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Spoilers Starship Design in Star Trek: Picard

BillJ said:
What's the point of going back to Deep Space Nine, if it is unrecognizable compared to the show you fell in love with?
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To fall in love with it in a different and completely new way. Because nothing, no design, no visualization, will recapture that moment, that feeling.
BillJ said:
They went far beyond "anything new" and rewrote the entire visual language of the timeframe. Some change was to be expected, changing everything wasn't. Especially for a show that was supposed to take place in an established timeframe.
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I know I'm a broken record on this but TMP did the same thing. Changed so much of the visual language that it felt like its own separate world, a telling a Star Trek story inside the world of Star Trek.TWOK is the exact same way, complete with new uniforms and a new starship design. And, that's why I totally get people who treat DSC as a separate time frame. The visual differences are different enough to warrant it, like TMP or TWOK for me at times.

But, I don't want the same old thing. I want something different. Changes that Trek has done before. And, this isn't the hill I'm willing to die on to say "NOPE! That's too much change!" I'm of the opinion that Star Trek is a show about exploration. So, I would like to explore.

There was a quote GR that he expected such change during the life of Trek and welcomed it. I wish I could find the book it was in, but it was helpful with recognizing Abrams' Trek as being just as much Trek, just as much a part of that universe, those characters and that story as other Treks. And while Abrams' Trek is an alternate timeline, knowing the characters informs my enjoyment of those films and vice versa.

Mileage will obviously vary, and clearly does.
 
fireproof78 said:
I know I'm a broken record on this but TMP did the same thing.
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I think people would've felt quite differently if they had dropped those changes into the time period between "The Cage" and TOS. They smartly gave themselves an out (redesign and refit after the end of the five year mission), just like the Abrams films did by going the alternate universe route.
 
BillJ said:
I think people would've felt quite differently if they had dropped those changes into the time period between "The Cage" and TOS. They smartly gave themselves an out (redesign and refit after the end of the five year mission), just like the Abrams films did by going the alternate universe route.
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Maybe, maybe not. Because, a change is a change. As I have stated many times TMP is probably the most shocking of the TOS films because it is nothing like TOS at the outset. We have Klingons completely redesigned, a visually new Enterprise, and Kirk being a dick. Now, I might be alone in this, but watching TOS (as I did as kid on VHS) and pouring over Trimble's Concordance, TMP wasn't for me. The novelization made it worse.

I don't know if people would feel differently...but I suspect that there would be a knee-jerk reaction.
 
TMP was the first time with a much bigger budget, and a decade of change in special, visual and sound effects. They could have kept some more of the look if they wanted to. They didnt have to change the color scheme of the bridge, the roundness of nacelles, etc. There are things they could have done, but I dont think the changes were a problem. I remember going to see it in 79 in the theater when we only had the show up until then, and I was ok with the changes.

The main problems people had then, IIRC were different. They were about slow pacing, multiple long dull stretches of inaction, off putting characterization and a failure to recapture the chemistry of characters. The ship was amazing. Fantastic job. The uniforms could have better, the Klingon prosthetics could have been better, the FX werent really finished, etc. No doubt it had an overall look and feel that was unique. Different than anything before or since. I liked that about it.
 
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fireproof78 said:
Maybe, maybe not. Because, a change is a change. As I have stated many times TMP is probably the most shocking of the TOS films because it is nothing like TOS at the outset. We have Klingons completely redesigned, a visually new Enterprise, and Kirk being a dick. Now, I might be alone in this, but watching TOS (as I did as kid on VHS) and pouring over Trimble's Concordance, TMP wasn't for me. The novelization made it worse.

I don't know if people would feel differently...but I suspect that there would be a knee-jerk reaction.
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the novelization is really quite terrible.
 
Paul755 said:
the novelization is really quite terrible.
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The Motion Picture novelization lost me when Kirk started talking about his mother having formal instructors who taught her how to have sex. Which is... a few sentences in.

Anyway, the Bird of Prey. I thought it looked great. The dialogue only said it was "antique," not directly from the 2260s, and its design feels believable as one of the the iterations between then and Picard's era.

As for Seven's fighter, I got the impression they were going for something reminiscent of the Delta Flyer.
 
There was some grumbling when The Motion Picture came out, but the large majority of us were just grateful to be getting anything at all.

Those of us who grew up watching TOS the first time around, went for many years thinking it was one and done.
To suddenly have it in the theaters was a joyful event.
No popular American Sci-Fi TV show had ever done that before Trek.
 
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Maybe this is off the wall but does anybody see a strong relationship between TOS era Fed ship designs and the Romulans? Always thought there was a vague resemblance but this new BOP model really hammers it home.

If somebody were to write a story retconning that Fed ship design was basically cribbed from the Romulans after their ships were way more effective in the early battles of the Romulan war, I do believe it would make total sense. Or perhaps the other way around ... but I've always had a vague sense the Romulans were a little more advanced than the Feds in general.
 
Since this is the Picard ship design thread, and not Discovery, I've got to say the ship designs so far have been really good.

I loved the BoP, which was both faithful to TOS and believable as a ship a near-25th century pirate would have augmented and upgraded over the years. I hope it's not the last one we see!

I'm still not sure how large La Sirena is supposed to be. The interior looks quite vast, and there's a fully-functioning holosuite somewhere. But she looked Runabout sized next to the BoP, unless that was always supposed to be larger than I thought.

I guess we'll have to wait till next week to find out about that little fighter/shuttle.
 
Tomalak said:
Since this is the Picard ship design thread, and not Discovery, I've got to say the ship designs so far have been really good.

I loved the BoP, which was both faithful to TOS and believable as a ship a near-25th century pirate would have augmented and upgraded over the years. I hope it's not the last one we see!

I'm still not sure how large La Sirena is supposed to be. The interior looks quite vast, and there's a fully-functioning holosuite somewhere. But she looked Runabout sized next to the BoP, unless that was always supposed to be larger than I thought.

I guess we'll have to wait till next week to find out about that little fighter/shuttle.
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It fought pretty evenly with that BoP so I dont think its particularly heavily armed either, then again torpedoes would have been overkill against that BoP.

After going through the shots again its clear that it is considerably smaller that the BoP, which is itself pretty small being roughly the size of the ToS Enterprise 1701 saucer so maybe 200-250 metres across if we include the wings, which would make the La Sirena no more than 50-80m long and 4 decks high at the most, which makes it considerably larger than a runabout.

A relatively small ship like that could conceivably be run by a few hologram crew however it would be heavily reliant on its computer and power systems to do so, any failure in either would leave Rios alone to do the work, which is risky although I am sure it would have backups.

I must admit one part of the fight was funny, after dog fighting around for a while the La Sirena just turned around and cut one of the BoP's wings off, just like that, even if the shields had been knocked out that looked like a cutting beam although Sevens fighter also fires at the same point as well.

Both the La Sirena and Sevens fighter seem to be using the same weapon types in a manner that seems very similar to a Borg Cubes cutting beams, their attack on the BoP looked more like an intentional and precise amputation rather than an attempt at strafing.
 
Khan Jr said:
Anyway, the Bird of Prey. I thought it looked great. The dialogue only said it was "antique," not directly from the 2260s, and its design feels believable as one of the the iterations between then and Picard's era.
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Exactly. The Romulans could have made the BoP for 50 years, 75 years after Balance Of Terror. Minor changes to the nacelles are easily explained by the ship being a later model, or maybe the new "owner" did an upgrade.

It was nice to see the old bird again, even if it did get it's wing clipped.
 
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