“The Pegasus” established that the Treaty of Algeron prohibited Federation starships to have cloaking devices. Presumably this stipulation was made by the Romulans. Now that the Romulan Empire is gone, there is no need to conform to the treaty, and no reason at all why Federation starships shouldn’t be able to have cloaking tech.
Part of my problem with that description of the treaty is how the Romulans expected to enforce it in the case of legitimate violations, short of directly fighting the Feds in a war (with the risk of drawing in other powers like the Klingons). The Klingons use cloaks as well and were political allies, and it's not like the Romulans could bar them from the occasional "loan" as Picard arranged to find Spock. We've had also instances where the Federation used holographic technology to hide themselves as they would do with a cloak ("Who Watches the Watchers?" and Insurrection among others), so it kind of undercuts their reliability.
That museum was great, and had some interesting implications. So, the USS New Jersey is an original TOS Constitution, and the Enterprise-A has its normal movie look. Now fans of the Discovery and SNW style Constitution Class really can't justify the original Constitution design as just being interpretative or whatever, the TOS Constitution Class design is now consistent between TOS, TNG, DS9, ENT and PIC. DSC and SNW are the outliers, and last time I checked 5 examples beats 2 counter examples. People can, somehow, disregard Trials and Tribble-ations and In a Mirror Darkly while defending the DSC Constitution, but the stretching they'll need to say the Constitution Class in PIC isn't canon will interesting.
To be clear, I really enjoy SNW as a show and don't absolutely hate its Enterprise design, but I've always maintained that the 1701's original design is the canon design, and now even Picard S3 agrees with me. I'm sure I'll lose the size war (the 1701 Enterprise will always be 289-ish meters to me), but we got the classic TOS design and Refit Constitution clearly on screen the the "present day" of Star Trek, and I love it.
I also loved seeing the other ships, I wish we'd gotten a full on view of the refit NX-01 but its cool to even have it in the background.
It was nice to see an original TOS style Constitution class, because I'm agreement that the original design (at least in terms of exteriors) can still be made to look good on a modern screen. It would seem to open some interesting problems related to SNW continuity, though.
In some ways, it reminds me of the warship art problem in Battletech. When Technical Readout 2750 was released, it was the first tech book to deal specifically with the advanced technology of the Star League (then mostly lost in game storyline) and to show the large naval designs that made up the Star League Defense Force's fleet. Many of the ships which survived the brutal Amaris War (which triggered the ultimate collapse of the League) chose to leave with General Kerensky on the Exodus, and those warships that stayed in the service of the Great Houses were effectively exterminated by the end of the Second Succession War.
Then when Technical Readout 3057 was released, most of the 2750 designs were updated to represent the Exodus fleet (whose descendants had evolved into the Clans of Kerenksy). Problem was, the art used for 2750 had been misplaced and couldn't be found in time for the publication date. So the major classes were given entirely new art for TRO 3057, with the game runners since saying that these are later block II advanced models and the 2750 versions are earlier block Is.
This isn't a bad solution by itself, but there are two potential problems. Some designs, like the
Black Lion battlecruisers, have art that doesn't seem to mesh aesthetically or design wise, and it's very unclear in terms of written continuity when the 3057 types entered regular service and presumably replaced their block I counterparts. The two-book set that covers the Amaris War in detail shows the SLDF only using 2750 type designs in the first volume and the nascent Clans using 3057 types in the second, when they were first getting organized. They're even shown using the 3057 version of the
Vincent corvettes, which is implied in the TRO text to be a later Clan model that likely wouldn't have been in service when the Exodus fleet left.
It's certainly not impossible for some of the older 2750 ships to have survived, and some are even confirmed to have done so as late as the 3070s. It's just very confusing to tell how many such ships remained in service and whether there's any advantage to using the older designs versus the newer ones. The Clans only built a relative handful of newer vessels before they returned in 3049, as their combat doctrine puts far more emphasis on ground forces and mechs in particular.
