Spoilers ST Lower Decks - Starships and Technology Season One Discusssion

[Timo]

I think it's somewhere in the hundreds for sure, but not close to the 855-1000+ of the big explorers.

Well, if the ship has as many Ensigns as we see, plus an appropriate ratio of noncoms at even lower decks somewhere, we might be talking about a five-digit complement...

- Were the Cerritos and Merced towing the big slug at sublight? There seemed to have been no indication of warp speed hauling here. Were they already really close to that starbase and the first contact ship had already warped off to better adventures, perhaps dropping its charge at the edge of the system for the little ships to take her in?

Might be the very reason they found this dead colonizer is it loitered close to a system with a Starfleet presence. A fairly minor course correction would then be performed to divert it to this random Starfleet asset. (And a possibly larger correction performed to slow her down - surely she'd be barreling ahead at an ungodly speed relative to most star systems, if limited to sublight and having to do the acceleration-deceleration thing and having missed the latter half of it somehow and so forth?)

- And, you know, NOW what? The Cerritos is seen leaving the starbase with[out] their former charge. I guess they're okay leaving Durango alone to face the court martial for the loss of his ship?

Sounds like par for this particular course.

And they didn't really say what they were goign to do with the generational ship in the first place. Will they wake someone up?

Freeman's rather categorical use of "mummified" to describe the passengers suggests they all died long ago, in those "disabled" cryochambers of theirs.

Figure out where the ship was bound in the first place and send it on its way?

With the passengers dead, probably not. It would be a bit cruel, even if (as you suggest) the ship didn't end up terraforming something that really shouldn't be terraformed when there are no live operators to give it moral guidance.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

i was surprised how much of the Vancouver's sets were simple recolors (if that) of the Cerritos' standing sets. Both Freeman and Mariner were not impressed, and I'm pretty much on their side. Aside from the T-88s and their sexy purple-ish stripes, there was very little on the surface to suggest the ship was really that much cooler than the Cerritos.

Heck, for much of the episode I was confused as to which ship our heroes were on! I wasn't really expecting most of the action to be on the Vancouver, whose Captain basically disappears after the first act. Freeman even issues the final order, and Shaxs' scenes are on the Vancouver's bridge as well.

Mark

PS - Holy crap, the Antares? But I'm just as intrigued by that red freighter, which looks yoinked out of the 2150s!

 

[Tuskin38]

Here's the full MSD for the Vancouver
https://twitter.com/gaghyogi49/status/1301611672403144706/photo/1

PS - Holy crap, the Antares? But I'm just as intrigued by that red freighter, which looks yoinked out of the 2150s!

Well Antares type. This one is NCC-502, the Antares was -501.

 

[Trekker4747]

i was surprised how much of the Vancouver's sets were simple recolors (if that) of the Cerritos' standing sets.

I'm guessing that was the "joke" as if this were a 1990s TV series recycling standing sets to be different ships. Particularly in the TNG era where when other Federation ships were visited the corridors were obviously the standing corridor sets and the bridge or most rooms being a redress of the movie-era Enterprise bridge.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

I'm guessing that was the "joke" as if this were a 1990s TV series recycling standing sets to be different ships. Particularly in the TNG era where when other Federation ships were visited the corridors were obviously the standing corridor sets and the bridge or most rooms being a redress of the movie-era Enterprise bridge.

It stands to reason that StarFleet would have a common design spec / requirements.

So most things can't be too different from each other.

 

[Ronald Held]

Which tricorder did Mariner use to detect the parasite? Have we seen those engineering scanners before, which were used on the Vancouver?

 

[Trekker4747]

Which tricorder did Mariner use to detect the parasite? Have we seen those engineering scanners before, which were used on the Vancouver?

She used a regular tricorder not the special one with a purple stripe on it she tormented and threatened to imprison a sentient being for.

I'm pretty sure we've seen hand-held scanning devices/tools like that before given all the various props we've seen.

 

[Mike McDevitt]

Humor aside, no estimates as to the size of the Cerrito's crew?

Pausing my VOD recordings, I’ve identified not less than 134 character designs on Cerritos in 5 episodes.

 

[fireproof78]

It stands to reason that StarFleet would have a common design spec / requirements.

So most things can't be too different from each other.

On the one hand, yes, I would expect that. On the other hand, given that crews rarely transfer maybe they like to customize it. I mean, I've worked for a corporation that insisted that all stores be the same but invariably each store manager had their own style, approach and preferences.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

manager had their own style, approach and preferences.

But that's usually about minor things like, where is the Captain's Ready Room.
Is it in the Room on the Left/Right of the Bridge?

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

I’d think that it would only be a thing in certain ship classes that could accommodate it. For example, the Intrepid class has two rooms of about the same size flanking the bridge and could potentially swap where Th e ready room is if the Captian really wanted a different view; indeed the USS Bellerophon seemed to have a different intent for its conference room that necessitated a completely different table in there?

Mark

 

[Mike McDevitt]

Cerritos crew size: 130-ish on screen so far, and the existence of Beta Shift (our protagonists) and Delta Shift (those jerkos!) implies Alpha and Gamma shifts. My higher wild guess, 525 crew, is looking pretty likely to me. Not including the possible kindergarten and pre-K.

 

[fireproof78]

But that's usually about minor things like, where is the Captain's Ready Room.
Is it in the Room on the Left/Right of the Bridge?

I mean, maybe? I would imagine more senior or experienced officers would be able to work within those specs to set up their ships how they want it to be.

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

In the first "Titan" novel, Riker had the leeway to increase the size of his ship's equivalent of Ten Forward as he wanted ample space for his diverse crew to mix and mingle. I'd guess that depending on the ship and crew, such relatively simple adjustments could be reasonable or even routine.

Or pre-programmed - the modifications to the Voyager mess hall were identical to the ones done to the USS Bellerophon (it was the same set after all) but the latter ship wasn't stuck in the Delta Quadrant with limited resources. We speculated at the time that Neelix wanted to cook, saw the "diplomatic kitchen" floorplan used for diplomatic courier configuration of the intrepid class, and somehow carved out the replicator stations and the Captain's private dining room in the blink of an eye without Janeway noticing. Point being that there may be a selection of pre-approved room configurations that could be done with minimal effort, and that many ships could have small differences in layout as a result of mission parameters or personal preference.

Speaking of which, I'm wondering if the last scene in 1x06 was ACTUALLY our first real glimpse of the USS Titan in any form of visual canon outside of the novel covers and occasional comic. In that scene, Fletcher was seen against a generic Starfleet-ish background, and he'd apparently been demoted back to Ensign by that point. For all we know, Riker could have dropped him off at the nearest Starbase just to be rid of him.

Mark

 

[NCC-73515]

Speaking of which, I'm wondering if the last scene in 1x06 was ACTUALLY our first real glimpse of the USS Titan in any form of visual canon outside of the novel covers and occasional comic. In that scene, Fletcher was seen against a generic Starfleet-ish background, and he'd apparently been demoted back to Ensign by that point. For all we know, Riker could have dropped him off at the nearest Starbase just to be rid of him.
Mark

We saw the Titan's observation lounge in PIC, in the picture of Picard and their son, IIRC

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

Yes, but that was just a still picture of the conference room of the Enterprise-E.The timeline and Picard’s uniform were suspect but that could easily gave been the E-E, IMO.

Mark

 

[NCC-73515]

Yes, but that was just a still picture of the conference room of the Enterprise-E.The timeline and Picard’s uniform were suspect but that could easily gave been the E-E, IMO.

Mark

IIRC, it was said that that was on the Titan.

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

Not quite - in fact I'm not sure the Titan was at all mentioned by name in "Picard" at all.

Mark

 

[Timo]

Indeed, even Memory Alpha identifies the Titan lounge thing as backstage speculation.

FWIW, the ships we got in "Arcadia" are artistically pretty close to Sean Tourangeau's take on the Titan, that is, on what STO generally does with "25th century starships". It would not be unlikely at all for the "real" Titan to be as Sean imagined it, in in-universe terms, or in terms of artistic choices made by TPTB. But whether it would be plausible or practicable to use the ship from the novelverse legally-financially...

In any case, the Parliament class here is a nice stablemate to the Luna class, perhaps the fighter counterpart to the butterfly catcher.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mike McDevitt]

Commodores, I’ve just rewatched ‘Nepenthe’ and the baby pic of Thad with JL circa 2381 does not include any dialogue identifying the ship.