Spoilers 31st/32nd Century Ships Revealed

[Timo]

Seems our S31 ship set is full now: Hou-yi (short 4-naceller w/rollbar), Shiva (short two-naceller w/rollbar), Nimrod (long four-naceller) and now Deimos (long two-naceller). Plus of course the basic (and still nameless?) intel cutter and the drone, and arguably the Vengeance type (although S31 operating the witnessed example of the latter was supposed to be an exception and thus probably not a rule).

Is there a horizontal version of the Dresselhaus type, or were those ships just always flying funny?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Tuskin38]

What's funny, is that STO called the Synth ships seen in Picard 'Demios class' (because Mars, get it it?), who's CG models were made from the DSC S31 ship parts.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

There was nothing in the show that implied that the ship got an A suffix because they were trying to hide the ship’s true origin.

Nothing that proves it didn't, either.

And in any case, doesn't that make more sense? We've seen extensive refits before (i.e. the 1701 in TMP) and they've never caused registry prefixes to increase at those times. Why start now?

What we know for a fact is, time travel is illegal in the 32nd century. So how is Starfleet supposed to explain Discovery's presence to the general public? The easiest method would be to slap a new registry on, that way Starfleet legally gets to claim it's a different ship. Thus, no time travel needs to be explained.

Occam's Razor, don't you know.

 

[Dukhat]

So if I steal a car, add some bling to it, and change the license plate, that will fool the cops into thinking it’s not the same car?

If Starfleet really wanted to hide the fact that the ship came from the past, then they should never have let it leave Starfleet Command, and they should have detained all the crew. The impression I got was that Starfleet didn’t seem to have much of a problem with this. And the illegality of time travel pertains to the present day of the 32nd century. When Discovery made its time jump in the 23rd century, time travel wasn’t illegal. And since the ship and its crew had no intention of time traveling further, there was no need to hide the fact that the ship came from the past. If anything, Starfleet should have hidden the fact that it had a spore drive, not that it had time traveled.

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

So if I steal a car, add some bling to it, and change the license plate, that will fool the cops into thinking it’s not the same car?

The car of Theseus?

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

So if I steal a car, add some bling to it, and change the license plate, that will fool the cops into thinking it’s not the same car?

That would fool a lot of people, yeah. Cops included.

And why wouldn't it? Cars are so generic nowadays that they pretty much all look the same anyway, so the only meaningful way to tell them apart is the license plate.

In any case, Discovery is a special case, since it's a famous ship - everybody knows what it looked like and what its registry number was. So if it turns up in the 32nd century, then (from the public's perspective) either there's time travel involved, OR it's a different ship. Because of the prohibition against time travel, Starfleet has to make it look as if it's the latter.

And obviously Starfleet has to do what it can to prevent its own enemies from finding out that Starfleet (presumably) has access to ships that can time travel at will. Even ignoring, for the moment, what the general public might think. Did the Emerald Chain ever find out that Discovery came from the past? If not, Starfleet obviously can't ever LET them find out, and if they did, then for all the Chain knows, Starfleet has active time travel resources which they can exploit at any time. If you were Starfleet, would YOU want that kind of word to get out?

When Discovery made its time jump in the 23rd century, time travel wasn’t illegal.

It is now. That's all that matters.

 

[Dukhat]

That would fool a lot of people, yeah. Cops included.

The police have ways of finding things out more than just being fooled by appearances.

It is now. That's all that matters.

If that were the case, then the Discovery crew would have been arrested by Starfleet for committing a crime. Since they were not arrested and in fact were sent out on missions instead, their actions were obviously not deemed illegal by 32nd century law.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

If that were the case, then the Discovery crew would have been arrested by Starfleet for committing a crime.

The Federation is, at this point, too weak to do anything about that. They need Discovery's help.

 

[Dukhat]

The Federation is, at this point, too weak to do anything about that. They need Discovery's help.

They only needed the spore drive and Stamets to control it. They didn’t need anyone else.

 

[Agony_Boothb]

Did the Emerald Chain ever find out that Discovery came from the past?

Zareh worked out that Saru and Tilly were from the past within about 30 seconds of meeting them. Since Zareh was working for Osyraa in 'That hope is you pt 2', I would assume he told Osyraa everything he knew about Discovery and it's crew.

 

[F. King Daniel]

The Disco crew weren't even given cover stories, and told anyone who asked where they're from. It's not a cover story, it's an -A with an upgrade, which goes back to W. Matt Jeffries original concept art.

 

[Timo]

I guess this boils down to a combination of what the writers intended back then and what they intend when writing S4.

Originally, it sounded implausible that Tyler could be Voq. "Didn't Starfleet run proper tests?" etc. But then the writers wrote a single line establishing that all the proper tests were indeed run, and merely happened to be consistent with Klingon torture. And that the personality was hidden in a clever and unexpected way when Starfleet only tested for the many expected ways.

Likewise, the writers could at some point declare that Vance always "wanted to hide time travel with the -A", by adding the appropriate line that affirms that the trick would have been sufficiently efficient and wasn't intended to fool everybody for all eternity anyway. Nothing going against it: all our objections can be shot down by keeping it suitably vague yet by making it suitably clear that the trick was supposed to work. At that point, it merely becomes an exercise for the audience to rationalize away the objections.

But this only if the writers decide to do that thing. There was strong intent from the get-go to do "Tyler is Voq". There is no known or apparent intent to do "-A is for hiding time travel". But intent is nothing, and execution is everything: the Klingon Empire can always be declared emperor-free without contradiction if the need arises. Or Spock's dad made the Vulcan Ambassador all of a sudden. Lingering implausibility then becomes "verisimilitude", since nothing is clear-cut in real life, either...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[DEWLine]

In addition to license plates, there's VIN plates on the dashboards, and even the individual parts are getting their own bar codes...

 

[Timo]

Yet changing your warp signature works to a degree; faking your bridge view with holograms works to a degree; and even doing a silly voice over the comms works to a degree.

It's just a matter of figuring out how painting an "-A" on the hull would work to a meaningful degree, if Earth-standard scans still reveal that the ship is built of outdated materials.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Blue Squadron]

As you say, it very much comes down to whatever the producers and writers find convenient at the time.

This is TV fiction, nothing more, nothing less. They don’t seem too concerned about the absolute logical consequences of everything that happens.

Overall, this production team only really seems interested in what works for them in terms of telling that story *in the moment.* Folks stopping afterwards to think, “hey, hang on a minute, what about [x]...?” really doesn’t seem to matter that much to them. They either understand the inconsistencies and just don’t care or they’re not even bothering to make the effort to think things through.

My overall impression is that there seems to be a lot of “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if...” and not much thought beyond that. Adding the “-A” suffix may well be one of those things. Given the historical significance of Starfleet registry suffixes in the Trek universe, it’s odd that they did it and there was NO mention at all in the dialogue.

On they other hand, maybe it’s simething else entirely: perhaps this is something the CGI FX team threw in during post-production and do the writing team were unaware of it? Indeed, it may not have even been considered at the time they were shooting the third season.

Anyway, all this stuff is mostly fairly minor and you can just shrug, maintain suspension of disbelief, stay in the moment and move on with the story of that episode; occasionally they do something very jarring that completely drags you out of the moment and is very disruptive to staying with the story-telling.

We all have different thresholds for that sort of thing. I truly disliked the whole Tilly-as-XO thing and found it entirely unbelievable and very jarring but I’m totally happy to accept that others were just not that bothered by it or even liked the idea.

I don’t imagine this approach is going to change as the series moves forward...

 

[TRON JA307020]

Nice. I love how utterly alien some of those ships look. If they're all federation ships, it looks like they got a lot more multi-cultural in their ship designs.

Shame that the source vid is gone.

Multi cultural in design? Not sure what you mean. The federation has always been multicultural. The other ships such as that round disk is probably a alien race that is part if the federation. The ships with the nacelles are human federation ships. The federation has always been full of different species and ships we just see the human ships most often.

 

[fireproof78]

Overall, this production team only really seems interested in what works for them in terms of telling that story *in the moment.* Folks stopping afterwards to think, “hey, hang on a minute, what about [x]...?” really doesn’t seem to matter that much to them. They either understand the inconsistencies and just don’t care or they’re not even bothering to make the effort to think things through.

With what time?

 

[Agony_Boothb]

Multi cultural in design? Not sure what you mean. The federation has always been multicultural. The other ships such as that round disk is probably a alien race that is part if the federation. The ships with the nacelles are human federation ships. The federation has always been full of different species and ships we just see the human ships most often.

I'm not sure what you are even trying to say with this comment. The Federation is of course, multi-cultural and diverse but their starship designs have not been at all. They have been all the same derivation based off the human design for a FTL starship. However, finally thanks to Discovery we're seeing that 30th - 32nd Century Starfleet has a much more diverse and less humancentric approach to Starship design.

 

[Tuskin38]

Season 3 VFX reel. Posting it here because most of the shots are ships

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[137th Gebirg]

Now THAT’S a demo reel!