Starship design history in light of Discovery

Saturday May remember everything he learned, as he knew Pike's order for taking command of DSC and Morse code.

 

The way he read the line, it seemed like the number is what told him the Hiawatha was a medical frigate, but gave him no other useful information (or else he probably would've said, "NCC-dash-815... oh, the Hiawatha. A medical frigate"). If he'd memorized the number of every ship specifically, he'd have recalled more. Could be he recognized what remained of the hull shape, and combined that with the number to made an additional deduction. Like if you saw the front-half of the Saratoga, you might figure "Oh, 31900 block with a refit-Constitution saucer? Must be Miranda-class". So maybe all the NCC-81X ships of that class were converted to hospital ships, and the NCC-80X Hiawatha-types were troop carriers or bulk freighters or something.

 

They really missed an opportunity to make it NCC-0815. I'm very disappointed, as I know @The Wormhole is too.

 

Yep, I think something about the number (perhaps that it's only tree numbers and begins with an 8) indicates the basic function of this ship. Makes the most sense.

 

Or then it's pretty obvious from the general shape of the ship (and the color scheme) that this is a medical frigate - this part requires no eagle-eye action.

Saru is just stating that which can be stated without accessing the records or knowing by rote. He can see the number but not the name, and he can see the shape and indeed type of the vessel (it's distinct enough a shape, after all).

Timo Saloniemi

 

Longer yes, thinner? I'm not sure. They seem thicker to me, if you compare it to the D7 model used in the TOS movies. The nacelles on the DSC D7 also appear to be angled straight down instead of angled inwards.

 

I came so close while writing that post to making a joke about the NCC-081X ships being colony transports.

 

Another shot of that supposed Section 31 ship from Michelle Yeoh's instagram
https://i.imgur.com/3I0Hxff.png

 

If I were to guess, and considering John Eaves’ involvement in ship design, they probably dropped the conventional D-7 nacelles (Drell?) for His older D-4 engine design. Which I’m okay with, actually. It’s a good variant to the original, IMO.

 

I wonder if they did get him to work on this variant. In Season 1 he was solely working on Federation ships.

 

I like the D4 battle cruiser design. It's a real shame that ENT never used it onscreen because it was the perfect forerunner to the D7 and K't'inga classes of a century later.

It may well be the best Klingon vessel design that the franchise created for the entire prequel era.

 

An early D7 design means they can alter it as it goes forwards (which they do) as they still use them up to the Dominion War some 115 years later.

 

Well, they prototyped it in 2151. Sometimes teething troubles can be a real pain. And a century of refining can come to naught, so that they eventually revert to the original design anyway.

Cool. So she's actually potbellied? (The ship, I mean.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

Eh, even the people running Star Trek more or less ignore the D7 model in Enterprise as a FX error due to no time to get a proper ship ready (a proper ship that had enough windows....the D4 is a good design, and the later D5 is good as well and removed the need to reuse the D7 from Voyager again after its first and only appearance in Enterprise)

 

Yup. But Trek is made of its errors and omissions as much as it's made of auteur intent. No telling what silly little detail they might eventually return to...

What is that D-7'ish ship supposed to be about, anyway? A hologram displayed in the Klingon Council Pit purely for lobbying purposes? A mysterious sensor log debated by the Council Members for whether it really came from the future/the past?

Timo Saloniemi

 

Maybe it’s not Klingon at all, but Hur’q.

 

I kinda wish the ships in T'Kuvma's fleet had been Hur'q vessels or at least developed from Hur'q technology. It would explain the radical differences in design compared to the Klingon fleet seen in ENT and the ones we get to see in TOS and the later series and films.

 

I don’t think Fuller intended there to be an explanation. He just told the designers to ignore all the previous Klingon ships.

 

I've always felt like that could be the explanation for any/all Klingon ships. Sure, there can be Klingon engineers and designers, but the Hur'q had them under their thumbs for a long time, so at this point I'd say the ancient designs we saw in DSC would be the best candidates for Hur'q designs.

The BOP we first saw in STIII and TMP was rumored to be Romulan, or at least a product of the (also rumored) Klingon/Romulan alliance. We know the Romulans had the D7 class, so there's a precedent for cooperation there.

 

Yeah, but we know both the Klingons and Romulans operated their own respective birds of prey in the 22nd century which were similar to their ships of the next century, so I'd say that the name is just coincidence. Perhaps it's just the different words for "small covert raider" in both Klingonese and Rihannsu happen to be rendered in English best as "Bird of Prey"?