Ships of the Line 2015 Calendar

[Christopher]

I think it's pretty clear that the "D7" in ENT was there by mistake, that it was meant to be a different class of ship but they didn't have the design ready in time so they had to make a substitution. So as far as I'm concerned, the D7/K'tinga didn't exist in the 22nd century and the "actual" ship in that episode's events was something else.

 

[cbspock]

Not impressed with the images for 2015 except for the cover.


-Chris

 

[Dukhat]

I'll pass on the calendar. I'll just change my wallpaper to some fantastic free fan art. Why do these calendars repeatedly go back to a Klingon ship design deemed not good enough for TV? It's not bad by any means, but I'm quite bored of it now.

Actually this D4 class battle cruiser design was created after the last-minute reuse of the D7 model in ENT but never made it into any episodes.

Not exactly. The ship would have been used, but the producers didn't like its lights, so they asked for the physical model of the K'T'Inga to be used instead. Just one of many boneheaded UPN decisions in that show.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Yep, like it or not, it wasn't a mistake but a choice on behalf of the producers to use the D7/K'tinga in "Unexpected"

I'm a fan of the old novel Ishmael, where the Klingons acquired their ships and technology from their former slavers, the Karsid Empire (who may or may not be the Hur'q), 600 years ago. I think it works as a pretty neat explanation for why Klingon ships barely change between ENT and DS9 (the ENT Bird of Prey is almost identical but for shorter wings and having more weapons than it's STIII-DS9 successor). One could even wonder if the "new flagship" Neg'Var, which had the same ancient rustbucket interior as the rest of the Klingon fleet, was perhaps newly discovered on a long-lost Karsid outpost.

 

[F. King Daniel]

IIRC, in The Final Reflection and the TMP blueprint pack, the "D" stands for "Drell", a Klingon serpent from which the basic shape of their ships is derived.

I've always assumed that the Klingon ship designs are based on the Imperial trefoil. I mean, they have three points arranged triangularly, the foremost being the longest.

All the Trek cultures have ships shaped like their insignia - the Romulans and Cardassians, obviously, the Ferengi Marauder has the "clawed dog-eat-dog" appearance of the Alliance logo, the Vulcans have ships that feature a triangular point piercing a circle, even the Federation has a circle with two stalks.

You're right, but it seems silly to me for species to shape their vessels after their insignia. I'd like to think there are better reasons for it, like the shapes being warp dynamic or something.

That may explain the prevalence of vaguely avian shapes among Trek aliens, but I guess not why nobody else uses the saucer/hull/nacelles configuration which has worked so well for Starfleet for 200 years.

 

[Mysterion]

A year without a "ship in drydock" and/or Captain Christopher's F-104? Finally.

 

[Christopher]

Yep, like it or not, it wasn't a mistake but a choice on behalf of the producers to use the D7/K'tinga in "Unexpected"

Even so, it sounds like it wasn't because they wanted the K'tinga class to have been around in the 2150s, just because they didn't like the design they were offered and didn't have a better "period" design and thus had to settle. It's important to understand that TV producers don't have unlimited time and money to achieve whatever they want. A great deal of what ends up on screen is the result of the creators making compromises, settling for what they can manage rather than what they really want. That's why so many creators are happy to back and retcon things when they have the chance. The later retcons should be taken as more indicative of the creators' true intentions. So the fact that the K'tinga was never used again in ENT, that it was replaced with a different, more period-appropriate design, proves that it wasn't what the creators really wanted. It was just what they decided to settle for that one time, until they could find a better alternative.

 

[F. King Daniel]

I disagree that the other ENT Klingon ships we saw were "more appropriate" for a prequel - they all looked contemporary to the ones in the classic movies and TNG-era. The Raptor and D5 classes, for example, echo TNG's Vor'cha-class. The ENT Bird-of-Prey, other than shorter wings, is almost unchanged from the version in STIII and beyond. Hence my thinking the D7/K'tinga is a fine fit.

 

[Christopher]

I disagree that the other ENT Klingon ships we saw were "more appropriate" for a prequel - they all looked contemporary to the ones in the classic movies and TNG-era.

That's mistaking real-world advances in miniature detailing/CGI for in-universe advances in technology -- the same mistake people have been making for years when they complain that NX-01 looked "too advanced" for the 22nd century. Both the Starfleet and Klingon designs look more "advanced" because they were created later. If the creators of TOS had had modern resources, their ships would've looked more modern too.

The point is that, however it looked to our eyes and our superficial assumptions of what "looks advanced" (which is a really lousy standard for judging actual advancement, by the way), it's different from the K'tinga. And that's clearly what the creators wanted all along, since they never reused the K'tinga ship. So this is one of the many, many cases where what we see onscreen should not be taken with slavish literalism. This isn't a documentary. The creators of a television show are trying to approximate a hypothetical fictional future, and some of those approximations are worse than others.

 

[F. King Daniel]

I disagree that the other ENT Klingon ships we saw were "more appropriate" for a prequel - they all looked contemporary to the ones in the classic movies and TNG-era.

That's mistaking real-world advances in miniature detailing/CGI for in-universe advances in technology -- the same mistake people have been making for years when they complain that NX-01 looked "too advanced" for the 22nd century. Both the Starfleet and Klingon designs look more "advanced" because they were created later. If the creators of TOS had had modern resources, their ships would've looked more modern too.

Nope, I'm saying that ENT's Klingon ships look the same as the ones we saw in the movies, in TNG and DS9. Clearly, the new designs seen were intended to echo 24th century Klingon ships. Advances in CGI in no way dictate art direction - in fact they do the exact opposite, giving far more freedom than before. It was a choice to keep the look unchanged.

The point is that, however it looked to our eyes and our superficial assumptions of what "looks advanced" (which is a really lousy standard for judging actual advancement, by the way), it's different from the K'tinga. And that's clearly what the creators wanted all along, since they never reused the K'tinga ship. So this is one of the many, many cases where what we see onscreen should not be taken with slavish literalism. This isn't a documentary. The creators of a television show are trying to approximate a hypothetical fictional future, and some of those approximations are worse than others.

Yet they used a virtually identical Bird of Prey design, and unchanged interior sets from the rest of Trek. I think there is more than enough evidence to interpret the creators intent was to not rock the boat and not deviate from what came before(/after), which leads me to think the intent is that Klingon technology remains stagnant between the 2150's and 2370's.

 

[Christopher]

Or maybe it just means that the same designers use similar styles, so anything they design will have some similarities regardless of its supposed era of origin.

And of course they used the same interior sets, because it saves money. Heck, that's the only reason TNG ever used leftover 23rd-century designs in the first place -- because it couldn't afford to design new ones at first. Again, there's a lot of compromise and settling involved in creating television, so it's unwise to assume that anything we see is purely the result of the creators' intentions and wishes. Sometimes it's more the result of expediency.

 

[Dukhat]

Even so, it sounds like it wasn't because they wanted the K'tinga class to have been around in the 2150s, just because they didn't like the design they were offered and didn't have a better "period" design and thus had to settle.

While what you're saying is exactly the case, their decision was still a silly one. If they considered the design "unfinished" or simply just didn't like it, they could still have used the ship, just at more of a faraway distance so that whatever issues they had with it were not visible clearly. Take TOS-R. In several instances (the Gorn ship comes to mind), there were images of ships on the screen that were so small that low-poly CGI models were able to be successfully used instead of a more high-poly, complicated CGI mesh.

 

[Fer]

I think it's pretty clear that the "D7" in ENT was there by mistake, that it was meant to be a different class of ship but they didn't have the design ready in time so they had to make a substitution. So as far as I'm concerned, the D7/K'tinga didn't exist in the 22nd century and the "actual" ship in that episode's events was something else.

Works for me.

 

[Christopher]

While what you're saying is exactly the case, their decision was still a silly one. If they considered the design "unfinished" or simply just didn't like it, they could still have used the ship, just at more of a faraway distance so that whatever issues they had with it were not visible clearly.

I certainly don't disagree. Using the K'tinga that early was a terrible compromise. And I think that if they had the chance to go back and do it again, they'd change it.

 

[Enterprise1701]

I'll pass on the calendar. I'll just change my wallpaper to some fantastic free fan art. Why do these calendars repeatedly go back to a Klingon ship design deemed not good enough for TV? It's not bad by any means, but I'm quite bored of it now.

Actually this D4 class battle cruiser design was created after the last-minute reuse of the D7 model in ENT but never made it into any episodes.

Not exactly. The ship would have been used, but the producers didn't like its lights, so they asked for the physical model of the K'T'Inga to be used instead. Just one of many boneheaded UPN decisions in that show.

If only one of The Romulan War or earlier ENT novels had re-inserted the unrealized D4 class design back into Star Trek fiction.

I disagree that the other ENT Klingon ships we saw were "more appropriate" for a prequel - they all looked contemporary to the ones in the classic movies and TNG-era.

That's mistaking real-world advances in miniature detailing/CGI for in-universe advances in technology

I think that if the Borg strive for logic, efficiency, and perfection, then Borg "cubes" and "spheres" should have much smoother hulls. Come to think of it, wouldn't that have saved the TNG design teams a lot of time?

 

[Christopher]

I think that if the Borg strive for logic, efficiency, and perfection, then Borg "cubes" and "spheres" should have much smoother hulls. Come to think of it, wouldn't that have saved the TNG design teams a lot of time?

Indeed. As I pointed out in Greater Than the Sum, a cube isn't an efficient shape at all. The most efficient way to encase a volume is a sphere, because it uses the least material and minimizes the distance (and therefore the length of any necessary cabling, piping, or corridors) between the furthermost points within it.

The design of Borg ships wasn't about real-world efficiency, but about conveying an impression to the television audience. We associate straight lines and right angles with technology, while rounded shapes seem more natural. (Plus, there was the fact that gigantic spherical ships had been done already.) And the texture of a Borg cube looked industrial, further adding to the impression of oppressive mechanization.

 

[Avro Arrow]

Even so, it sounds like it wasn't because they wanted the K'tinga class to have been around in the 2150s, just because they didn't like the design they were offered and didn't have a better "period" design and thus had to settle.

While what you're saying is exactly the case, their decision was still a silly one. If they considered the design "unfinished" or simply just didn't like it, they could still have used the ship, just at more of a faraway distance so that whatever issues they had with it were not visible clearly.

This may have been subsequently debunked, but my understanding was that the producers' problem with the design wasn't that they didn't like the overall design or anything like that, but just that it didn't have enough windows.

Here's a passage on MA from Rob Bonchune on the subject:

The only other original design that was also chopped (that I remember now) was the John Eaves Klingon D-6 or D-5 [sic] that I included in my calendar image for 2006. It was originally done FOR FREE for Star Trek: Enterprise by Koji [Kuramura], who stayed up 36 hours to do it for the show. It looked great, but then the "producer(s)" said, "put more windows on it". We said "no" (you have to understand that we did so much extra, that at that point it was the straw that broke the camel's back when they were being mindlessly trivial and unappreciative). So, in their infinite wisdom, they choose to use a low-resolution K't'inga model (from a timeline over 100 years later) we had lying around. Because that was much more logical than a ship that needed 10 more windows that no one would EVER notice!!!!

MA page link
Original source of quote link

(There's a second, similar quote on the MA page, but I won't reproduce it here.)

If this is in fact true, it seems like an incredibly petty reason not to use the model. But it also seems the producers weren't interested at using the model at a farther distance to hide their perceived issues.

I certainly don't disagree. Using the K'tinga that early was a terrible compromise. And I think that if they had the chance to go back and do it again, they'd change it.

I was really hoping they would have replaced the K'tinga model in that episode for the Blu-Ray release, but no such luck.

 

[Dukhat]

I certainly don't disagree. Using the K'tinga that early was a terrible compromise. And I think that if they had the chance to go back and do it again, they'd change it.

I'm assuming you meant that if they could go back in time to when the episode was being produced they'd change it. Because they certainly didn't bother to change it for the DVD or BluRay releases

This may have been subsequently debunked, but my understanding was that the producers' problem with the design wasn't that they didn't like the overall design or anything like that, but just that it didn't have enough windows.

Thanks for the clarification; when I said "lights" earlier, I meant "windows."

John Eaves commented that it was incredibly silly and nit-picky decisions like these from UPN that severely hampered their overall efforts working on the show. And I won't even get into UPN's idea of a "rock band of the week."

 

[F. King Daniel]

Or maybe it just means that the same designers use similar styles, so anything they design will have some similarities regardless of its supposed era of origin.

ENT's designers weren't STIII's or TNG's. Bill George designed the original Bird of Prey and Rick Sternbach designed the Vor'cha, neither of whom worked on ENT.

And of course they used the same interior sets, because it saves money. Heck, that's the only reason TNG ever used leftover 23rd-century designs in the first place -- because it couldn't afford to design new ones at first. Again, there's a lot of compromise and settling involved in creating television, so it's unwise to assume that anything we see is purely the result of the creators' intentions and wishes. Sometimes it's more the result of expediency.

Trek's set designers are masters of recycling sets into new configurations, yet they stuck to the Klingon interior design established in STIV. These people turned the Enterprise-E corridors into a Ferengi ship in "Aquisition" and made Deep Space Nine corridors into the Enterprise-J, all it took was a little paint.

I personally would have loved to see them use the same Klingon design but with shiny new silver walls instead of the same old rusty look - but again, they were either instructed to make no changes (something I consider very likely, having read about the Scimitar's design evolution on John Eaves' site), or failed to do so through their own lack of imagination which case they unimaginatively gave us unchanged Klingon designs across 2 centuries.

I'd rather use a backstory which fits what we see (the one from Ishmael) than play mental gymnastics and pretend we actually saw something different. It's a nice fit for their strength too - in "Unexpected", the Enterprise NX-01 is no match for the D7 battle cruiser. In TOS, the Enterprise has an edge over it, and in TNG and DS9 it's canon fodder.

 

[Christopher]

I'd rather use a backstory which fits what we see... than play mental gymnastics and pretend we actually saw something different.

I await your explanation for why Saavik felt the need to get extensive cosmetic surgery and vocal-cord reconstruction after Spock's funeral.

If we'd seen the K'tinga more than once in the 22nd century, then it would be justified to try to account for it. But if something is done only once and never again -- like "James R. Kirk" or just about everything "The Host" established about the Trill -- then it's probable that the creators themselves changed their minds and no longer wanted it to be part of the universe. In which case it's perfectly appropriate to treat it as a mistake and relegate it to the apocrypha pile.