I mean, the Enterprise starship class was really the only ship we had for the longest time but I never assumed they all did the same thing.
Spoilers Starship Design in Star Trek: Picard
- Thread starter pst
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Even if they are also the same on the inside, you have to weigh the cost of not having diversity in starship models against the benefits of being able to mass produce the same model faster...
Why would Starfleet need to mass produce starships during the Picard era?
I dunno. More worlds are joining so there's more territory to cover? They lost a bunch of ships in a war that need to be replaced? Or maybe they are just trying to beef up their fleet because of a new threat?
More territory, replacing lost ships from several conflicts, preparing to respond to the next Borg/Species 8472/Hirogen/whatever attack based upon data received from Voyager.
Who says they are?
Well, somebody is, considering we see the resulting mass. But perhaps Starfleet is outsourcing? The Inquiry class might have been built by the Metrons, either for a nominal fee as something to while the Tuesday afternoon away with, or then because Starfleet after losing Utopia Planitia was willing to pay an arm and a leg.
Timo Saloniemi
Timo Saloniemi
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Yet there's a mass of ships there in any case. We can't get past the "mass production" argument unless we argue a high percentage of those ships are old, representing a continuum of designs as indicative of stretched-out and piecemeal production. And Riker sort of says out loud that the opposite is true, and he holds the qualitative high ground.
Or then we can argue there only really were five ships there and our eyes were watering from all the pretty effects and seeing fiftiple.
Timo Saloniemi
Or then we can argue there only really were five ships there and our eyes were watering from all the pretty effects and seeing fiftiple.
Timo Saloniemi
Could those ships have been held in reserve asl a rapid strike force?
It'd be funny if there really were only like 4 ships, and they used the same image/sensor duplication tech that La Sirena used (somehow) to make it look like 112 (which, again, I hand-counted that many from one screenshot).
Unlikely, but I'd believe it more.
If they were holos, it would have been the mother of all bluffs, even for Riker's poker acumen, as we can likely assume there were exactly that many real Romulan ships staring them down.
I was hoping that's what they were. Alas, nope. 
It would make dramatic sense: Riker pulls off a fantastic stunt - but only after his old mentor has utilized it himself.
(Of course, it would have made even more dramatic sense for Oh to call Riker's bluff, on basis of Picard already having pulled that one - only to discover slightly too late that those "holograms" were actually firing back...)
At the conclusion of the adventure, we're simply left wondering, not knowing one way or another. It's not as if we ever got a grand fleet departure scene; perhaps there was a rather less grand fleet shutdown scene instead, when the camera looked the other way?
Timo Saloniemi
(Of course, it would have made even more dramatic sense for Oh to call Riker's bluff, on basis of Picard already having pulled that one - only to discover slightly too late that those "holograms" were actually firing back...)
At the conclusion of the adventure, we're simply left wondering, not knowing one way or another. It's not as if we ever got a grand fleet departure scene; perhaps there was a rather less grand fleet shutdown scene instead, when the camera looked the other way?
Timo Saloniemi
I mean, dozens of starships that look almost 100% identical on the outside? Gotta be a late 24th century holographic bluff, right? That's what I thought the first time I watched it.
It would have been far more clever a choice.
It would have been far more clever a choice.
I will add, I don't really understand all the flack that scene got on the copy and paste ship fleet. Sure it was lazy VFX, but the warping in scene where you see the ships was like 2 seconds. The meat of the scene was Riker's dialogue, which was awesome. Frakes stole the show.
As I have been told from various places around the Internet, it's because a)it's lazy, so therefore the VFX team/Production team doesn't care and b) it's disrespectful because it is all one ship and Starfleet clearly has multiple ships and fans can do it better so therefore it must be done that way.
Make way for Star Trek: The Special Edition with changes to the VFX. That has never been controversial at all!
I’m sure the simple answer is that they just didn’t have the time to make more designs. They weren’t lazy or disrespectful; they were under time constraints. It’s not like they really needed more than one ship design for that scene anyway. It would have been nice for Riker to have his own unique ship, but it is what it is.
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I am quite certain that is the case. That is why I role my eyes at fan VFX "fixes" because it could be done whenever they wanted. The production team doesn't have the luxury of time.
