Spoilers ST Lower Decks - Starships and Technology Season Two Discussion

[DEWLine]

Not sure that's an intermix chamber. Might be a turbolift pathway. Depends on what parts of the ship the person using the display wants to pay attention to, right?

 

[David cgc]

The season two trailer has a first: A canon cutaway of the classic movie Enterprise, from the Wrath of Khan holodeck simulation. With a weird intermix chamber in a totally different arrangement from decades of lore:

I'm sure I've seen a zig-zag warp core like that before from someone scooching back engineering to account for the corridor extending out in front, but I'm having trouble tracking it down.

Also looks a little squished. I certainly hope no one is thinking about retconning the TMP ship to match the proportions of the DSC version.

 

[Ronald Held]

The season two trailer has a first: A canon cutaway of the classic movie Enterprise, from the Wrath of Khan holodeck simulation. With a weird intermix chamber in a totally different arrangement from decades of lore:

The holodeck had an imperfect 1701 diagram?

 

[fireproof78]

Experimental engine core design?

 

[Tuskin38]

Pretty sure that's a turbolift (it looks the same as the ones on the Vancouver and Cerritos MSDs), and the warpcore is next to it.

 

[Tuskin38]

Also looks a little squished. I certainly hope no one is thinking about retconning the TMP ship to match the proportions of the DSC version.

Daniel angle corrected the diagram, it originally looked like this, which might account for some of the distortion.

But I also think the image in the episode is squished (or stretched) itself, because look at the circles on the corners of the boxes.

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

We see an interesting version of Boimler on the bridge of a Galaxy Class starship. Needless to say, I think we’ll be seeing a Galaxy-class ship in some way this season… Whether it’s THE Enterprise-D or not is unclear of course, but my guess is that it’s a fantasy of some kind, so they’re leaving the ultimate reveal of an E-D cameo a surprise. In any case, I highly doubt it’ll be some other class of starship, given how much time they’d have put into creating a fairly accurate recreation.

Mark

 

[Mike McDevitt]

What a fun premiere! Lots of tech easter eggs and tidbits. As usual, we'll try to stick to the TECH of the episode and not just point out easter eggs, even thought they do tend to be intertwined. :P

- The workout / therapy session at the top of the episode gets a big pass because it's a holodeck sim, but wouldn't it be awesome if it were actually based on something real? Mariner has shown she has a knack for quickly repurposing existing programs, so maybe she swiped a mission report from something that happened in the Dominion War to use.

- Almost all the tech and ships seen in the sequence match the late DS9 era, except I guess the Cardassian uniforms, which are a bit more liberal an adaptation of the live action versions to be real.

- Ships seen include:

- Miranda-class USS Macduff
- Hideki-class Cardassian scout/fighter/whatever
- Jem'Hadar attack ship
- Maquis ship / Starfleet fighter
- Bajoran ship from later DS9
- ENT-era Klingon D5
- Klingon Bird of Prey without its neck or forward pod
- Some form of Romulan ship that looks a lot like a FASA design or two
- Danube-class runabout (with dorsal pod!)
- LOTS of Delta Flyers!

There's also a curious wedge-shaped ship, a ring-shaped design with three outboard pods, and possibly one or two others.

- Compared to the relatively lazy copy-paste job we had in the finale fleet of "Picard", this was a great piece of work, though I completely acknowledge the very different circumstances from the other show. Still, one of the D5 instances is curiously also missing its forward pod, and ALL of the Maquis / Starfleet fighters I saw seems to have a crumpled portside wing.

- The Macduff's bridge is basically identical to the configuration seen on the USS Reliant from TWOK (but not the Saratoga from TVH). The NCC reg also lines up with a ship of that era. Her phasers however have the TNG style visual and sound effects, but they correctly are seen being fired one from each ball turret. COULD this be representative of a Dominion War era ship?

- The newly-repaired Cerritos has gained a new bank of escape pods on her upper aft saucer as well as atop the bridge deck, which are the more recent hexagonal shaped hatches. They strangely don't match the existing square shaped hatches she already has. The whole mismatch is actually quite apt for the show - but to be fair they could also be something completely different.

- At the end of the previous season, while under repair we saw that both the bridge AND ventral centre sections were popped out. The ventral section has now gained a new, more prominent bulge whereas before it was less featured. Perhaps this is where the torpedoes now fire from? Or maybe she now HAS a torpedo launcher?

- The saucer rim shuttlebays now glow blue even when closed. However, the maybe-shuttlebay on the secondary hull isn't glowing.

- Other lighting changes abound, one of which brings out the alternating green and red lights along the saucer rim. This is actually uncool for me, because on modern day aircraft those are used to distinguish direction of travel at night (portside running light is red, starboard is green). Starfleet in general doesn't do this, but it's still jarring to anyone who knows what the lights are meant to be used for. Still, this season some of these lights are always on, while others now blink, at least in the opening credits.

- We actually see the (implied) window of the Lower Deckers' hallway quarters from the outside, firmly establishing where it is between the impulse drives.

- The big module we saw the crew unloading stuff from in "Second Contact" is back, again being used as a container for stuff being delivered to a newly-contacted species. We also see the subspace antenna thingy and shuttles, making this seem like a fairly standard operation. Maybe the Cerritos is carrying a bunch of these pre-packed modules with all the gadgets and trinkets to be left on the planet of the week?

- The assorted numbers on the "Unclaimed Subspace Channel Directory" list are random grouping of numbers and groups of numbers. There's no apparent standard here. What's keeping Randall Park's character from just making one of his own or adding a number to one he does like?

- The Cerritos is established as NOT being a "capital ship", which may be the first time the term has been used in Star Trek. Today we generally call carriers, battleships and nuclear missile subs "capital ships" as they are any navy's "most important", but destroyers, frigates cruisers and other ships for lesser combat or support roles are not. In Trek extended fandom a capital ship is often used to describe many of those ship types as well, so it'd be interesting to discuss the implication here.

- The gang has retrieved the venerable shuttle Sequoia from last year! There are no nacelles again, and this time they seem to not have any stacked up against the bulkheads like last year; but someone seems to be actively working on it. The reapair bay looks a little different here, and seems to have gained both the "lights moving back and forth" prop from Trek and a million other things, and a version of the "bendy straw" lighting fixtures from Discovery.

- There are no fewer than three new medical carrying devices this week.

- I think the Cerritos gets into her first battle in earnest with this episode. She was shown firing all of one time last year, no? Here she fires multiple times at the Big Giant Head, and has torpedoes to fire. Now to confirm where those come from!

- This is the second battle in a row that Riker orders the Titan to red alert AFTER the shooting starts. Perhaps both battles were unexpected combat situations, but one could argue that his version of shipboard yellow alert keep his ride mostly combat ready, I guess?

Mark

Did the Admiral actually say “capitol” ship though? Like the British slang for excellent, very cool?

 

[F. King Daniel]

I'm sure I've seen a zig-zag warp core like that before from someone scooching back engineering to account for the corridor extending out in front, but I'm having trouble tracking it down.

Also looks a little squished. I certainly hope no one is thinking about retconning the TMP ship to match the proportions of the DSC version.

This fan made Phase II cutaway, perhaps? It's the only other time I've seen the intermix shaft be anything other than one horizontal and one vertical. But the shape is entirely different.

Pretty sure that's a turbolift (it looks the same as the ones on the Vancouver and Cerritos MSDs), and the warpcore is next to it.

I suspect it's meant to be the intermix chamber, and they've fudged to try and keep to the old Star Trek Encyclopaedia's idea that engineering is deck 19 while also taking into account the corridor in front of engineering, which absolutely does not fit in the intended position and scale. But I guess we shall see.

It could even be a random placeholder plucked from google, hence the NX-01 graphics, but I doubt it (at least, I couldn't find it on a quick scan)

 

[Boris Skrbic]

The callbacks to TAS animation style would seem to support the notion of DSC/SNW simply having their own “art style” that need not be referenced by other productions. You could imagine a live-action series largely ignoring what had been established for ships on DSC.

 

[Henoch]

Is that an intermix chamber? There would seem to be a TNG style straight vertical warp core suitably aft of the Probert-intended "vertical intermix shaft" location, slightly forward of the lower vertical part of that highlighted whatnot... Or then no amount of squinting will do any good here.

Timo Saloniemi

I suspect it's meant to be the intermix chamber, and they've fudged to try and keep to the old Star Trek Encyclopaedia's idea that engineering is deck 19 while also taking into account the corridor in front of engineering, which absolutely does not fit in the intended position and scale. But I guess we shall see.

It looks like "they" wanted to fit the foreword 70' corridor going from Engineering. Maybe they have been reading our TrekBBS threads on the topic...

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

Cribbing this official (?) Paramount promo poster of the USS Titan and crew:

- The original Titan novels were noted for the ship having the most diverse crew in the fleet (despite having two humans and a half-human in the three center seats). Here, Riker is flanked by a new non-Saurian XO at full commander rank and another new species as a relief counselor (if Deanna's on mat leave or one of her frequent early TNG trips to Betazed, or simply had that shift off when they came under attack) and of Lieutenant rank. The other two new characters are a Lt .Cmdr seen at a side station in the first episode (perhaps the Engineer?) and the unshaven Lieutenant at Tactical. The two speaking characters from last season are not seen in the premiere.

- In the first episode we had Boimler at the traditional Conn station on the Enterprise, but here he's doing more Ops-ey stuff while the Ensign at the matching station seems to be driving. Having two redshirts up front is not unusual (Worf was at frequently at Ops in TNG S1), and Boimler is supposedly still on the Command track, so it should be okay for him to be swapping around at this point in his career. Although, at the end of LDS S1 he was reporting more Conn-ish stuff, so...

- The Titan herself looks like the same model as last year, but somewhat less glowey. The lighting could be obscuring the windows on the secondary hull, which is a little to jarring to see to bare. [Edit: the show model doesn't HAVE traditional windows on the secondary hull after all, as confirmed from in-show footage of the premiere and finale. Even the novel cover art only shows a few of them total.]

- And hey! They're confirming that the Titan is in fact a Luna-class ship!

Mark

 

[Boris Skrbic]

It looks way too much like an Akira in practice, which isn’t OK just because the NX does also (from certain angles). The Titan should’ve been a more traditional design: clearly Starfleet, but hard as you try you can’t really pinpoint a specific inspiration.

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

Perhaps, but IMO the Titan is the latest in a long line of "let's flip the nacelles upside down to make the same thing look different" ship designs, going back to the Miranda class. The Reliant's production sketches show that she was originally meant to have the nacelles up top, but they flipped them to make it LESS like the Enterprise. Here, if you simply angled the Titan's pylons up and ditched the pod, you'd have something far more Sovereign in appearance than Akira in my view.

Mark

 

[Boris Skrbic]

The Miranda isn’t the best example since production illustrators had largely abandoned FJ’s modular approach whenever the budget wasn’t an overriding concern (which it never is for fan designs). You’d doodle, sketch and modify endlessly and eventually come up with new shapes that would then be physically built or CG-modelled from scratch. If you can look at what is supposed to be a moderately prominent design and think “Akira-class with hints of Sovereign-class”, it feels wrong for 2380.

 

[Markonian]

Imho, the Sean Tourangeau's Luna--class Titan is a beautiful design.
I'm hoping that Captain Ezri Dax and the Vesta-class USS Aventine also receive canonization at some point.

That could prompt Eaglemoss to bring out both ships in XL format.

 

[Boris Skrbic]

I hope they hire Rick Sternbach eventually.

 

[valkyrie013]

For the constitution class image. Could be a refit if some sort that gave it a different engine. Maybe in aircraft terms the Enterprise was a block 20 and the image is of a block 50 ship.

Or the msd is wrong like every other ship in this series..

 

[David cgc]

This fan made Phase II cutaway, perhaps? It's the only other time I've seen the intermix shaft be anything other than one horizontal and one vertical. But the shape is entirely different.

That's not the one I'm thinking of, but it might've been a basis for the show graphic, judging by the less-pointy back-end of the warp nacelle and the prominant cut out of the top rear of the nacelle pylon on both.

 

[Tuskin38]

side by sides of the old and new model, and wow (just mute the audio idk)