Starship design history in light of Discovery

Agreed. They definitely do appear to possess a Disco design aesthetic, but they thankfully don't resemble giant spiked dildos with warp engines.

 

They resemble the Kelvin Timeline D7 battle cruisers(JJ's "Klingon Warbirds")seen in the Kobayashi Maru training simulation in Trek 2009, just with more of a DSC flavor. I don't mind them so far, and if you look closer at the picture there appears to be at least one redesigned Bird-of-Prey in the fleet that looks a lot like the ones seen in both ENT and Star Trek III.

Klingon warships are finally starting to look the way they should have from the very first episode.

 

It’s been a while since I’ve watched The Cage, but is it explicitly stated that there *wasn’t* some wibbly wobbly timey wimey anomaly that hurled the ship to Talos?

I know I’m reaching

That’s so cool! I love that explanation! I mean I know we’re only talking about one line of dialogue but that explanation borders on genius!

There’s a similar story in one of the Myriad Universe collections as well - there are androids everywhere and Data and Lore run an android colony called Turing. It’s a good story

 

Well, Tyler's records know that the Columbia disappeared "in that region", instead of the trail going cold at region X and now resurfacing here at Talos.

It may be telling that the records are aware of the disappearance 18 years ago, yet absolutely nothing has been done about it. If the Columbia were particularly slow by the standards of the day, a faster ship would have done a Terra Nova style check as soon as the schedule allowed. In Kirk's days, it took half a year or so to check on a missing fellow starship. Would schedules have been different back in the days of Dr Haskins' mission? Or would all ships simply have been as slow as the Columbia?

Then again, what's so hot about doing warp six, or TOS speeds in general, as compared to doing warp five, or ENT speeds in general? Vulcans back in ENT could already do warp six or otherwise best the Earthlings. A truly significant improvement in warp speeds between "The Cage"-minus-18-yrs and "The Cage" doesn't sound particularly attractive.

Now, if breaking the mysterious barrier creates a shortcut, this might be more significant than an improvement in ship performance. And our Trek heroes are always penetrating unbreakable barriers, showing it's possible to travel where none have before... But Tyler does appear to insist that it's their "new ships" that "can"...

Timo Saloniemi

 

That Klingon ship image isn't from Discovery, it's for a mobile game set in the Kelvin Timeline.

 

TOS mentions that merchant ships still travel at Warp 2. That means they didn't get any faster than ECS ships from 2155. Might have been a great deal of technological stagnation between the Romulan War and the events of DSC, and maybe the materials/tech/fuel were too difficult to build en masse to have everyone zipping around at high warp speeds. Maybe scientists kept pursuing damned fool ideas like Spore Drive, Transwarp Drive, and Genesis.

Humanity used to have passenger flights at speeds above Mach 2. It occurred around the same time humans walked on the moon and reusable space planes were being put on the drawing board. The fastest military planes could exceed Mach 3 regularly. Earth had multiple undersea laboratories where researches might spent months at a time.

Now passengers below Mach 1 for decades and no change in sight, no one has walked on the moon in almost half a century, the space planes are all in museums, and as far as anyone knows nothing with a jet engine approaches the speed of a Blackbird. There are two undersea stationary habitats left, but in less then 100 feet of water. One is run by a university and nearly closed a few years ago for lack of funding, the other is now a hotel where you can get scuba delivered pizza.

We could still do those things, but we haven't, and attemps to leapfrog that tech has lead to blind alleys and abandoned paths. Things change. Maybe that period of the Federation could be seen that way.

 

Humanity concentrated it's efforts into greater things. Smartphones, Twitter and Facebook!

 

... and trying like Hell, to at the very least, attempt to move slightly in the direction of a more "Enlightened" Society.

Though looking around today, one could imagine that it'll take a lot more than just the "Two Centuries" Star Trek would have us hope for.

 

Not really. The reason things look so bad today is that the aging, entrenched, rich, racist elites see that the younger generation is already pushing the world toward a more inclusive, enlightened, Star Trek-like future, so they're desperately trying to cling to their old order and delay its demise as long as they can. But demographically speaking, they're already doomed. These are men in their 70s and 80s -- the future does not belong to them. The younger racists and white nationalists who follow their rhetoric are tiny in number compared to those who oppose them. They can do a great deal of damage before they fade away, but they're already generating a powerful backlash. (Hopefully starting this Tuesday.)

Remember, the Star Trek version of Earth's future history is that humanity came to the brink of nuclear apocalypse in the 1990s-2050s, and that it was the shock of that near-disaster that opened our eyes at last and allowed us to build a utopian society by the early 2100s. Roddenberry always thought things would have to get much worse before they got better. After all, he was a veteran of WWII, a conflict so cataclysmic that it prompted the nations of the world to form the United Nations and make other efforts to ensure that no war on that scale would ever happen again. So it was natural that he'd think it would take an even more extreme version of the same process to set us straight once and for all.

 

Nah. We'll get there and perhaps a lot sooner than many of us think.

But it won't be easy. The regressive people in our world will hold out until their very last breaths and we can't expect a lot of them to just roll over and accept the inevitable. We'll win but it's going to be a prolonged war.

 

So according to the Eaglemoss booklet that came with the USS Buran, the Cardenas class is another design based that came from USS Shenzhou concept art.

This is interesting, but doesn't make sense if you include ENT in the timeline.




The red striping on the Shenzhou and the black stripes on the Cardenas came from a scrapped idea where experimental ships were going to have red markings.

The USS Curie, a Shepard Class that the USS Glenn replaced in the final story, had red makings and giant text that said 'Experimental' on them.

 

Not necessarily, because progress isn't always linear. Things go in phases or cycles, and something can go out of fashion for a while before coming back.

 

Indeed, ENT showed us four sizeable ships that could have been recent'ish Earth designs.

-The hero ship and the Intrepid had the bridge on top.
-The warp delta aka Ganges had the bridge close to the bow.
-The Sarajevo had the bridge in a tower above the stern.

(Also, the opening credits ship aka Emmette had no protruding bridge at all, although whether this is an in-universe thing or just an accepted artifact of the model never being finished on the topside, we can decide for ourselves.)

Perhaps the "traditional" bridge placement was more like an aberration back then, and only ever became commonplace in the mid-22nd century? The Constitutions might have spearheaded that particular fashion trend, even.

Timo Saloniemi

 

So in STO, they made the bussards spin on all the DSC ships, except the Crossfield

I wonder if that was something on the show models we just couldn't see, or just a creative choice on the part of the game's artists.

 

Has to be the game, as in the series they all have very solid and static blue glows.

 

Well the Shepard's bussards are red.

But yeah I looked at some of the ship scenes on youtube and the only ship that has spinning bussards is the Enterprise.

 

Quick way to reuse a mesh.

 

Eh?
The spinning wasn't in right away, it came a couple weeks later.

On the test server that is, when the ships were still a WIP.

 

You'd think solid caps would be easier than customising an animated version. They obviously wanted them to do that which is weird, given the series went out of it's way to have the 24th century solid colour version.

 

STO doesn't use an animated texture for spinning bussards, they actually spin the nacelle cap model.

the bussards are not a completely solid in the show, there is detail in them.



Same with the Shepard Class