How often was the transporter a problem?
That seemed like a every other week thing on why the transporter couldn't be used.
That seemed like a every other week thing on why the transporter couldn't be used.
Starfleet Academy Starship Thread
- Thread starter Tuskin38
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How is this any different to 24th Century starships having shield frequencies/modulations or warp nacelles that could be blown off by weapons fire? Or Starships having a really obvious and targetable bridge?
Among all Star Trek fans, there is a small number that plays Star Trek Online. I used. Among those, there is a small number that goes deep and hard in remembering what all the ships look like.
This means, out of all the Star Trek fans watching the show, only a small number will go 'hey, that is 25th century ship from a game not everyone plays'.
Recourses are not unlimited for this show. If they have a fast way of adding ships to a scene, they'll do it. And any fan that thinks that is weird, google Star Trek Merchant ship.
STO is literally doing a big "STO Ships Are Canon Now" sale for those specific ships.Among all Star Trek fans, there is a small number that plays Star Trek Online. I used. Among those, there is a small number that goes deep and hard in remembering what all the ships look like.
This means, out of all the Star Trek fans watching the show, only a small number will go 'hey, that is 25th century ship from a game not everyone plays'.
Recourses are not unlimited for this show. If they have a fast way of adding ships to a scene, they'll do it. And any fan that thinks that is weird, google Star Trek Merchant ship.
Well, they are licensed. Any money they make on those expansion packs with the newly-canonized ships, a percentage gets kicked back up to Paramount. It's a win-win for both companies and, at the end of the day, it's all $$$ in the bank. The best thing for them was that no real additional expense was required, aside from maybe a fresh paint job on the skins to make them HD-ready. Damn near pure profit. Just like Eaglemoss/Fanhome repaints of existing ship models. Minimal cost, maximal revenue. Rinse and repeat...
Among all Star Trek fans, there is a small number that plays Star Trek Online. I used. Among those, there is a small number that goes deep and hard in remembering what all the ships look like.
This means, out of all the Star Trek fans watching the show, only a small number will go 'hey, that is 25th century ship from a game not everyone plays'.
Resources are not unlimited for this show. If they have a fast way of adding ships to a scene, they'll do it. And any fan that thinks that is weird, google Star Trek Merchant ship.
This. Only the most pedantic of Star Trek fans (i.e. me) cares about such esoteric things as starship design. To 99% of Trek fans, a ship is a ship.
It would have been great if STO existed back during the Dominion war arc of DS9. David Stipes could have used a bunch of different ship designs instead of the few Galaxies, Excelsiors, Mirandas and FC ships he was forced to use.
Absolutely! Sadly, it was a different time.
Although I still think many of those battle scenes looked damn good for what they had to work with. Was it a copy/paste furball? Sure, but IMO it looked an order of magnitude better than Riker's copy/paste fleet at the end of PIC S1.
Although I still think many of those battle scenes looked damn good for what they had to work with. Was it a copy/paste furball? Sure, but IMO it looked an order of magnitude better than Riker's copy/paste fleet at the end of PIC S1.
Can you imagine?? I mean, I am a starship nut but not THE BIGGEST one. I loved the battles scenes in DS9 but my God.... if we could have some of the STO designs in there. Some work quite well for the 24th century.
They work well for the 24th century because the majority of them are just 24th century designs with different skins. The Ross Class, Sutherland class etc are just malibu stacey with a new hat.
Seriously, where's my ship collecting set that can swap hats and accessories?
I call dibs on the sombrero!
Don't forget the special blue-vs-reddish-orange nacelle bussard intake variants.
Don't get me wrong, I very much appreciate all the hard work that the VFX department did with the little resources they had. Heck, due to the lack of studio models available for DS9, they had to use model kits and freaking Hallmark ornaments and Playmates toys for their ships! And yes, it all still looked better than PIC. Of course, I'm biased because I think motion control is far superior to CGI as far as the finished product is concerned. I get that CGI works better when you need hundreds of ships in a shot, but models just look more realistic than CGI.
It gets into the broader problem that a mediocre battle with a few ships is always more fondly remembered than a well written battle with a thousand ships. Babylon 5 is a great example of this. The battles of the Human Civil War arc have far more depth and consequence because it's like 6 loyalist ships versus your rebels. It's why Rogue One is the best Star Wars space battle we've had since 1983 (well, excepting maybe some of the video games).
PIC's problem isn't that it used STO designs. PIC's problem is that it couldn't choose one visual continuity and stick with it. You had Eaves' post-DS9 concept for Season 1, Season 2 inserted this Neo-TMP aesthetic on top of Eaves' post-DS9 vision with the Sagan but then mixed in early 25th century material from multiple different art styles and design directions in STO (Gagarin, Sutherland, Reliant), and Season 3 worsened this mix (Edison, Alita, Duderstadt, NeoConnie, etc. etc.). And then you had the First Contact design language on top of that still there.
TNG didn't really have this issue, the DS9/First Contact ships are mostly a transitional blend that works well with the Galaxy, Nebula, and the more-contemporary-looking-W359 ships. Really it's only with the Intrepid, and really the Nova and Sovereign, that you get the introduction of a third design language into the series. The second is obviously the Miranda/Constellation/Excelsior (TMP design language) still hanging around (also that one destroyed Connie at W359 but at least we can write that off as a training ship). The Ambassador and the older-looking-W359 designs blend features enough that I don't know if I'd consider them a fourth design language.
If it was up to me, I would have explicitly stuck with Eaves' material. The finalized concept for the Sagan-class with the post-Sovereign nacelles, Krause's post-Sovereign concept for the Duderstadt, etc. and the refined Inquiry form a much more unified vision for the 2390s/turn of 2400. You could still pull the Jupiter-class, Chimera-class, and Ross-class from STO for that as well, which all mesh into that post-Sovereign aesthetic. I would have also eventually still brought in the Odyssey as the new era in 2402, since that design is absolutely incredible, but this would have communicated evolution and transition to the audience in a way the disjointed use of six different design languages (First Contact/Sovereign, NeoTMP, Post-Sovereign, Odyssey/basegame STO, Neo-TNG (Sutherland), Neo-DIS/2020s STO) in PIC S1-3 doesn't at all.
Not necessarily. My issue with the Ross and Sutherland isn't really design but the fact that if any ship was going to be the new Excelsior for the next 100 years, it wasn't the Galaxy or Sovereign, but the Nebula.
That being said, some of them are fairly solid. The problem is their unique 24th century designs like the various base-game Escorts, Engineering Cruisers, etc. still are waiting on remasters. The Jupiter-class got one but it's more a late 2370s-2380s design language, so wouldn't fit in with TNG or DS9. The Shi'Kahr is a phenomenal 24th century Miranda-class take but it's built off an existing ship style like the Ross you mention above (same with the Vesper, which is a pre-Ambassador Connie replacement).
Although on that note I always found it weird that DS9 forgot about the Ambassador. You'd really think of all the ships they'd be reactivating and/or extending the lives of for the war, they'd prioritize newer designs over older stuff. I know they wanted to recreate a few of the W359 models for the opening of Emissary but the time and budget didn't pan out (hence why we have two equally canon Melbournes...)
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The Inquiry class cut-and-paste fleet was a design Eaves had originally made as a variant of the Intrepid class for some defunct video game pre-STO. And while it worked somewhat for a 2399-era ship, it was annoying to have it literally be the only ship they had, multiplied by a hundred.
As for the S2/3 ships: I thought the Sagan was just fine. As a matter of fact, I thought it was the best design that show had. But with that said, I did not like the choices that were made for the other STO ships, and I really didn't like the choices that were made for the Titan-A.
I think all of those design languages (and I agree with you as to how those languages are interpreted) work in the context of their chronological build times.
Honestly, other than the Excelsior II (which I personally don't like either design-wise or registry-wise), we were not going to get new original designs for the various background ships in S2 & 3. But I judge that there were more logical STO designs they could have used instead of what they went with. Designs that made more sense post-2380's-design-language-wise, and not ships that were just new skins of DSC and TNG ships.
As far as Eaves is concerned, I like the guy and think that back in the Berman days he came up with some good stuff, like the Sovereign class, the Jem'Hadar ships, etc. But he doesn't seem to understand design lineages when it comes to designing ships from other time periods. His work all tends to be similar and derivative no matter what era he's supposed to be designing for. And because he reuses old designs that were never really meant to represent what he's using them for, the Trek ship design languages you discussed above are now somewhat skewed.
DS9 didn't 'forget' about the Ambassador. The studio model had been damaged after its use in Emissary and was crated up, so they did not have access to it when they were scanning the other studio models into CGI like the Enterprise-D, the Reliant, and Greg Jein's Excelsior models. If they had access to the model, we would have seen a CGI version in the Dominion war fleets.
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It was its own class, not an intrepid variant.
The game was also Star Trek Online, but by a different Dev (Perpetual Entertainment) that failed to meet deadlines, so CBS passed the project onto cryptic.
The Avenger class in Cryptic’s STO was loosely based off it. In fact when they brought the Inquiry to STO, they also made it a skin for the Avenger.
I really love this Bird of Prey (mix between the DISCO bird of prey, but using "classic" BoP elements).
Looks very futuristic & alien, but still "Klingon".
There were two Ambassador class models, with one being kept in storage and the other being damaged during its time when it was being put on display.
Budget constraints were a major problem in TNG's seventh season, for if they hadn't existed, we might have had new models for both the Raman and the Pegasus.
Budget constraints were a major problem in TNG's seventh season, for if they hadn't existed, we might have had new models for both the Raman and the Pegasus.
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