Yes, my thoughts too. And I figure that the Akiras function as a smaller version of this, supplementing the larger Sovereigns.
The problem with paying too much mind to the changes to the E model is that in the future more ships will bring undergoing perpetual refits. Will that mean that they’re all therefore clunkers, or that suddenly the Star Trek universe has entered a new era of bad workmanship? Even if you judge the refits as natural upgrades for new technologies that have no bearing on the worthiness of the original ship, it’s the same issue. What about when old ships are “refit” before this brave new era, like the Enterprise in DSC and soon SNW? Or possibly the Miranda we saw in the trailer for season 2 of LD with its glowing red Bussards, if it’s a flashback scene and not a contemporary one.
Alternatively, the interior designer used the wrong reference material. After three years of staring at it, confirmed ship model geek Picard had the wall ripped out so he'd never have to see it again. In his next ride, he got more accurate models, until he infamously broke those too.
Perhaps, though Akiras seem to be contemporaries of the Nebula/Galaxy. If any class gets to have yet another variant, it's the Miranda.
Then again, they amassed those very older ships for the final push to Cardassia. And few if any ships were lost in that part of campaign in the end. Retiring all the old clunkers at that juncture is certainly possible and even likely, though! I tend to see this as an opportunity rather than a problem. We get precious little material to satisfy our starship fetishes to begin with. If there's variety, good - and if the variety is of odd sort, all the better. If ships get altered, this can fall in two distinct categories: alterations early on in the life of the design, and alterations later on, either to long-serving ships or then to newbuilds of a legacy design. The former cater for the story that "something went wrong"; the latter cater for the equally interesting stories that "something new was tried and panned out/did not" and "a sudden need arose for changes, either to the class or then to a specific ship". The latter might stem from individual damage sustained (many ships in WWII ended up diverging from their nominal class because they got different repairs at different times, not because there would have been an intent to upgrade as such), or from new shortcomings discovered in face of new threats. The changes to the E-E might be due to damage, of course. But the subtle changing of hull curvature would suggest truly catastrophic damage, in which half a hull is lost and has to be rebuilt, now to a different shape. Moving of nacelles is trivial in comparison; even bolting on a third one might be! Of course, there's nothing wrong with catastrophic damage here. Enterprises might not be flagships, but they sure are disaster magnets all, ending up at hot spots quite regardless of their Starfleet orders. I'd phaser the LDS bridge when we come to it. But I'm cool with NCC-1701-nil getting lots and lots of refits, of the repair sort, for the combination of her being quite old; coming from an era where ships weren't yet built to last a full century; and being the worst disaster magnet of them all by far, engaging monsters and gods and invaders on assignments initially presumed dull. Timo Saloniemi
The 1701-E was more of a combat vessel than the 1701-D and more designed around deep space tactical situations than outright exploration and the carrying of families? I can see why some people would find the Enterprise-D more of a luxury liner while the Enterprise-E is a military cruiser.
That's just a visual continuity thing. The go to VFX for Starfleet warp engines is the ST: TNG/ST: DSN/ST: V/ST: E "have the front bit glow red with any grills/openings on the sides and back glow blue at all times" style.
It’s all a visual continuity thing. For all I care the ship could be organic or crystalline and grow in different directions.
We can always also plead "LN-64 bussards only glow red under stress", much like we got "Kirk's impulse engines only grow red (or indeed become visible at all!) under stress" in TOS-R... Timo Saloniemi
Well refiting doens't have to be a complete change to the ship the carriers are "Refit" each time they come back from there cruises. This could be it for the Trek universe. The E could have been Refit after there borg encounter in FC, taking out all the borg componets, and changes be made. For the dominion war, the ship could have been put in dock for a month to refit it for combat with more weapons and other improvements. Just like it seems that there was a "Refit" of the Enterprise D between all good things, and Generations with the new bridge moduale. Refits don't have to be complete teardowns, can just be replacing worn components, updating to new specifications like go from a Block 20, to a Block 40 setup.
Those are space-energy/matter sinks according to the FJ-based TMP blueprints, not Bussards. As Joseph himself explained in 1976: The engine fronts are the source in which the entire energy of the universe in front is taken in and passed in a loop through the vehicle. The energy is utilized to operate the machinery while passing through this loop, and then put out the back and restored exactly as it was when picked up in front.
Only never on screen. And any reference to the "sink" part of the "sink/source" engine can be reinterpreted as a reference to ramscoops now. However, personally I don't appreciate the idea of the black troughs at the bows of LN-64 being the sink in either the FJ or the Sternbach/Okuda sense. Rather, this engine has prominent fingernail shapes somewhat farther aft, on both sides - essentially a forward hemisphere of the TOS type, only with junk piled ahead of it. Make that one glow red when the ships get supercharged late in their lives! Timo Saloniemi
Well, the bussard collectors were mentioned that they take in local matter as ships travel through space to generate extra energy from that. It would probably make sense that they'd glow red (or the color would intensify) under stress (as they would be working more to compensate and minimize energy expenditure from the Warp core, so as to extend anti-matter supply).
Do we need to assume Bussards in all eras until proven otherwise, though? I also find that FJ’s limited role for the antimatter reaction (which I’m emphasizing in bold) fits quite well with the visually ambiguous directionality of the entire system: But in theory you would need only a very, very tiny antimatter-starting chamber to start the whole mechanism pulling in energy. Dilithium crystals are very unstable, so with a starting chamber full of dilithium, a few added atoms of antimatter will provide the driving force to get the whole system charged up and sucking in space energy. This is what could’ve been abandoned starting with the Enterprise-A, however, perhaps as a direct consequence of transwarp experiments.
Except this very thing was not mentioned. We know that these things called "ramscoops" exist. We know they can suck and blow. But there is never any suggestion that this would be related to the ship getting extra energy, or collecting extra fuel. For all we know, the scoops exist for clearing a path through interstellar space, and for that reason are vital gear for not just every ship, but for every engine. We sorta do, as they were part and parcel of Cochrane's very first test rig already. If they were merely "nice to have", they might have been on the second test rig, or perhaps the sixteenth... But what does the -A really add? Nothing much is new there: the glowing vertical cylinder could be one of the doodads we had in TAS already. The -nil introduced a lot more in TMP, but even there it was difficult to tell the new from the old, as we apparently were seeing parts of the engineering "maze" that had not been visited previously because the people doing the visiting were now wearing protective clothing... "Warp drive fundaments change" is one of those things that never truly gets a dialogue mention. Except in connection with the buzzword transwarp, and the -A doesn't have that buzzword attached, not on screen. (No, it's not on the screens on the bridge in TVH or TFF, this was Shane Johnson's own addition/modification of the actual Okudagrams used.) Timo Saloniemi
Do you mean in an Okudagram or a production sketch? They’ve always been nice to have, but what if they were in fact more critical when antimatter was only a way of jump starting this access to “space energy”, and the collectors later remained as a kind of vestigial element of the sink, long after every ship had been retrofitted with the TNG style system, which was in fact an evolution of drives from the ENT and FC eras? Antimatter scarcity being no longer an issue, it turned out the original system enabled improved control over power generation relative to the unpredictable space-energy drive. I’m sure that everything in Star Trek V, VI and VII works pretty much the way we expect from TNG, but I can’t say that with confidence for the earlier films or series. Or there was no access to that kind of power before. I think this is more of a shift in power generation, and we do see the terminology used in dialogue change from one era to another.