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ST Strange New Worlds - Starships and Technology Season Four Discussion

It has long been speculated that the little black dot in the center of the impulse deck between the engine outlets on the TOS model was an aft-facing torpedo tube. Never confirmed by the model builders, to my knowledge.
According to Doug Drexler, the aft torpedoes fired by the Defiant in ENT Season 4 were meant to come from that hole, but the idea got lost in communication somewhere from outline to final FX.

Man that is hard to visually pick out.
Not really.
 
Yeah I think I remember that back in the day. It always made good tactical sense (to me, anyway) that all ships should have aft-firing torpedoes, particularly in an emergency evacuation situation.
 
It seems these were hung up in the art department.
'As Seen in Discovery S02'
Must be a pre-production diagram, considering none of the new SNW characters are listed there.

Though it does have the new saucer windows added in SNW, at least on the side view, they're missing on the top view, and it still has the larger DSC bridge window.
 
ethh3ym9qeec1.png
 
Something interesting, the Shuttle set blueprints show a small transporter pad in the back behind a door, but I don't believe we've ever seen that, might be something they cut.

Trying to find the image now, but I can't.

look all predatory
I don't see that at all.


and huge for no reason...
Nothing is ever done for 'no reason'.

Plus the TOS shuttle itself was too small for the interior set. Size is never a constant in Star Trek.
 
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the interior set being the way it is due to the limitations of filming tv in the 60s. much like having one short curving corridor segment as a stand in for a multitude of locations where the corridors would have different angles of curve or even be straight, etc.

Nothing is ever done for 'no reason'.

upsizing the Enterprise with the alleged intention being to "fix" some of these discrepancies is certainly a reason, yes. but somewhat undermined when you upsize the other things, past even where they'd match.


I don't see that at all.
this one's just all on my sense of aesthetics, i guess. sharpening all the corners, raising the side angels, wedging it out more... i do see what BJ says about it being more insectoid, even SG1 replicatorlike

replicators-and-stargates-v0-vb5jyjo8lurd1.jpeg


Size is never a constant in Star Trek.
poor BoPs....
 
Something interesting, the Shuttle set blueprints show a small transporter pad in the back behind a door, but I don't believe we've ever seen that, might be something they cut.

Trying to find the image now, but I can’t.
That would be intriguing. I’ve never seen a shuttle with a transporter outside of the TNG eras and beyond, like the Type 7 shuttle, which had one in the middle of the main section, or a runabout, which also had a transporter pad. I don’t know of a picture, sadly, yet at least. :(
Size is never a constant in Star Trek.
That’s hugely true. Ships like the Birds-of-Prey and even background ships in DS9 are the main “offenders”.
 
That would be intriguing. I’ve never seen a shuttle with a transporter outside of the TNG eras and beyond, like the Type 7 shuttle, which had one in the middle of the main section, or a runabout, which also had a transporter pad. I don’t know of a picture, sadly, yet at least. :(
The DSC shuttle had a transporter, but no visible pad.
 
Or to put it another way, how many instances in 79 episodes of TOS and six movies could a problem have been solved by having a transporter in a shuttle?

(As it stands, there are already umpteen episodes in the TNG era when the ship or station or whatever is fully depowered, but NO ONE thinks to go down to the shuttlebay to use the "emergency escape transporter" to fix things.)
 
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I think this ship firing on the Enterprise is an updated/beef'd Orion interceptor from Enterprise

Hook beak nose, curved wings, and the engine layout is identical. I think the wing tips might even be red like in ENT

image.png


For Comparison
image.png

image.png
 
It begins! Ten more episodes of tech to savor, and it starts with an interesting one!

4x01 Valles Marineris

- I'm pretty sure the shuttle is the same as always for the series, but this may be the first time we've seen the side door and ramp deploy. It's akin to the (much smaller) TOS shuttle, which also has a step deploy from the nacelle, but here it's more complex, with a small bridge deploying from the side of the shuttle and multiple steps down from the nacelle. The steps seem to take a lot of internal space in the nacelle too, which makes me wonder how much of the nosecap is for show. The whole thing looks to be a little redundant anyway; why not have the bridge permanently deployed and help support the nacelle?

- The opening sequence has evolved yet again. Notably, the scene around Starbase One is significantly less busy.

- The phasers have officially been retrofitted with a disintegrate setting, which has been done without changing the physical props they use. I'm pretty sure this is consistent with ENT (whose phase pistols had only "Stun" and "kill" and early DSC. Could this be more of a software update then hardware? As it stands SNW already introduced the lowest "sting" setting in its first season.

- Subspace sensors emphatically have no problem imaging the sides of planets facing away from the ship. And even the pre-warp, ancient Martians have no issue with this - but they also had funky tractor tendrils and other stuff to worry about.

- The SNW Enterprise primary antimatter fuel cell is portable, phaseable, and theaft-able. They had "secondary" cells they could hook up, but perhaps the Enterprise was only carrying what they needed for the mission? Most other versions of Trek suggest their primary antimatter supply takes up a lot more space than a Gatorade cooler on its side.

- Spock goes on about how much energy they'd need to get back home, and then it turns out to be their own antimatter supply causing it. Are we saying that Sol V exploding somehow added to the energy requirement? Otherwise, the math suggests that the antimatter pod alone contained the energy needed, if not the delivery system.

- Late in the episode, some of the bridge displays (notably their equivalent of an MSD, the big three-quarter schematic of the Enterprise on the aft station) are shown to be monochromatic instead of their usual golden hue, while others are normal. They switch back to normal in different shots, which suggest a production error, but i kinda like the look.

Mark
 
I know we saw phasers disintegrate someone in DSC season 1, in the time-loop episode, but maybe it was a difference of degree, and now they could vaporize large objects. I’m pretty sure the TOS style beam was new, they’d always fired bolts before. I also noticed some layers of the Cage version of the transporter sound effect at the beginning of the episode when they beamed up, which I never caught before.

The gray displays were while the ship was disabled. When they restored power and things began coming back online, they faded back to their normal gold color.
 
- I'm pretty sure the shuttle is the same as always for the series, but this may be the first time we've seen the side door and ramp deploy. It's akin to the (much smaller) TOS shuttle, which also has a step deploy from the nacelle, but here it's more complex, with a small bridge deploying from the side of the shuttle and multiple steps down from the nacelle. The steps seem to take a lot of internal space in the nacelle too, which makes me wonder how much of the nosecap is for show. The whole thing looks to be a little redundant anyway; why not have the bridge permanently deployed and help support the nacelle?
Future shuttles have that as a common design where the Nacelles are fully connected to the body and don't seem to have tiny pylons anymore.
So this design might have been common before that general change in Shuttle design.

Similar to how Hydro-Foil ships were pretty common back in the day, but now nobody seems to operate them anymore despite the performance advantages.

- The opening sequence has evolved yet again. Notably, the scene around Starbase One is significantly less busy.

- The phasers have officially been retrofitted with a disintegrate setting, which has been done without changing the physical props they use. I'm pretty sure this is consistent with ENT (whose phase pistols had only "Stun" and "kill" and early DSC. Could this be more of a software update then hardware? As it stands SNW already introduced the lowest "sting" setting in its first season.
Probably a bit of both. The physical prop doesn't need to change. Just a minor change in settings and you're good to go.

- Subspace sensors emphatically have no problem imaging the sides of planets facing away from the ship. And even the pre-warp, ancient Martians have no issue with this - but they also had funky tractor tendrils and other stuff to worry about.
They also phase through walls without issues and don't use airlocks for some reason.

- The SNW Enterprise primary antimatter fuel cell is portable, phaseable, and theaft-able. They had "secondary" cells they could hook up, but perhaps the Enterprise was only carrying what they needed for the mission? Most other versions of Trek suggest their primary antimatter supply takes up a lot more space than a Gatorade cooler on its side.
Maybe because of this "Anti-Matter Theft" incident, Starfleet decided not to pack this much Anti-Matter into one large "Gatorade Cooler" sized container moving forwards?
It's way too easy to steal if you have 2 reasonably strong people to carry it away.
Keeping many seperate smaller Anti-Matter Containers spread around the vessel makes it harder to steal that much Anti-Matter.

- Spock goes on about how much energy they'd need to get back home, and then it turns out to be their own antimatter supply causing it. Are we saying that Sol V exploding somehow added to the energy requirement? Otherwise, the math suggests that the antimatter pod alone contained the energy needed, if not the delivery system.
Exploding Sol V seems to be create enough energy to go home.
Not sure how much energy you can siphon off a exploding M-class planet, but the numbers should be significant.
 
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