ST Picard - Starships and Technology Season One SPOILER Discusssion

The lack of markings on these shuttles still bothers me.
https://pic.star-trek.info/displayimage.php?album=6&pid=5621#top_display_media

 

Eh...they're industrial shuttles.

Plus the marking is probably right on the nose below the view ports

 

We have regs in all of our home countries about ID markings for boats and aircraft, right? Regs detailing exactly where on the hull/fuselage such ID markings should be visible?

 

Well, the captions definitely read as "tri-hy". As in "hydrogen". Probably referring to some substance rejoicing in a name beginning with "tri-hydrogen" and not ending there...?

 

Maybe it's where they all get shitfaced on tri-ox?

 

Apologies for the slight ramble. Been about 12 years since I was last on this site, but STP has given me new motivation.

New ship classes at Utopia Planitia I was bothered that the ships at Utopia Planitia were ALL new designs (the inverted Sovvie sauce with the two struts). I mean we're only 20-odd years after the last canon era and the lifetime of Galaxy, Sovereign, Akira spaceframes would be 80-120 years (per my trusty copy of the Technical Manual). I would expect to at least see a few of these classes in the background.

Utopia Planitia and Federation military industrial complex Okay so UP was destroyed when the 'synths' broke free. This would have been bad but not fatal. We know that the Federation has other shipyards (McKinley Station, Antares Shipyards, possibly others). Not exactly a cripping blow.

Synths if these are utilitarian work bees. Why bother assigning them a gender? Or even a humanoid form? Would have been cool to see the I, Robot take on them.

Other ship designs The shuttles, taxis and other background seem to be going for a future-industrial motif, rather than the clean-white utopia of TNG/DS9/VOY. I know STP is meant to be dystopia, but there would still be much of the sunk infrastructure and assets of the Roddenberry era.

 

Welcome, then! We're indeed living in interesting times, with PIC perhaps setting the bar high for the other upcoming additions to the franchise. And it's a good day to ramble.

Why, though? This isn't the Utopia Planitia dockyards building starships for Starfleet - this is a specific section churning out special ships for the evacuation of Romulus, supposedly. It would make little sense to build more than one model for that purpose.

As for "background", it's cool to see stuff there. Realistically, though, space is empty: if Mars had a million starships in orbit spread evenly, we'd be unlikely to see even one of them in the specific vicinity of this staging area. So we always have an excuse for not seeing anything up there. But TPTB always have an excuse for showing something anyway, and there's little reason for them not to use that...

But a convenient excuse to stop anything and everything having to do with the evacuation of Romulus. I mean, Starfleet probably would have had the required ships already, or could have Taken Up From Trade and moved a billion people in the couple of years involved. But that was always going to be a massive effort, detracting from other stuff even if not objectionable on the grounds of "they're Romulans, let them die" already.

It's possible that ships built for the evacuation would be useless afterwards, being too limited and specialized and/or having been built to break down after two flights. I mean, the latter sort of construction cheapskating is what kept WWII going - and miracle workers far surpassing Scotty is what kept some of the WWII vehicles and ships going past their early expiration date.

It's also a bit difficult to see without bias what Synth life on Mars really is like. On the surface, if you have workers you lock in the closet for the night, you're not being nice to them. But for all we know, an android might prefer it that way, not needing sleep for anything but OTOH valuing private time and contemplation.

As for Asimovian takes, robots sitting in a closet and contemplating is right out of the ominous That Thou Art Mindful Of Him...

Are these standard conditions at UP, or is the "working class" setting indicative of the rush job of getting the evacuation fleet done?

Well, Mars is red. And Earth remains squeaky-clean and white, with SF Headquarters portrayed consistently with most past takes and with the older cityscape free of any and all Blade Runner clutter. What we see of Utopia Planitia could well be the tip of a really big iceberg, with lots of nice stuff underground even if a few derricks and hangars are needed on the surface.

This is the second time ever in Trek that we actually get to see the flying cars of Earth, AFAIK. And (save for the skins) they are all identical, certainly bowing to a socialist-utopian rather than capitalist-commercial view of the future! I wonder when there are enough PIC assets that the artists can finally start to mix and match: all the shuttles at and above Mars were identical, all the flying cars were identical, all the DSC-style shuttles at Okinawa were identical, with not even these three appearing in mixed swarms or anything. Not every scene can enjoy the excuse applying to the UP fleet.

Timo Saloniemi

 

IIRC they showed Akiras under construction in Voyager..but yeah, at the time of the Synth attack the shipyard was 100% focused on the ships for the Romulan evacuation, presumably all other projects were put on hold or transferred to other shipyards at Bajor/Vulcan/etc

 

We didn't NECESSARILY see Akira-class starships under construction. For all we know they were there for repair or refit - there were Excelsiors in dock in the same shots. We DID see Galaxy-type saucers under construction, but that could mean a Galaxy-class ship, a Nebula, or one of several other known classes.

Here's my observations so far from 102:


- The episode opens with a very strangely arranged shot, panning away from Mars and almost immediately to the fleet of ferries - which are hovering belly-down over Mars. The way the shot panned away suggested that the fleet was oriented away from Mars in the first place, which it clearly was not.

- That we have dozens or even hundreds of apparently completed ferries just hovering over Mars begs the question: If they're completed, why aren't they already engaged in the evacuation mission? And if not, what's going to be installed next Tuesday to make them mission-worthy? While the Romulan evacuation plan probably built in a start date for the citizenry to actually start moving house, surely there could be logistical things that could be hauled about in the meantime.

- No spacedocks are visible here either, which isn't necessarily telling, but you'd think these things would be under construction in one per historical precedent. So are these ships in a holding orbit? Or some sort of storage like how ships were left hanging around at the Qualor II depot?

- This attack happens on April 5, First Contact Day. All those kids on Earth were in school at the time, and yet a younger Katey Janeway got the day off in her youth.

- There are synths walking around outside UP without any protective gear. Are they saying that the atmosphere is okay for everyone, or just them?

- Profanity aside, this is the second episode in a row where people say "dude". I guess stuff really does come back into style if you wait long enough.

- The food replicators in this room are actual, commercially-available 3D printers! But I do wonder what's wrong with the open-platform concept we see chez Picard last week. Are they worried about the Martian dust, which on average is significantly finer than the stuff on Earth? Is that why thy make the buildings red on the inside too, to hide the dust that surely gets everywhere on an industrial work site?

- I'm sure that more of this attach will be be revealed in forthcoming episodes, but I'm very curious about these apparent defence satelites. Would they be relatively new (installed after the Borg blasted through the Mars Defense Perimiter back in '67) or older (and simply wouldn't have been effective against the Borg anyway? I ask because they are leveraging solar panels of a sort, which hasn't been prevalent in TNG until now (and later, as we see on the Golden Gate Bridge).

- The two security guards who dive bravely into slaughter are wearing not only the uniforms appropriate for the period, but also with armor of a sort. This recalls the TOS movie era when security officers would wear chest plastrons when on duty. I'm assuming they would normally be wearing these and didn't suit up when the red lights went off; otherwise it'd be closer to the precedent of Starfleet soldiers wearing armor in DS9 (and ONLY DS9) from the previous era.

- Boston has enough sky traffic to have Coruscant-esque highways full of cars. Some things really don't change.

- Picard and Laris beam into Dahj's apartment, apparently on the DL. How'd they do this? Does Picard's place have a transporter terminal these days or nearby? Or does he have a site-to-site module like Tom Paris had in VOY "Non Sequitur"?

 

Ben Sisko also spoke of beaming into their living room, which "The Visitor" paints as fairly conventional and lacking in visible transporter terminals. No doubt homes have elegantly camouflaged systems, then. But are they true site-to-site, or are there hidden "arches" in the walls, similar to those in front of SF HQ?

Mars was going to be terraformed, and in ENT already it was possible to walk outside with just breathing gear, Babylon Five style. Perhaps the big fire that keeps on burning involves bountiful oxygen in the atmosphere, provided by a chemical or biological reaction that releases it from the soil constantly and at a relatively high rate?

I could see the UP workers doing one of the less endearing jobs in the facility, which is also why they have synths for colleagues (supposedly both because it's dull and simple and F-8 isn't exactly a conversationalist, and because it's hard work and F-8 has a better body than most humanoids). Red walls to hide the dust, substandard equipment and entertainment, the works. But then why does their workplace specifically provide this handy access to planetary defense shields? Or is such access available everywhere, but synths aren't employed elsewhere?

Regarding the fleet, we don't exactly see "warp-capable ferries". Perhaps this is a logistics yard instead, hauling materials in for the factories that churn out the actual ferries? "Children of Mars", too, would have us think that dockyards processing tug-type starships are relevant to the evacation effort. But that episode, too, leaves things well short of explicit...

Timo Saloniemi

 

Would also add:

When Picard walks into HQ, I bet the holograms of the Enterprise (D and original) are microtargeted based on his user profile (Janeway walks in, she gets an Intrepid-class). V similar to microtargetting of those holo-ads in Minority Report in 2002.

But why are they such terrible quality photonic projections rather than materialized matter?

 

...Perhaps they are produced in the exact style of the Lloyd's main lobby holograms of famed spaceships in the early 22nd century? A bit like a modern corporation doing its lobby murals in Bayeux tapestry or hieroglyph style, just with their products as the subject.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Every computer in TNG had no password and had full access to every system in the quadrant.

 

Yup. It just sort of eats into the logic of needing an inside tin-man at the very target of the attack. And why was F-8 shooting at all those colleagues of his? To stop them from reversing the shield-drop process? Makes little sense if thousands elsewhere could press the required buttons, too - F-8 would merely be wasting valuable keyboard time he should be spending blocking those remote commands instead.

Oh, well. Perhaps he had already locked the system and merely liked shooting at people.

Timo Saloniemi

 

I actually like the notion, but I do wonder under what criteria the Enterprise-D was selected in any case... Of the three ships he's known to have commanded (skipping over the Verity for now), this Enterprise was most likely his shortest command, considering that he'd been CO of the Enterprise-E for about seven years by end of Nemesis, and that he was likely in command for several more years before the Romulan supernova that resulted in his promotion. One could argue that his accomplishments while in charge were of a higher profile than those of his precursor and successor ships, but who gets to make that decision?

[Yes, the choice was made because a producer wanted to have that instant visual connection and he's more well-known to more fans as the Captain of the Enterprise-D, but I digress.]

As for the imperfect projections, also agreed. Picard was talking to a solid hologram just a day or two prior, and she seemed perfectly tangible except for when she appeared or vanished. A perfectly solid-looking model of any given ship should be possible. Perhaps people complained about walking in and having something THAT BIG look like it could legitimately drop on their heads?

Mark

 

Why would it change for Picard's user profile and not anyone else?

Was Admiral Chekhov the previous person to walk in?

 

Presumably it just rotates through the Federation flagships, and retroactively, the most renowned ships. I'm sure at some point Voyager gets lumped in there, but for story point purposes, it was simply the Enterprises.

 

If it was just a display of different Enterprises, then if we see it again, hopefully they will foreshadow the new Enterprise-F (assuming it’s a different design than the STO version and that they plan on actually showing the ship later in the show.) Maybe it will be a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment (although those are largely extinct thanks to the internet...)

 

Isn't Ent-F non-canon? If it is, then I hope they just keep it as a Sovereign-class vessel. Those spaceframes are built for 120 years!!

 

Technically it is non-canon, however the E-F and the entire Odyssey class kind of exists in a canon grey zone since I think CBS had at least some input on it