Amazing what a little bit of effort and detail can do. Thats the first time Ive seen that ship bright enough to make out
The design is absolutely fine. It looks like it could follow on from the Prometheus/Sovereign, 15-20 years later. I'd have preferred more variety, but for a rapid-reaction force it probably makes sense to have the same design.
I don't have a problem with the design, I think it's a good looking ship. I was referring to the producers saying there were different classes of ships in the fleet, when it looked like the same one when it first aired. From this pic it still all looks like the same ship copy and pasted to me
This design predates the Avenger, Eaves designed it back in 2005-06'ish for the version of STO that was never made. I asked their ship design lead, and he said some of the concept art of the Inquiry the STO team got from CBS resembled this old concept art. Also according to him, the Avenger was inspired by this concept art. So no, it isn't a copy of the Avenger, the Avenger is a copy of it. When they added the Inquiry to STO they even made it a skin for the Avenger. That's a fan model, which takes some inspiration from the STO version that added more detail.
Here's the original render. https://www.deviantart.com/cannikin1701/art/Inquiry-Class-Zheng-He-859686689 The model was made by Marc Bell.
STO's rendition of Oh's command ship https://twitter.com/ShipTalkingPod/status/1351939129429405698 They're calling it the "Dhailkhina Warbird" I googled "Dhailkhina", I can't find that word existing outside of STO. I wonder if it's a word from the the show team, they did create new Romulan words for Picard. Those stripes are on the in show model, they're just really hard to see with the dark lighting and how shiny the ship is.
I've seen on reddit that the ship had been nicknamed dai-katana before, so the "Romulan" name may be a pun based on that. Anyway, always great to have an official class name for new ships.
Eaglemoss has added a registry number to the original Zheng He CGI model: NCC-86505. http://blog.trekcore.com/2021/01/star-trek-picard-launch-april-hero-collector-model-releases/ And it’s 630 meters? WTF? That’s almost as long as a Galaxy class starship. There’s no way it’s supposed to be that long.
I wonder where they got the length, Cryptic wasn't given for STO by CBS IIRC. The STO one is around 425 meters, as they made it a skin for the Avenger class which is that length. I wonder if they just measured the CG model. That's 5 higher than the USS Inquiry number Cryptic used in their promo art, NCC-86500. Either they collaborated (which they do), or maybe there was a registry for the Zheng He in the production documents, and was never seen on screen, that both Cryptic and Eaglemoss saw.