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Spoilers Starship Design in Star Trek: Picard

I don't mind a lot of the Frankenfleet designs except where they mingle ship parts from different scales. I do appreciate the effort they made to pare down the Galaxy class saucers to represent smaller primary hulls, but some of the ships ruined that effort with obvious model kit part swapping which looked so wrong with mixed scales

That was intentional, according to Judy Elkins. They didn’t want the ships to resemble the filming models they already had.

As for the use of the smaller 1/2500 Galaxy class saucers, that was done by professional model maker Ed Miarecki at the start of TNG, when he was given the job of building study models of other starship classes based on the Enterprise-D. The idea was to have more variety and newer ships than just the four filming models from the TOS movies. The Nebula class directly came from one of those study models. The studies were later used in BoBW as the wrecked ships in the Wolf 359 graveyard.
 
I meant of several models thay took a 1:1440 kit and cut the outside of the saucer off, leaving a smaller hull with the windows making it look like a smaller alternate primary hull.

I like the Centaur class but using the 1:537 Miranda weapons pod on a 1:1000 Excelsior hull is the type of scale bashing I am talking about. I love kitbashed ships, but either keep the pieces in similar scale or make their sourcing obscure
 
I meant of several models thay took a 1:1440 kit and cut the outside of the saucer off, leaving a smaller hull with the windows making it look like a smaller alternate primary hull.

I’m confused. There were no models at 1:1440 scale. There were models at 1:1400, which at the time of ‘A Time to Stand’ would have been just the large Enterprise-D kit, and possibly the Enterprise-E kit. Neither of those kits’ saucers were used for kitbashing purposes, much less having their saucers cut to make the saucer smaller.

Alternatively, Miarecki’s kitbashes for TNG used 1/2500 saucers with a 1/1400 bridge module to give the appearance that the ship was smaller than a Galaxy class starship. He did not cut the outside of a 1/1400 saucer off to make a smaller saucer.

I like the Centaur class but using the 1:537 Miranda weapons pod on a 1:1000 Excelsior hull is the type of scale bashing I am talking about. I love kitbashed ships, but either keep the pieces in similar scale or make their sourcing obscure

In the actual episode that we see the Centaur, one cannot tell that a 1/537 Reliant pod and struts were used, because the ship was moving too fast for that detail to be made out. None of the kitbashes were meant to be scrutinized up close.
 
None of this was in Season 1 or 2, so it could either be unused or for Season 3
CTqOMo1.jpg
 
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None of this was in Season 1 or 2, so it could either be unused or for Season 3
CTqOMo1.jpg

Interesting that both the TOS Enterprise NCC-1701 and the Discoprise NCC-1701 are depicted (as presumably the same ship.) That muddies the waters of the theory that the Discoprise was ‘always how the ship looked.’

Oh, and after seeing this, there’s no way in hell that we’re not gonna see the Enterprise-F.
 
Interesting that both the TOS Enterprise NCC-1701 and the Discoprise NCC-1701 are depicted (as presumably the same ship.) That muddies the waters of the theory that the Discoprise was ‘always how the ship looked.’

Oh, and after seeing this, there’s no way in hell that we’re not gonna see the Enterprise-F.
He also posted pictures of gold models of all the Enterprises at one point, including the DSC/SNW one along side the TOS one
 
Both looks happen, one around 2260 and the other from 2265-2270. Even Paramount embraces that so we probably need to.
 
Both looks happen, one around 2260 and the other from 2265-2270. Even Paramount embraces that so we probably need to.

Actually, according to the visuals in DSC, the ship looks like the first version during “The Cage” (2254) and looks like the second version starting with its first appearance in 2257. If we take the visuals literally. Which people say we shouldn’t. But then we have these plaques. I’m confused.
 
Lower Decks and Prodigy also used the TOS Look. Which, they're animated series, so they have a bit more leeway.

It's all up to the art designer I guess.
 
Yeah, I think the TOS and DSC Enterprises both being made as drawings (oddly, matching the style of the ones in the NX-01 ready room, which I always assumed were done by Archer in-universe, and were definitely made by someone hundreds of years before there was an Enterprise-D or -E to add to the set) and gold models is more to give options to the set decorators/producers about which one they wanted to use, rather than an actual intention to have both displayed side-by-side.

Even PIC has gone back-and-forth a little already, using the DSC Enterprise in season 1, but the TOS-era Stargazer model in season 2 was designed as a TOS-style ship, not a DSC-style one.
 
Even PIC has gone back-and-forth a little already, using the DSC Enterprise in season 1, but the TOS-era Stargazer model in season 2 was designed as a TOS-style ship, not a DSC-style one.

Good point. If one examines the two 23rd century four-nacelled ship classes that apparently exist contemporary to each other (the Cardenas and the Radiant classes), they are wildly different. The former looks far, far more advanced (to the point where it wouldn’t look out of place as one of the First Contact ships from the 2370’s as opposed to the 2250’s) while the other design looks completely contemporary to the TOS era. Because one ship was made by a designer who doesn’t quite get the idea that ships should have a certain look based on the time period they’re from, and the other designer does get that idea.
 
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