Not convinced holodeck or VR shooting gallery should exist. Vulcan sky is blue not red. Architecture seems off from Enterprise. Whole mindmeld/katra use is a gross change
* I took it to mean the Constitutions are the top of the line frontier Starships where experience counts double. * Strange we never saw Cronwell's cruiser. But not showing stuff is one of the best things Star Trek can do, since our imaginations are always so much more intersting than generic guest starship designs. * Yet another mirror reflection to get us excited. * We hear something like "available offload crew to Cargo Bay 5", which leads me to assume they were also transferring some cargo between the command cruiser and the Discovery. Maybe boring supplies, maybe something else. * We see the "spokes" in the saucer have glass ceilings (*symbolism gong*), but I'll leave it to Timo to figure out how they ended up in a curved corridor without apparently turning 90 degrees.
Hmh? Vulcan sky has already been blue, yellow, red and black (indeed all of them in ENT), plus brown and violet in TAS. The whole planet changes color, too. No doubt depends on the dust in the atmosphere. We also got two round things in the sky, one of them very large, nicely matching the ST:TMP/TAS interpretation of what it means "not to have a moon". Why should Vulcan only have one narrow type of architecture? We've seen plenty of styles: TAS, ENT, the 2009 movie, now this (which has echoes of all of the above). Thankfully, no caves, which is all we got in TNG and the TOS movies! Interstellar mind melds were a thing in ENT already... Timo Saloniemi
And you can argue that the deaths of the Intrepid crew amounts to an interstellar DDoS attack on the local meld network. Mark
The Enterprise gets called a "Constitution Class" onscreen, by a character in a series that predates TOS. I guess that retires the "Enterprise is a Starship Class" debate then It's a shame really, as so far Discovery has not touched on some of the lesser known discussions in fandom. Antimatter reactors are still in the nacelles! Transporters do not disassemble you molecule by molecule! Photon Torpedoes are caseless! And so on
The Constitution line was nice, and left vague. I think the intention is that it's a big prestige assignment where you can quickly amass experience. Burnham's suggesting it specifically because it's the best chance of getting on the command track. Perhaps due to the high turnover of crew? Kirk's ship is constantly getting new officers, and not only to replace those red shirts. It's a bit of a strange suggestion because it's precisely what Burnham did not do - she used a family connection to pull some strings to get assigned to an old ship. Did she even go to Starfleet Academy? She seems to get a science officer gig on Shenzhou on the back of her Vulcan Science Academy credentials, and then learns on the job. Serving on a small ship seems a pretty good way of getting noticed and rising to the top.
Trip and T'Pol marriage bond seems anomalous, but I think it would be better understood by the general audience. The JJ Vulcan i discount, as that universe seems designed to be different. TAS could not put as much detail as was seen in ENT. I view Vulcan society as high structured, so it could be a different area. I did not recall seeing stellar body. The larger one is T'Khut and it's moon?
Pretty sure Sarek knew Georgiou already hence the USS Shenzhou, but I don't see it as Burnham's choice rather as the one Sarek sees as best for her with a captain who is not only vibrantly human in nature but also very experienced. As for her background not coming from Starfleet she may already hold Vulcan CMDR/ Lt CMDR credentials from the VSA hence why she becomes the first officer of the ship under Phillipa. As we can presume the crew of the Intrepid are not Starfleet Academy grads even though they may be considered Starfleet Officers. I enjoy that the show sticks to the idea that most races still have their own training academies that funnel into Starfleet adjacent to Starfleet Academy. Finally I think her advice to Tilly was went to be the best track for experience in space not just to get noticed for promotional purposes (which may actually stem from what shes knows of Phillipa's record and rise through the ranks).
While the pilot was a little ambiguous with how it showed things, Burnham wasn’t initially assigned to Shenzhou as first officer, and only became the second-in-command after several years rising through the ranks on the ship.
Was the "cruiser" even a full starship? I forget the exact dialogue, but when Cornwell first arrived, wasn't Lorca told that she had arrived in her cruiser and was requesting permission to "land"? And then when she left, she left in a standard-looking shuttle, didn't she? IIRC, the small Aurora in TOS was also called a "cruiser". Maybe this is a similar usage, as opposed to a capital ship classification?
Scotty once suggested that a “cruiser” was not an actual starship designation (“Relics”), but that’s been contradicted elsewhere too (“Yesterday’s Enterprise“). Still, leaving it open to interpretation is just fine, and only seven to distract from the ACTUAL nerds issue of how appropriate it is for a Captain and an Admiral in the same command hierarchy to bone. Mark
Cruiser is ambiguous enough - in "Peak Performance", it's a big warship/starship, clearly the non-heavy sibling of the heavy cruiser mentioned in "Conspiracy", but there's also the pleasure cruiser interpretation available. But landing is ambiguous, too - does Cornwell arrive in a shuttle from her own ship, perhaps? What about the shuttle she leaves in - is that a Discovery auxiliary? Do we see the pennants? Timo Saloniemi
One would think that, as easy as it was for the "D7" to get to Lorca's shuttle so easily, and assuming they were moving through Federation space at the time, all pennants and identifying transceivers were removed and/or changed from all Admiralty's shuttles, lest they scream "Flag officer here, come capture me!" to the entire region in a time of war. Hopefully they learn from their mistakes in that regard.
I did like seeing the central rear landing support on the shuttle, similar to the Galileo. Do we have a definitive size for the Disco yet?
The shuttle also features a docking ring, like the TMP-era travel pod. But it doesn't jut out at all, and the "teeth" of the ring are on the aft surface, so it's not exactly the same thing. Mark
^ Anyone have a good screencap of that? I'm guessing it's similar to the hard capture ring on the NASA docking system (minus the guide petals and soft capture ring), with the "teeth" being the capture latches. (I worked for a couple of years on that! )
Cool! I can’t post a link to a screen cap, but going by your link, it’s the same sort of thing but with the teeth more densely packed. Mark
The jutting-out problem can probably be solved with the push of a button... But teeth on the aft surface would make better sense for an androgynous adapter. Perhaps this thing is both, with the outer teeth exposed when the ring extends for docking with a starship hole, but with the after teeth engaging a fellow shuttle's ring? An inspection pod might be built austere, without androgynous capabilities. Timo Saloniemi