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Starship design history in light of Discovery

Not necessarily. Sometimes navies build big ships in anticipation of upgrades, ending up with something that's way too big for its initial mission, and perhaps remains so when the upgrades never materialize. Others may disbelieve in "main mission" since they can't afford to build three different ships for three different jobs, and the end result may be larger than smaller than any given mission would suggest. Both might hold true for Starfleet, which tries to live up to the challenges of the unknown, and cannot afford to deploy three different ships to deal with that unknown even if building three might be affordable.

Also, the hero ship of TOS is capable of varying her crew count by 100% between adventures. Is she sized for one of these counts, or the other, or neither? More probably, the answer is a futuristic "for both", and one and the same hull can do every conceivable job, and needs to.

The hero ship of DSC in turn might be a conversion, considering her weird innards and a couple of other cues. Perhaps not quite ideally sized or shaped for the flying lab task, but quickly available for it in wartime, which counts for more.

Timo Saloniemi
 
Starship design history in light of Discovery (and Picard) appears to be such that it overwrites everything on the exterior through 2270 or so and in the interior through 2295 or thereabouts, which is when we continue more or less as established.
 
Dunno about exterior: we saw no exteriors that would detract from DSC until we got to the early 2270s, since the only exterior we saw in TOS was the hero ship, which is essentially the same in DSC.

Interior, largely ditto. And PIC is a pure nostalgia trip, so it's likely to keep the bridge of the Stargazer as is (a few burns and bruises notwithstanding), thus basically extending the sameness to every other interior out there since it's part of the TOS movie continuum. But we'll see. Or then not see, since it's far from said that we will actually revisit the Stargazer bridge even if and when we revisit the era.

Timo Saloniemi
 
Timo said:
since the only exterior we saw in TOS was the hero ship, which is essentially the same in DSC.
Click to expand...

It’s designed to be 50% longer and not an exact extrapolation from the eleven-footer, hence the notion of overwrite to follow Discovery’s length, but since the Stargazer’s components come from the TMP redesign, I’m estimating the year reimagining ends and restoration begins as 2270, the end of Kirk’s five-year mission.

After that they’d start paying attention to how the Stargazer is built, though a secondary option is to ignore the origin of Stargazer components and designate the Excelsior the first externally unchanged design, especially since it would help a bit with the traditional Enterprise lineup (moving from about 450 to 467 meters).

Timo said:
Interior, largely ditto.
Click to expand...

TOS doesn’t have proper animation and neither does TMP, which also adds the extremely well-documented physical buttons, so I’d imagine the interior (or at least the consoles) would continue to be updated until after GEN and the Jenolan (hence 2295 or so), which fall into the latter Okuda era that includes animation only hinted at in productions set in earlier decades.
 
Huh I just noticed another change between the Season 1 and Season 2 (and 3) Discovery model. They changed the area above the shuttle bay where they have the ship's name. There used to be windows there, but in Season 2 and 3, they're gone

Season 1:
Anovos model first rest are from the show
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fnRGjXw.png


Season 2/3
b68JVZl.png

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Windows, but with the lights off. And perhaps shutters on, as with Lorca's menagerie in all shots but the one.

Which was an epic fail on so many levels: showing a corridor that leads straight through the same wall on which the window is placed, then showing the window used purely as a viewscreen on which to replay an earlier event from an angle that doesn't match what one would have seen out of that window at that time, and then giving an exterior view of a window that is there only for that single episode, and is of a dubious scale vs. all the other windows to boot.

Timo Saloniemi
 
The only solutions I have to that conundrum are:
- either we ignore it as a real-life VFX error,
- or Discovery has protective shutters there it can roll up and down to cover the windows.
 
Another thing.

Some Discovery models based on Season1, like STO's and the Polar Lights 1/2500 scale have windows on the back of the bridge dome. The Anovos model I can't tell the images on their site are too small. The Eaglemoss model doesn't have any.

I can't seem to find any shots from Season 1 showing any. Any direct closeups are completely in shadow, no lights.
 
I don't think they went to small again, Ii already listed the real sizes of Discovery season 1 and 2 ships. We basically only saw the Constitution class in tos and all discovery ships are smaller than the excelscior. There are honestly probably starfleet ring ships offscreen. Look at the Syndey class and how Andorian it looks.
 
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