Hmm, I couldn't see any with cutout saucers although there could have been but the camera angle made it impossible to see them. Confirmation that the Ibn Majid is a different class which is good to know. The best shots were towards the start of the sequence, showing the different types of nacelles, impulse engines and bridge modules. I think he is right, only one made it in the end with a couple of variations. Would be nice to know which one, I assume it was the Inquiry class Zheng He with the two sub classes, I would assume the Heavy Cruiser Zheng He would be larger than the others but from what I could see that wasn't the case, they all seemed to be about the same size 400-500m or so. Couldn't see the Explorer Seeker class with the cutout saucer, should have been pretty obvious but would need a top down camera angle to spot clearly. Would be nice to know what the Cruiser Carrier Equity class is actually carrying, I assume its drones as it would need to be a big ship to carry fighters. Diagrams plox.
Since we didn’t actually see those ships on screen, it’s unknown how much change they would have had from the original concept art. I’m not even sure they are the ships in question; that was just my guess based on what Chabon said. I do know the shuttle at Utopia Planitia was barely changed from the original concept art. I would think that if they did reuse these designs, that at least the nacelles would be different.
Been looking at the eaglemoss Discovery ships because I’m board at home. Man, if you just tweak the nacelles a bit on the Shepard Class and the Buran they really would fit in the “Picard” era. They would be perfect designs for the 24th/25th century.
I don't see anything about NEM that implies the Titan was a supership. All we know about her is that she's Riker's new ship, and she's being deployed to Romulus post-Shinzon for a diplomatic mission. Your interpretation is perfectly valid, but I for one never got the impression you did, and I don't think that calling her the Titan was "obviously" a reference to Greek mythology. I rather liked the idea of giving a class of ships a theme name, and I liked the idea that there's a Luna class and every ship in it is named after moons. (The novels restricted themselves to moons from the Sol system, but I think it would have been cool for there to be a Luna-class ship named, for instance, the USS T'Khut or the USS Jaraddo.) Nope. It wouldn't make one bit of difference at all. This is all just spitting at the wind, especially since the episode really wasn't about the ships in any meaningful sense. If it had been ten Sovereign-class or Galaxy-class starships, or a mix of dozens of Sovereigns, Galaxies, Ambassadors, Prometheuses, or what-have-you, the episode out have played out exactly the same. 1) J.J. Abrams has never been involved in the creation of DIS. He and Alex Kurtzman haven't worked together since Into Darkness back in 2013, long before DIS was conceived. 2) I, too, wish that they had set DIS in the late 24th Century -- because nothing about the story they told required it to be set in the 2250s, and that setting didn't add anything to it, and because Michael's being Spock's foster sister adds a weird subtext to his family scenes in TOS and in the TNG Vulcan episodes. But, the idea that if they set something in the 23rd Century, that they shouldn't depict the 23rd Century as being more advanced than us, is just impractical. A multi-million dollar television program trying to get a mass audience is not going to re-create an aesthetic that is clearly based on outdated ideas about what "advanced technology" means in the 2010s and 2020s. It's just not gonna happen. Sure, ENT and DS9 re-created that aesthetic for one-off (or two-off) throwbacks, but that's not the same thing as a sustained setting for a TV show trying to attract an audience beyond niche Trekkie obsessives like us. And Star Trek is always supposed to be showing us a vision of the future, not a vision of the past. Yeah, I've often thought that the design aesthetic they chose for DIS looks more like it would flow naturally out of the design aesthetic of the late 2370s rather than the 23rd Century. Yet another reason I would have chosen to set DIS in the late 24th or early 25th Centuries if I had had the choice. But that's also a very subjective thing that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of whether or not something's a good show that's gonna attract a loyal audience.
Thank you! (Side-note: Even Star Trek shows from the 90s are starting to look outdated. The computer readouts on Cardassian consoles in early DS9 are often painfully obviously using circa 1993 Macintosh word processors, with no real effort to hide the early 90s Apple font or operating system.)
That's why I said "JJ and his current and former people". That includes former. JJverse and Disco share this in common. And I was a big supporter of visual changes over TOS and I didnt understand anyone who wanted a movie or show today to look like a 1960s TV show. I am talking about time suits, interstellar beaming, instantaneous jump drive that covers 50,000ly+, Etc. I do not mean that screens, panels and computer terminals should look like 1966 props. There are in-universe rationales if they insist on the 2250s as the setting. The Borg tech of First Contact and ENT: "Regeneration". It's collected, studied, and over decades, reverse engineered, etc. That's one way. There are other ways.
Yes. We all agree. We have a 1960s conception of the 23rd Century and an 1980s/90s conception of the 24th Century in these shows. As discussed recently, AI/Robotics is advancing far faster that in Trek, while advances in space flight and exploration are lagging farther and farther behing the optimistic Trek pace. Over 50 years closer to the 23rd Century and already the trendlines are starkly different. And It's not just dated laptops, props, and viewscreens.
I do. Hard to reconcile 2250s instantaneous jump drive and interstellar beaming with every show and movie set after that. The attempts I have encountered to rationalize the mysterious loss of this tech from the 2260s to 2390s are not even internally believable. And not nec since easy, breezy in universe explanations exist.
I never thought that the warp jumps between Earth and Vulcan and other locations were that quick, only that the movies chose to show little or no narrative between the warp jump and the arrival sequence. I don't for a moment believe that the Kelvin Timeline Enterprise got to Vulcan that quickly but J.J. simply chose to ramp up the drama and the action by not showing us the gap in time between the ship leaving Earth and arriving at Vulcan. Even Discovery seemed to be taking the normal amount of in-universe time to travel from Earth to Vulcan in the Season 1 cliffhanger before she received the distress call from the Enterprise.
For me it was more about the context of the scene. When Picard states, "This is all a damned inconvenience, and while you're happily settling in on the Titan, I will be training my new first officer," the way he emphasizes the name 'Titan' made me think he was trying to compare Riker's outsize personality to the ship he was being given. Or at least, that was my interpretation at the time.
No, I don't either, and feel like it is a rather literal interpretation what is occurring on screen. I feel a similar way regarding the attitude that if a character states something then they must be right. It's a rather simplistic interpretation of on screen events.