* who I am, and who I will always be.

Tend to disagree. I think with Saru, it's not about rank, but position. He simply reminds her that he's now the second in command, the same position she held. Clearly, there are more commanders (or lt. commanders) running around the ship, but only one XO. Could even be related to his species. Maybe he (she? it?) has no gender and/or last name/first name, therefore insisting on 'first officer' simply implies that he would like to be addressed in a more formal way.
As for the Burnham quote, it's again a figure of speech. It's about the role, not the rank. She should have said 'position' instead of rank, but she compares being a first officer to being a mutineer. If she was talking rank, not position, she would have sais 'I was a commander before I was a civilian'.

Likewise, on my rewatch I think that the Engineering set we've seen will indeed be *the* engineering set of this series. Stamets pretty much universally refers to their destination as Engineering while aboard the Glenn, and Saru gestures towards the Test Bay door while saying Burnham will be assigned to Engineering. Perhaps "Test Bay Alpha" specifically refers to the "It's NOT a dilithium chamber!" chamber that Burnham gets infused in? So that the computer doesn't just arbitrarily beam them to either of the upper deck areas of the space, or to the shroom-room?

But if this really IS engineering, where are the engineers? The officer Burnham speaks to when she first goes there is a Command-division ensign, Stamets is obstensibly a scientist through and through, and.. Tilly. She's wearing bronze, but her thing is THEORHETICAL engineering, so she's not really a grease monkey type of engineer, right? There are other extras on that set, including two bronze-adorned people who walk around during the "time is passing, this is not a haunted ship" montage, so it's not an engineer-free zone.

This would hardly be the first Engineering set that didn't have science or command people randomly working in the background, but it's almost as it we've flipped things around and are seeing that THOSE people are actually doing down there, especially given the propulsion science they're working on. Plus, this is obstensibly a science-focused vessel under normal circumstances...

Here's an idea. If the spore drive is indeed part of the ring structure and not part of the star destroyer secondary hull, why would you put the control room in the star destroyer part of the ship? I guess the room was located somewhere in the neck, possibly giving them control over warp and spore drive at the same time (we don't know how - or if - they interact, but I'd like to keep an eye on both systems, if I were the chief engineer.). Doesn't mean that the room is main engineering. Maybe it's a heavily refitted engineering lab or auxiliary engineering (which would explain the mushroomroom next to it). How would you do it on a contemporaty vessel? Are there any contemporary examples of ships having two 'sets' of propulsion systems (like nuclear and diesel)?
 
...Ah, so the ship was built by Starboard Engineering of San Francisco, UE!

(Can anybody untilt the image to finally divine a launch/commissioning stardate?)

Timo Saloniemi
 
I guess even the engine "stuff" behind the grille of the TOS Enterprise was never really defined either, so was are the glowey red things stretching off into the distance here? A bridge graphic may vaguely see it as the upper side of a horizontal warp core (the Shenzhou had a similar graphic and MSD showing its more vertical barrel - shaped core) but it could easily be one of Discovery's multiple impulse engines, or a dedicated "spore core" for all we know.

Mark
 
I skim the Trekyards FB page (don't really participate - saving a discourse on the devolving nature of social media discussions for a whole other thread) and today saw a relatively quick analysis.

It concluded that assuming a 3.5m deck height, Shenzhou is around 442m long, and the Discovery is a whopping 790 meters in length! It was quick to point out however that most of that length is indeed just those nacelles, and volumetrically speaking it was comparable to the Constitution class (if you assume the saucer edge is only one deck), with the Shenzhou being similarly less compact. BTW, assuming an average deck height of 2.5m (careful though, Saru is over 2m tall), the lengths skrink to a more manageable 316m/596m space.

I'm not a starship length nazi though. In my headspace I'm going with Crossfield = Constitution volume (ish) and the Shenzhou comparably smaller.

Mark
 
Won't we get a pretty accurate count from the shuttlebay, though? I mean, the front wall shows a clear division to five decks, and the shuttle is a prop, the doorway into the ship proper is a set, and live people interact there.

Timo Saloniemi
 
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top