Spoilers ST Lower Decks - Starships and Technology Season One Discusssion

Perhaps the Parliament Class has things in common with the much earlier California class.

Yeah, they have mentioned it has been refit before, and the nacelles aren't the originals. I suspect we might eventually get to see a USS California, which has never been refit.

 

Huh, I didn't know they said that. This would be the first evidence that a starship other than the original TOS Enterprise has been refitted to such an extreme.

 

For clarity, that's from the production crew, not the characters.

 

I can get behind the California class being a contemporary of the Ambassador and other early 24th-century designs. I guess fandom had had visual evidence of what, TWO classes of ships that have lasted decades in the Miranda and Excelsior, but there's no reason at all that there shouldn't be others over the years that also had several production batches AND refits such that a 2310s California like the Rubidoux would look just the same as the fresh-ish off the line USS Merced.

This would however be an example of a ship class that's been produced for potentially up to 70 years though (assuming the above scenario). While there's little evidence that the Excelsior and Miranda classes were produced for that long, there's real-world precedent - the first and last Nimitz class carriers were launched in 2972 and 2006, and the Boeing 737 airliner that first took flight in 1967 is still being produced today, albeit in a much-improved model (though the main fuselage is practically identical today to the original) and no plans to stop making them. The Russian Soyuz also first carried humans to space in 1967 and are still being made today. If it ain't (that) broke...

Mark

 

Either you meant 1972, or The Final Countdown was more realistic than I thought...

 

They were well ahead of their time! And the Nimitz's reactor core may still be lukewarm in a thousand years regardless!

Mark

 

There's a street in Regina, that province's capital, also of that name. (I spent a decade there.) Naming streets for peers of the realm was a thing back in the day.

Case in point, care of Library and Archives Canada from the 1907 Fire Insurance Plans of Regina.

 

The Olympic's primary hull was as circular as it gets

 

Imagining an Ambassador era California would probably involve nacelles with the characteristic topside opening (although perhaps pointing down or to the sides), in addition to the blue lateral/wraparaound "field windows"; a bit fewer portholes on the saucer (the Excelsior kitbashes of DS9 liberally added TNG style portholes when deemed fit), aaaand... What else? Shorter strip phasers? Perhaps even turret phasers for the extra granddaddy flair? A blue "enclosed" deflector such as in the Connie refit, the Excelsior and the Ambassador, although perhaps a bit more oval? An angled saucer rim?

You can easily do "old" with a circular saucer and a midsize starship, so TPTB here chose well...

I'm sorta looking forward to the episode where we finally see a "known" starship in glorious animation, and can compare it to these all-new creations for determining how "accurate" or "serious" we're supposed to find the depictions.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Should we expect to see a "known" ship in S1?

 

Well, why not? This show makes an effort to look like TNG, and TNG has a big pool of starship designs that yell "TNG!", and making use of one of those designs as a guest starship in LDS is pretty simple because LDS does lots and lots of guest starships and can make those look like anything it pleases.

We're apparently gonna see Q and all. A Galaxy is certainly a possibility - but so is an obscure ship from "Best of Both Worlds", just for the shits and giggles. The Makers of LDS are like that, from what we can tell.

Timo Saloniemi

 

The Olympic was technically known, albeit in an alternate timeline. That one episode scene at DS9 confirms it’s existence in the main timeline. The chances of seeing a Galaxy-X have increased by an order of magnitude!

 

Excellent point. And the artwork on the Quito seems to prove that LDS gets the general proportions and surface features of its starships exactly right. (Scale may vary, but then again, it always does.)

Okay, so the Quito nacelles may be smoothly rounded where the Pasteur ones had more of a kink. But TNG ships in general are curvy things, and it's difficult to see where the LDS art style would result in major differences in the portrayal of, say, a Galaxy or a Cheyenne.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Boilmer was out of phase by a milliCochrane. He could interact with normal matter. How far out of phase would he have to be to only be able to walk on decks?

 

Not even Trek gets it right. Remember “The Next Phase” where Geordi, Ro and some Romulans could walk around on the Enterprise decks and breathe normal air but one of the Romulans got pushed through an outer hull bulkhead into deep space? And they were so far out of phase from real space that they were never seen. The writers play fast and loose with theoretical rules to tell the story and not kill everyone off in the process. Same thing happened here. Boimler should have floated out of the ship and shouldn’t have been able to breathe.

 

Don't forget hearing. Sound travels through air.

My explanation in the novels is that 1) the gravity plating blurs out the phase of the decks so phased people don't fall through them, and 2) it's easier for single molecules to exist in a superposition of quantum states than it is for macroscopic ensembles, so air molecules can exist in multiple phases at once.

 

Forgot about the hearing part, yeah, that too.

I’m normally not one who finds it difficult to suspend disbelief on such things, but if viewers need to engage in mental gyrations of that caliber to get there, I think the show runners failed us, to some degree.

 

It happens a lot. Look at "Wink of an Eye" or "Timescape." How can they hear each other if the speed of sound waves traveling through the air is a thousand times slower from their POV? How can they walk if gravity accelerates them a thousand times more gradually? They'd be effectively weightless. And the air would be a thousand times harder to push through when they walked.

 

That was the entire point, it might also be spoofing on Section 31.

Sometimes an animation error is just an animation error, and nothing more.

 

Exactly. Honestly, the "The Next Phase" is one of my favorite TNG episodes. As much as it doesn't make sense that they can be out of phase and still interact with different matter, it's still a fun story.