That would be great to see. Whenever the Shepard class becomes available, I would love to see it with those nacelles.
Starship design history in light of Discovery
- Thread starter INACTIVEUSS Einstein
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Damn, dude! That's really good!I tried
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That would be great to see. Whenever the Shepard class becomes available, I would love to see it with those nacelles.
The Shepard-class is already the best-looking starship class in DSC next to the Enterprise. She'd only be better and an even prettier ship to look at with TOS-style nacelles.
I agree completely. The Shepard is my favorite Discovery ship. The Cardenas Class is growing on me though.
The Shran would be a better starship if she weren't so much like a flying saucer with integrated warp nacelles. I think we could look at her as an early forerunner of the Defiant-class starships of the TNG/DS9/VOY era, a compact and well-armed starship whose warp nacelles were fully integrated into the primary hull along with all other onboard systems, and she's not an ugly design at all. Just...weird for a Starfleet vessel, especially one of this era.
Perhaps she's an Andorian design adopted by Starfleet Command and that's why she's so radically different from other starships of her time period? A good ship, just unconventional by 23rd century standards.
Perhaps she's an Andorian design adopted by Starfleet Command and that's why she's so radically different from other starships of her time period? A good ship, just unconventional by 23rd century standards.
Yeah it's a wonder the crews of MaGee class ships don't have major health problems from the nacelles being inside the ship. On the other hand it does remind me a lot of the C57D from Forbidden Planet.
Like I said, the Magee-class could well be an Andorian design contribution to Starfleet. A one-off design that served during the DSC era but fell into disuse and was decommissioned not long after the timeframe of the new series. We've never seen any Andorian starships other than the ones depicted on ENT but that doesn't mean that Andorian spacecraft designers and tacticians couldn't have had a thing for a simplified saucer design where everything is incorporated into the primary hull.
Starfleet seems to have been in a very experimental period just prior to TOS, throwing mud around to see what sticks, in terms of bridge placement, nacelle number and configuration, hull shapes etc.
That makes a lot of sense in the context of a newly-formed Federation of different cultures, technologies and design principles seeking to work together to create the best of all worlds.
Although it is rather odd that the upstart new kids on the block from Earth seem to win the argument for ship design. Federation Starfleet ships clearly evolve from Earth Starfleet ships. Out go the Vulcan ring ships and compact Andorian battlestars, at least externally.
That makes a lot of sense in the context of a newly-formed Federation of different cultures, technologies and design principles seeking to work together to create the best of all worlds.
Although it is rather odd that the upstart new kids on the block from Earth seem to win the argument for ship design. Federation Starfleet ships clearly evolve from Earth Starfleet ships. Out go the Vulcan ring ships and compact Andorian battlestars, at least externally.
I attempted to explain that in my ENT novel Rise of the Federation: A Choice of Futures. My thinking is that the Vulcan and Andorian ship designs were more combat-oriented (long and narrow, presenting a smaller forward profile to an enemy) while the rounder Earth designs had a more efficient and versatile internal arrangement that was more suited to a science or multipurpose vessel. Also, the two outboard nacelles had a similar advantage of versatility over Vulcan ring engines or Andorian inboard engines. So once Starfleet decided it would be a multipurpose force devoted primarily to exploration, science, diplomacy, and colony support over military functions, that led them to favor Earth-style multipurpose designs over the Vulcan and Andorian designs that were more specialized for fighting. Although of course they did draw other aspects of the ships from other founder species -- e.g. deflectors and tractor beams came from the Vulcans and Andorians, as ENT showed.
It's easy to believe in a monotonous decreasing of variety in starship design, with TOS designs still exactly as diverse as the DSC ones, only lamentably unseen, and with the late 22nd century actually wilder than even a quarrelsome committee of John Eaveses could imagine.
It's equally possible that the DSC level of diversity remains in the TNG century, though. We did see oddballs in the background even before CGI debuted big time in the TNG movies. If anything, DSC gives us a steady stream of round saucers, while the other eras have a dearth of those.
Inboard engines don't seem like an alien design solution that would be on its way out - ships like Saber keep the warp engines tucked close in, even if the configuration of the Defiant looks odd even to our DS9 heroes initially. The Magee really is pretty traditional in the end, with two nacelles, a round saucer, a topside bridge, a ventral deflector, the works.
Indeed, as the above experiments show, a paint job and an engine swap do wonders here. Although I don't think TOS engines are a thing that should succeed the DSC boxes. To the contrary, the round-tipped cylinders could very well be antiques, relics of the ENT era that only remain in civilian service in the 2260s, along with the few surviving Constitutions and perhaps two or three other similarly ancient Starfleet designs.
I say, bring on more DSC ship mods with TMP nacelles to get a feel of how the 2260s really looked like, outside our narrow scope of TOSvision!
Timo Saloniemi
It's equally possible that the DSC level of diversity remains in the TNG century, though. We did see oddballs in the background even before CGI debuted big time in the TNG movies. If anything, DSC gives us a steady stream of round saucers, while the other eras have a dearth of those.
Inboard engines don't seem like an alien design solution that would be on its way out - ships like Saber keep the warp engines tucked close in, even if the configuration of the Defiant looks odd even to our DS9 heroes initially. The Magee really is pretty traditional in the end, with two nacelles, a round saucer, a topside bridge, a ventral deflector, the works.
Indeed, as the above experiments show, a paint job and an engine swap do wonders here. Although I don't think TOS engines are a thing that should succeed the DSC boxes. To the contrary, the round-tipped cylinders could very well be antiques, relics of the ENT era that only remain in civilian service in the 2260s, along with the few surviving Constitutions and perhaps two or three other similarly ancient Starfleet designs.
I say, bring on more DSC ship mods with TMP nacelles to get a feel of how the 2260s really looked like, outside our narrow scope of TOSvision!
Timo Saloniemi
I like it! But I had another head-canon theory (free to use
):It was called the Earth-Romulus war, NOT the Federation-Romulus war. Thus my theory is: The war was specifically between Earth und the Romulans (that is - Romulan drones pillaging in Earth space: No eye-to-eye contact with actual Romulans).
The Vulcans, Andorians and Tellarite all stayed officially "neutral", but they heavily supported Earth Starfleet with technology and ressources. Thus Earth-designed Starfleet ships were suddently the ones incorporating the most advanced technology from all later Federation-species, and because of the war, Earth was mass producing these ships on an assembly line.
After the war, there was suddenly a vast fleet of the most advanced ships, just laying around without any more purpose, free to use. Because of that, the other species started to integrate them into their own fleets, and slowly phased out their original designs for the newer, more advanced multi-species-technology equipped ones, and when the Federation started to pool their ressources for joint developments, they started their future developments from these designs.
^Clever, but I have issues with any explanation that's rooted in wartime decision-making. That was a paradox that I confronted when I started writing Rise of the Federation: How was it that a union forged in war ended up being so peace-oriented? That didn't seem like something that could be a straight line of cause and effect. If the foundations of the Federation and Starfleet we know were founded in war, then shouldn't it be a more warlike, aggressive entity? So that was the focus of the first book, A Choice of Futures -- how the nascent Federation and its Starfleet decided whether to stick to the more militaristic path or choose to prioritize exploration and diplomacy instead. Thus, the choice of the Federation Starfleet to use the basic design of Earth Starfleet vessels -- ships which were designed for peaceful and scientific purposes -- became a symbol of the choice to favor discovery over conflict.
I had no idea the Galactica was larger than the Enterprise-D. Or the original, for that matter. That doesn't feel right. So up-scaling is a good idea.
Could the DSC creative team be scaling up the ships because they're so small compared to other popular Sci-Fi series?
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Unless they plan on showing battlestars, star destroyers and Goa’uld ships in DSC, I don’t think that they’re worried about needing to scale their ships to those examples. I think it’s more that historically, Star Trek ships were “officially” scaled far smaller than what they realistically should have been scaled. The Excelsior especially should have been scaled much larger than its official size.
Why would you say that? The original Enterprise was comparable in size to an aircraft carrier -- there's a graphic to that effect in The Making of Star Trek. It was more than adequately huge. It's just that modern shows have gotten ridiculously excessive about ship size. So many franchises started featuring incredibly huge motherships that it got to the point where "incredibly huge" got devalued and started to be seen as the routine, expected size of a starship.
Your theory forgets about Coalition of Planets.
you say this in past tense. just last year the last jedi's first act alone introduced two increasingly super-mega-ultra-sized star destroyers (in addition to the pre-existing ones from the force awakens) with decreasingly dramatic effect.
the original enterprise was designed with a certain size/proportion in mind. every starship design since then has cribbed that proportion, but the recent trend of upscaling them while keeping that proportion has caused things to sort of look out of whack. i love the kelvin timeline enterprise, but the bridge structure on top of the ship will never make sense to me now that we know conclusively how large she really is.
I see both the U.N. and the EU (and partly NATO) as peaceful organizations, forged directly in result to a devastating war. Maybe I'm a bit biased there, but I thought the founding of the Federation as a peace-keeping entity, built around common goals like exploration, was a result of things going haywire without such an organization beforehand.
In this case: That majority of players in the Alpha quadrant ganged up together with a declaration of both 1) backing up each other and 2) never starting a war on their own, as a means to persuade any other, aggressive species not to attack any single one of these players. And yes, I see the focus on "exploration" and scienitifc discovery as the practical result of that: a common goal all these species could peacefully work together, which just by the way also keeps them on top scientifically and technologically, to strenghten the power of this non-aggression pact.