What a depressing photo.
How?
Wasn't it later in Picard season 2? I thought just brand synergy stuff.Respectfully, I don't like it at all. An animated show, which has the ability to come up with completely unique designs without worrying about budget, makes a ship that is essentially just an Excelsior with Sovereign nacelles.
No, that was the Excelsior II, not the Obena. Different ship, and I didn’t like that one either, for other reasons.
I just checked Memory Beta, which has orthos of both ships and... I've learned something today.
I actually really liked the Excelsior II, and with its registry numbers, my new head canon is that a lot of the Excelsiors we see during TNG are actually Excelsior II classes.
I've heard sentiments like that before. The thing is, the Excelsior II doesn't really look like a ship that was designed and built decades before the Galaxy class. Nor does it really look like it was refit from older Excelsiors (and the class ship isn't a refit of the original Excelsior anyway.)
People said the same thing about the TMP Enterprise, really. We got over it. 
Mark
Mark
I prefer an inclusive view towards ship designs, rather than trying to collate them in one nice linear descent-of-man order where each ship most closely resembles the ones immediately before and after it. That kind of thinking is how we end up with the Probert Enterprise-C looking like a 50% morph between the Excelsior and the Galaxy. We’ve seen enough explicitly new designs that have old-fashioned features to prove that false anyway.
For instance, we might’ve assumed that triangle escape pods like on the Sovereign and Akira meant “brand-new ship” in 1996, but we’ve seen plenty of ships that come after those have square escape pods (or escape pod hatches, after Voyager retconned that). The same can be broadly true of any feature or cue; hull curviness, saucer roundness, color, bussard collector style…
For instance, we might’ve assumed that triangle escape pods like on the Sovereign and Akira meant “brand-new ship” in 1996, but we’ve seen plenty of ships that come after those have square escape pods (or escape pod hatches, after Voyager retconned that). The same can be broadly true of any feature or cue; hull curviness, saucer roundness, color, bussard collector style…
People said the same thing about the TMP Enterprise, really. We got over it.
Mark
That’s not really the same kind of situation, though.
Registries are sometimes chronological, sometimes not (take the USS Syracuse for one example)
It's also not clear if each block of numbers gets filled at the same time, too. Certainly, the Picard era seems to strongly imply that's not the case, several times.
91701 works better for me, that said; as does 92893, etc.
Would quite have liked to see a Sovereign-class USS Excelsior, too; maybe a Vesta-class or styled similar Voyager-A, likewise.
Considering that the Vesta, in the novels, has a new FTL that is faster than warp (slipstream), I always liked the idea that as an homage there was a Vesta class Excelsior.
