Starship design history in light of Discovery

...For SNW or for DSC S4?

In TOS, the hero ship sort of existed in a vacuum: all we ever saw was sister ships, and twin (twelvtuplet?) sister ships at that. The TAS art that seeped into TOS-R didn't much change the fact, because it was used to portray pseudo-civilian shipping rather than Starfleet.

Starfleet outside this could have looked exotic indeed. And, according to DSC, did. That is, in DSC it's diverse, apparently featuring designs from different eras and just with commonalized engines. I'm not sure I'd like sacrificing diversity for commonality in SNW. Especially as the very role of the hero ship is to stand out...

Timo Saloniemi

 

I'm sure they'll just continue to reuse the Disco S1 ships as guest Federation ships. If they're still there in the Picard era and post-Burn, they're gonna be there TOS era.

 

Those weren’t DSC season 1 ships that you saw. Those were 24th century and 31st century ships that coincidentally looked like mid-23rd century ships.

 

One of the people at the scrapyard said all the junk there was 'centuries old'.

None of those ships were intended to be 31st century.

 

But they sure as hell weren’t supposed to be mid-23rd.

 

I mean, the Enterprise was treated as a bit special, despite Kirk's obvious bias, in TOS, so I think having more diversity in ship design would be nice. That's why I liked Season 1 stylings is because it felt like a between era of the NX-01 lines and smoother lines of TOS. The Enterprise in DSC definitely felt unique in that regard.

 

The dialogue seemed to imply they were.

 

The dialogue did not give any specifics as to how old the ships were, just that they were old. The fact that neither Burnham nor Georgiou remarked that the ships were from their era implies that they weren’t supposed to be that old. They were just supposed to be generic wrecked ships. Indeed, the only thing Burnham says about the ships is that she’s seen many of these wrecked vessels because of the Burn, implying they were supposed to be only 130 years old. That’s a good enough descriptor of ‘ancient’ to me.

Plus the fact that there were only four types of wrecked ships on that planet (the Hiawatha type, the Hoover class, the Cardenas class and an unknown kitbash Reliant-looking ship) indicates that we’re not supposed to take those ships at face value. Why would this planet only have those four ship classes to salvage? If those ships were truly meant to be 900 years old, then there should have been far more variety. There should have been thousands of designs from almost a millennia of Starfleet history, not just three designs from a very specific point in time.

 

This doesn't sound likely at all.

The line about old ships would have been in the episode for a purpose. The story itself offers none: of course a scrapyard is going to have old ships. But the episode was written by people who'd know that "23rd century" assets would necessarily be used. So the quip about "old" is there specifically to lampshade the Hiawatha.

Indeed, the drama then bends a bit to the studio reality, and makes a point about the heroes not being completely out of their depth specifically because this scapyard does hold stuff from their own era. Both in- and out-universe, "old" functionally stands specifically for "as old as the heroes".

Nothing wrong with a narrow selection of ships, then. Sure, there might have been lots of classes between 2250 and now. But if and when the yard specializes in this particular range of old stuff (remember there's a specific technological era for ENT through PIC when it comes to construction materials!), this doesn't matter. And the Hiawatha type is just the Boeing 737 of the era, possibly built i greater numbers than all the other classes put together. It does appear to be a transport/utility type, after all, and quite possibly saw widespread civilian use.

Of course, we can interpret the lines 47 ways from Tuesday. But going against the clear intent is not worth the while in this case. Say, Burnham hasn't seen these specific shipwrecks: she speaks of the general galaxy-wide phenomenon. So having her words specifically apply to this particular shrapnel cloud doesn't help and isn't necessary, nor intended.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Except we never saw Hiawathas, Hoovers or Cardenases in TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY or the TOS and TNG films. So the chances those ships lasted longer than the DSC era is highly unlikely. It’s more likely that they were just meant to be generic wrecked ships.

 

Ah, but the idea is not that they would have lasted longer. They didn't - that's why they are scrap. That's how the scrapyard thing works: it has hardware that has not been active for ages.

A comparable yard elsewhere might specialize in TNG era ships. Again, it would not have 26th century vessels, because those cater for different clients with a taste for the new type of construction material introduced at that juncture, as per "People of Earth". But it need not have 23rd century ships, either, if the customer base doesn't crave duotronics.

Certainly it doesn't pay to assume that the ships in orbit would have been active till the day of the Burn. This is in fact ruled out: active ships would have disappeared in the Burn. Whatever wreckage is up there has been wreckage for several centuries, and at most a few clients added to it by having their active 31st century vessels blown to dust at the fateful hour. That is, those ships did not become wreckage but instead simply ceased to be, yet the act of going kaboom wrecked the poor scrapyard property even further...

Timo Saloniemi

 

They’re scrap because they were all damaged when the Burn happened, per the dialogue. So they were all active up until that point.

 

As said the Burn could never have done that. Burnham is merely talking about the fact that most planets have debris around them from Burn effects; nothing she says precludes the orbiting wreckage from having been orbiting inactive relics for the preceding centuries. Although of course there's little reason to think she would be incapable of error, considering she is just jumping into the situation...

Timo Saloniemi

 

Georgiou: Looks like a war zone.

Burnham: It was caused by the Burn. I've seen these ship graveyards all over.

Sounds pretty straightforward to me.

 

Yes, it describes what it's like "all over". Only this isn't all over, this is a scrapyard, with which Burnham clearly is unfamiliar, this being quite the plot point.

Nothing wrong with "it" having been caused by the Burn; not even Tolor would actually have his orbit filled with debris on purpose. But debris and wreckage are separate issues. And so are scrapyards and ship graveyards, considering Burnham knows the latter but doesn't know this thing at the focus of the ep.

It would be interesting to see a flashback to a Burn event up close for the sheer technicalities of it. Supposedly, it made warp cores blow; the infographic that transforms from a map to a montage of images shows the likely results, give or take a bit of artistic license. How does one then get these partially wrecked neo-Constitutions near Hima and Sahil's relay? Did that ship type have better core ejectors than others? Were those ships typically idled when not warping? Were they so old that they were not in active service? Did they run on something else besides dilithium?

The default assumption with wrecks would be that they were caused by other ships blowing up, but it's not the only option. And even that one makes one wonder why ships would be parked that proximally. Flying in proximity formation, yes. But idled proximally? Scrapyards are good for that. But what else would be?

Timo Saloniemi

 

How does Burnham saying that she’s seen these graveyards all over equate that she’s unfamiliar with them to you? That’s the exact opposite of her statement. She clearly knows how to act on the planet and how to deal with the Emerald Chain. So she obviously has lots of familiarity with places like this.

The intent is clearly that these ships were not originally wrecked, or previously in the hands of the Chain (if the Chain even existed before the Burn, which is very doubtful.) They might have been old, but they were still operational prior to the Burn. The intent is also clear that they were not meant to represent the 23rd century Hiawatha, Hoover and Cardenas classes, but generic 31st century ships that were damaged specifically because of the Burn.

I'm actually betting that we'll see some new 2260's-era Starfleet ship designs in SNW and very little recycling of DSC season 1 models. Even the Enterprise may look different from what we saw in DSC.

 

i hope they make it canon at some point(wishful thinking i know) cause it really look good

well if they do add more ships i hope they continue following the DSC style and not go back to the old one

 

And I’m hoping for the opposite.

 

Same. Start moving to the TOS designs so by the time Pike hands the keys to Kirk in the finale the Enterprise looks like it should.

 

I hope for both. The Enterprise should stand out.