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Spoilers Starship Design in Star Trek: Picard

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:barf:

Where's Waldo/Wally?
 
I honestly wouldn't expect anything solid until Eaglemoss does them in a year or so.

Maybe they'll have interchangeable parts. They'll send you one model with a couple add-ons and gimmicks, and you have instant access to any of the four new starship classes.
 
The Curiosity-class might be the only Starfleet ships I truly dislike, and that includes concept models and background kitbashes. It's weird though, because the things I spot as problems, such as lacking functional details takes nothing away from the Defiant-class or original Constitution-class. We've had ships without deflectors and nav sensors, loads of ships don't have transporter arrays, cargo doors, fuel hatches, or obvious sensors panels, and the Defiant lacks visible phaser arrays and obvious torpedo tubes, though it has the pulse emitters. I just find something deeply off about the shapes, proportions, and detailing (or lack there of), especially what has been done with its windows. One point in its favor is the lack of bridge window.

It's the Discovery bridge redressed but from the outside there is no bridge window, so good for them. I have nothing against bridge windows but they don't fit the period and I see no reason for them to make a comeback. The Sirena gets a pass because it's basically a giant shuttle.

I have mixed feelings about the design being copy pasted, because it does and doesn't work. It doesn't work because of how Starfleet fleets of the past have had so many different classes of ship. There is a broken expectation by not having a handful of new designs as with First Contact, or the post battle scene at Wolf 359. On the positive side is real life fleets tend toward the use of one ship class.

Starfleet pulling together so many ships of the same class in such little time tells me Starfleet has focused intensely on standardization in order to create an enormous, yet easy to supply fleet. By having one major ship class, with just a few iterations of upgrades (as indicated by the warp engines) training, logistics, and maneuvers can all be highly standardized. Anyone serving on one ship can seamlessly integrate into another ship. If a non-replicatable part fails, every facility will have a spare, because every ship needs that specialty part at some point. There are advantages for planning too when every ship has the same strategic and tactical capabilities. We also see that Starfleet once again takes defense very seriously and no longer needs to pull in a fleet of random ships at last minute notice in order to run an operation.

It's very likely there are other types of ships out there for other roles, but having one preeminent ship for the activities we normally see such as defense, emergency aid, and diplomatic missions makes a lot of sense. For deep space missions there are probably still ships like the Galaxy-class, and for sitting around solar systems there is the Mars defense style ship. There are probably still science specific ships too, but who wants those ships doing combat operations.
 
Yeah, the Arkonian shuttle in "Dawn(ENT)" may have been the Alice shuttle from VOY and changed just enough to look like a different vessel.
 
Yeah, the Arkonian shuttle in "Dawn(ENT)" may have been the Alice shuttle from VOY and changed just enough to look like a different vessel.

Alice was explicitly a ship of unknown origin found in the Delta Quadrant by traders. Clearly, the Arkonians may have travelled very far or at least traded their ships to a culture of lengthy space travel.

The Tellarites and the Xindi of the same era also traded vessels with the Arkonians.
 
Where do you get certified crew for thousands of ships in months?
150 worlds, 800 million people/world (and 1/80 of them coming of age each year). Assume 1% of the adult total population is active starfleet and 1 % in reserve during peacetime and 5% active starfleet in wartime...

That means every year, 15,000,000 new people enter the service (assuming 1/80 of the population graduates to the age of entering military service --- lets say 20). This is in addition to the 900 million reserve unit and 900 million active unit that mostly is not on starships.

Fielding new starships of 500-1500 people for a short term/emergency mission should not be an issue for the Federation
 
I’m not sure I see a problem with the fleet shots, given that Starfleet’s plan for fighting the Borg was to build a ton of Defiants? These just happen to be the ships you send in response to a fleet of warbirds. Starfleet of this era is far more specialized and organized than before.

The old-school DS9 fleets may have looked more interesting, but realistically we had to imagine they were cobbled together from whatever was at hand, from 23rd- to 24th-century designs (and that’s before we factored in the Frankenstein fleet). What we could’ve seen on PIC are more individual starships in different roles, but it’s just not a Starfleet show.
 
I’m not sure I see a problem with the fleet shots, given that Starfleet’s plan for fighting the Borg was to build a ton of Defiants? These just happen to be the ships you send in response to a fleet of warbirds. Starfleet of this era is far more specialized and organized than before.
Same here.
 
Sorry, I disagree. One of the greatest (IMHO) physical modelmakers was Gregory Jein
I don't get the comparison here. TNG and other model-based shows reused whole filmed and composited shots all the time. There was nowhere near the amount of visual effects in those episodes. Picard probably has VFX in every single shot.

How that money was allocated was not the fault of the VFX personnel, nor is it a reflection of their talent or time constraints.
I never said it had anything to do with their talent. I said they are every bit as talented as hobbyist. But time constraints are real.

What I think is that the producers just didn't make this a top priority, not that they didn't have the time or budget.
Priority has everything to do with time and budget.
 
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