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Spoilers Starship Design in Star Trek: Picard

Speaking of something else, because I can not think of anything contributable to what has been said about the two new ship classes and agree with most everyone on their god awful appearance, we learned that the La Sirena carries photon torpedoes and can land on planets as it is designed with landing gear.

On the other hand, if this was a Pita Shop and they served me falafel that looked as bad as those ship designs, I would refuse to eat it.
 
I bet people who live in the Star Trek world probably sit around and gripe about how all the new ships are ugly these days. Kind of like car enthusiasts do now. And the ship designers are like "What? I'm stuck with this shape because of safety regs and this new warp geometry? I'm doing the best I can!"
 
Realistically space battles would be so far apart you wouldn't see any other ships on screen.

Star Trek space has never been realistic.

Discovery has probably been the most realistic with the lighting, with the shots being super dark.

There's varying degrees of realism. Whatever the hell this was, it wasn't not realistic, or more importantly, compelling.

https://scifanatic-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/dsc-214-rev-02.jpg

The Enterprise's face off against two Romulan Wardbirds in the Neutral Zone in TNG was more dramatic than the above nonsense. And that didn't even have any shots fired.

I see a lot of common design language between those Starfleet ships. Saucers, nacelles, Bussard Collectors.

Then I'm sorry but you don't know what you're talking about. At this level you need more than "saucers + nacelles" = common design language.

Five different hull shadings, different registry placements, different registry colouring, wildly different nacelles between all of them, some are totally monotone (an Eaves speciality) while others have Starfleet markings. The list goes on. But yes, they all have saucers.

And what's generic about the Romulan Cobra Head? I've never seen anything like it in any other Sci-Fi. It's hardly generic.

You've never seen that sort of shape with a pointy front and a shiny metallic paint job?
 
Riker shows up on the Enterprise-F, throwing a leg over the back of the Captain's chair and telling Commodore Oh: "Looks like you're about to experience what I call the Riker Maneuver."
 
Haven't seen the episode yet but I can see three distinct nacelle types which means at least three different classes.

They do look familiar, I have never played STO but the one ship looked like a close match for the mid size (450m or so) Avenger class which makes it canon.

Looks like they went for a classic mid size destroyer squadron in the end to match the Romulan fleet.

It would seem that Starfleet have no problem making ships without Utopia Planetia, not exactly surprising.

I get the feeling the chances of seeing an Odyssey class have increased somewhat.
 
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Wow, just popped my head in to check out the thread and wish I hadn't. Elitist, gatekeeping bullshit is all I see. Enjoy yourselves.
I'm not sure that is completely warranted, TJ Sinclair :). For my money, I have mostly enjoyed Picard, and a poor ship design is not going to be what ruins the finale for me (although as a ship nerd, I can't say I'm not disappointed!)

I think there are weird, stretched texture details, an unharmonious, kinda 'melted' combination of shapes, and a general feeling that the ship as been modelled in a cg application, not built in a shipyard. A good design, and a good cg model should be able to fool the eye, give a sense of weight and physicality. Digital Domain's Enterprise-E, Foundation Imaging's later Voyager models, and Pixomondo's Shenzhou and Disco largely managed to achieve this. Some of them even achieved this to an impressive degree of photo photorealism. These ships in my opinion do not hit that standard.

I don't believe I, or others in this thread have been gatekeeping in expressing such opinions.
 
I'd have gotten a lot more out of a beauty shot of one of the ship than having 200 little ones filling the screen.
Yeah, Riker's ship could have been used for that but I will take what I can get.

At the end of the day they are only there to frighten the Romulans off and they served that purpose well enough.

Having lots of ships also means the detail can be lowered on them as well, if it was a close up of one ship there would be a lot more work involved.

It was bound to need a significant show of force to frighten off that many Romulan ships, Starfleet went in big which ensured there wouldn't be a fight at all.
 
The new ships look cool. I like them. They were basically there to be a deus ex machina, for all of a minute so it makes little sense to have multiple classes of starship just to appease fans who want ship porn. Starfleet having 50 different classes of starship never made much sense to me. Especially when other cultures like the klingons and the romulans had 2 or 3 at most.
 
Not having seen the episode but having appreciated the cross-eyed picture:

1) These look exactly like I expected late 24th century starships to look like, in good and not-so-good. Distinct enough from previous generations, and more "forward" from TNG than "back", too. The Sovereign/Nova/Prometheus segue with all the angles and trenches and terracing was a step back in some ways; this certainly fixes the trend.
2) Obviously from the STO school of starship design, even if none are exact matches (yet - STO will obviously fix that oversight overnight!).
3) Visually not cool that they aren't more distinct. Then again, thematically this is perfect: us old codgers on both sides of the screen will think the new stuff is indistinct and derivative, compared to the cars/starships we had back in our day.
4) In the end, though, I'm disappointed we got a fleet in the first place. Just have Riker or whoever appear in one superior starship and scatter those silly Romulan warchicklets, giving us the opposite of the DSC finale where superior numbers carried the day.
5) Yes, already, in absolute terms the quality of these is abysmal, more fitting of something like STO than a HD episode. But that has seldom mattered in Trek, which began with crazy low-res wooden ships and proceeded to pieces of blatantly obvious plastic.

Timo Saloniemi
 
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