Starship design history in light of Discovery

Our surprise mass revelations of previously unseen ship designs do tend to happen near Earth - "BoBW" and ST:FC. One might assume these designs to be something not needed much in deep space, then, or something incapable of coping with said.

Then again, these ships have another thing in common: they pop up at times of "national distress", or specifically at times of impending war. Starfeet expected a fight at Wolf 359, near Earth but sorta coincidentally so. Starfleet may well have been amassing for the Dominion War near home base, too, right in time to give the Borg another warm reception. War would have brought the DS9 kitbashes out of the woodwork, too.

Would the summons at the Binaries have involved dedicated warships as well, perhaps? We never see carriers in action in peacetime, but Binaries supposedly features two types, Engle and Hoover. We don't see the oddball Nimitz class fight, but Admiral Anderson chose to fly his flag on the Europa, and perhaps the class name is suggestive already? The Cardenas might or might not be a battlewagon, but is in turn associated with Lorca. And the Gagarin was the last survivor of an ambush, while her Shepard classmate at the Binaries was one of those not known to have been lost.

Timo Saloniemi

 

To be fair, it's not obligatory that a warp nacelle be paired with a Bussard collector. It makes sense for a long-distance explorer-type ship to have self-refueling capability, but there may be Starfleet classes for which it's not a design priority. We've simply become accustomed since TNG that there's a common aesthetic to Starfleet nacelles: red glowing thing at the front, blue glowing stripes on the sides.

Now, even in TOS there was a commonality between the Enterprise and its shuttlecraft, but the show never established a function for the pinwheel-lit glowing domes; they were retroactively designated as Bussard collectors. For that matter, TOS was inconsistent if shuttles had warp capability, so maybe they had some other function, and it was simply a design goal for the shuttlecraft manufacturer to match the mothership.

 

semi-cross post from the star trek starships collection thread, but this scan of the booklet for the klingon beacon from the facebook fan group shows the starfleet tug from "brother":

looks like it's basically a malachowski-class primary hull with hoover class nacelles. oh also, the D7.

 

Also, look, the D7 isn't black.

 

I am liking the D7, shame its 2 years late, a battle between a fleet of them and the Starfleet ships we saw would have been brilliant in the Pilot.

 

What is that one SF ship? I don't recognize it and it has quite a different-looking warp engine that its peers to-date.

 

The bottom right one? pst said in his post. It is the tug seen in Season 2 Episode 1.

It's a Malachowski-Class kitbashed with Hoover-Class nacelles.

 

It's fugly.

 

Well, I can see why it was mistaken for a Ptolemy, designed like that. It's also an easy win for Eaglemoss, with using components that are a part of already-existing assets - no need for additional R&D investment. Much like how an actual series of ships would be built.

 

It's a tug. Ever seen a pretty tug?

 

Auxiliary bridges are hidden away. Main Bridges are on the top. It’s always been seen as a sort of culturally human/federation thing. (Bridges on naval vessels a lot of the time.) It’s supposed to look open and welcoming, but also project strength ‘our main bridge is up here...easy target huh? So we are either stupid or are able to defend it. Please feel free to check out the rest of the ship....’ I suppose you could argue it’s the safest place....nowhere near the bit that crashes first, and away from all the bits that explode best. Easy for maintenance too. Swap it out like a birthday cake candle.

 

In TOS it wouldn’t have mattered where the bridge was, in “Day of the Dove” a single phaser blast was shown to be capable of completely disintegrating a ship, it only gets problematic in the later series/movies when the weapons primarily poke holes in the hull.

 

Phasers in TOS seemed markedly more powerful than they'd be in the later series and films even though we know that can't be true. Say what we want for late 1960s television but producers knew how to make futuristic weapons look powerful and intimidating.

 

Given how much the bridge shakes no matter where the ship is shot perhaps no place on the ship is safe.

 

Then again, apart from Mudd's ship, this is the first one with a kitbash scale mismatch - the Hoover nacelles are "really" much bigger than the Malachowski ones. Not that it would "really" matter, as we don't see much on screen, but it might affect what Eaglemoss actually has on stock...

Well, "Day of the Dove" is a demolition shot: unshielded or otherwise already finished ships can be made to cease to exist with a single shot. Elsewhere in TOS, the Klingon battle cruiser is a tough opponent, never actually destroyed by Kirk (unless we count the originally unseen ship at the start of "Errand of Mercy").

I wonder if the DSC D7s aren't just waiting for their flashy House paint here...

Timo Saloniemi

 

As per usual, the tug they're showing is not the one we saw onscreen. While blurry, what we saw was a match for the Ptolemy class more or less. The pylons were longer and there was a clear bottom/center mount.

I would like to see other views of that ship though.

 

Sorry, I should have clarified better the previous post was for unshielded ships. In TOS shielded ships are pretty tough, once the shields are down they're toast.

 

I was referring more from an R&D POV. Yes, they would need to print new model masters, but in the CG world, scaling existing parts from prior models is easy. They could probably knock it out in a couple of hours.

 

Yes it is. We just never saw it at this angle in the show.
https://twitter.com/bencsrobinson/status/1194346079233425408?s=21

 

In the actual appearance, the pylons look longer and like they're aimed more straight down from the saucer.

Like I also said, I want to see the model from more angles, but it doesn't look right so far.