Most of the details we loose our minds over in current Trek are just fine if done in the past.
Spoilers Starship Design in Star Trek: Picard
- Thread starter pst
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That episode may be the reason why they had to invent the different B'rel- and K'Vort-class Bird-of-Preys to explain the size differences. The D-12 seen in GEN seemed to fall into the smaller B'rel size category.
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Gonzo
Guest
It was funny at the time, it did look great when they dropped cloaked around the Warbird though.
Don't think the scene would have had quite the same impact if three little B'Rel BoP's did the same.
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Gonzo
Guest
Money and time probably, the usual reasons.
By the time DS9 was on TV and TNG was coming to an end they had come up with the Vor'cha class followed by the Negh'Var, both of which are great.
The scene was so great I wouldn't have cared. The fleet face off fails from a dramatic storytelling pov AND a visual effects/ship porn pov.
Storytelling, yes. Visual effects, yes. Starship porn? Total, absolute fail. A small bird of prey is suddenly the size of an enormous Romulan warbird. Remember the meltdowns in 2009 when they scaled up the Enterprise to fit a beer brewery and fleet of shuttles inside?
If you grew up with it, it's fine. If it's new, it's sacrilege.
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Gonzo
Guest
I did like the projection of force that the fleet represented in Picard.
Thing is they could have done just as well with say a squadron of 10 ships on either side, throw in some D'Deridex and Valdore vs some established classes or an equal number of the new ships.
It would have been plenty as it was only a small settlement after all.
It seems it was just that they ran out of time and maybe money, just imagine if the two huge fleets had actually started fighting, the costs would have gone through the roof.
Thing is they could have done just as well with say a squadron of 10 ships on either side, throw in some D'Deridex and Valdore vs some established classes or an equal number of the new ships.
It would have been plenty as it was only a small settlement after all.
It seems it was just that they ran out of time and maybe money, just imagine if the two huge fleets had actually started fighting, the costs would have gone through the roof.
Look at season 2 of Discovery and that idiotic spacebattle with a million drones flying around, more = better to these people.
I do wonder how they'd have depicted the scene in "The Defector" with the kind of easy copypasting they can do today. Would it be 4 ships or 40? 400?
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Gonzo
Guest
The first time I saw the Drone battle I just knew it was going to set some members off big time.Look at season 2 of Discovery and that idiotic spacebattle with a million drones flying around, more = better to these people.
What made me laugh at the time was the idea that the AI wouldn't have backed itself up somewhere else before the battle.
The drones didn't bother me at all to be honest, personally I prefer a good Mexican standoff straight out of the Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns but set in space with lasers.
Fewer ships makes the battles more personal and easy to follow.
Hopefully that lesson will have been learned for SNW.
I think that what we saw in “The Defector” worked just fine (other than the aforementioned stupidly-scaled up BoPs), but that the fleets in PIC was just stupid overkill. Really, do you need 200 warbirds to destroy a tiny settlement of a few androids? A fleet which necessitated 200 Starfleet ships to face off with them?
I think the scene would have worked just fine with only Oh’s ship and Riker’s ship, without all the extraneous ships just made for scene-filler.
Or if you're going to do 200 ships space them out and show more dynamic movements, such as some of Riker's armada positioning themselves off to the side and slowly rotating to face the Romulan vessels. Show some of them slowly surrounding Commodore Oh's fleet to cut off an easy escape route.
It wouldn't have solved all of the problems with that scene but it would have made it better.
It wouldn't have solved all of the problems with that scene but it would have made it better.
My biggest problem with scenes like this has been and always will be the propensity to show a combat group that should be able to move in 3-dimensional battlespace as limited to a generally 2-dimensional mindset. Yeah, some of them are "higher" or "lower" to some central waterline, but for the most part, they're still thinking surface warfare - going nose to nose. Starfleet would have done better to Warp in above or behind them, or beneath them, or ANYWHERE other than in front of them, where their shields were weaker and guns were fewer. Instead, they follow the Napoleonic siege mentality of the "face off".
Star Wars had the same problem with running "blockades". You have a (relatively speaking) small fleet in one little sector of space over a planet and everyone acts like the entire world is cut off and nobody can escape. Same thing here. A fleet of a couple hundred ships is less than an arc-second in the sky surrounding a planet!
What's really to stop the Romulans from warping out and then approaching at a completely different angle to commence planetary bombardment? Or, if the Synth threat was really that bad and, well, since they are Romulans (and taking Balance of Terror into account here as a direct canonical precedent context), I could easily see them sacrificing their lives for the greater good of their people to either just go full impulse, slamming themselves into the planet or (I like this one even better) turning off their singularity containment cores, which would probably be enough to create a localized black hole, swallowing the planet entirely (and the Fed fleet with it). Seems to me like Oh and her cohorts lacked the intestinal fortitude and strength of character to do what needed to be done to defeat the Synth Evil that was upon them.
I loved the show, but the finale in general, and the bit in space between the fleets in particular, was a bit lacking for me.
Star Wars had the same problem with running "blockades". You have a (relatively speaking) small fleet in one little sector of space over a planet and everyone acts like the entire world is cut off and nobody can escape. Same thing here. A fleet of a couple hundred ships is less than an arc-second in the sky surrounding a planet!
What's really to stop the Romulans from warping out and then approaching at a completely different angle to commence planetary bombardment? Or, if the Synth threat was really that bad and, well, since they are Romulans (and taking Balance of Terror into account here as a direct canonical precedent context), I could easily see them sacrificing their lives for the greater good of their people to either just go full impulse, slamming themselves into the planet or (I like this one even better) turning off their singularity containment cores, which would probably be enough to create a localized black hole, swallowing the planet entirely (and the Fed fleet with it). Seems to me like Oh and her cohorts lacked the intestinal fortitude and strength of character to do what needed to be done to defeat the Synth Evil that was upon them.
I loved the show, but the finale in general, and the bit in space between the fleets in particular, was a bit lacking for me.
This is why I love it. It shows Starfleet back and capable.
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The space visual effects have been terrble on Discovery and Picard. They've no clue how do set shots up.
The battle between the Klingon ship and the Gagarin was dynamic and well-shot, but yeah, a lot of space combat in the new series is pretty mediocre.
I think that is one of the best battles but I also enjoyed the Battle of Binary Stars. I think the Control battle is dumb, but the rest have been really interesting to me.
The Control battle may be the visual lowpoint of DSC's first two seasons on the air.
I find that hard to argue against. I prefer revisiting the Binary Stars and the Gagarin battle. Also, when Discovery is stuck in the Mycelial network and the Section 31 ship trying to rescue them.
The Battle of the Binary Stars at least has logic and dramatic weight behind it. Even a Klingon religious sect would have access to loyal followers who'd also have their own warships and the buildup to the battle following Burnham's disastrous encounter with the Torchbearer on the Beacon made sense and was interesting to watch unfold. The Section 31 fleet bothered me from the get-go since it's a covert organization that at best should have minimal resources that can be seen in public if at all. There's this vast swarm of armed starships and other vessels that Section 31 didn't have in the 22nd century, doesn't have in the 24th and doesn't have in these numbers even in the Kelvin Timeline of that same century. It's the ultimate example of short attention span "pew pew pew" in DSC's first two seasons and one that has no dramatic stakes except for Admiral Cornwell's heroic self-sacrifice to detonate the Section 31 photon torpedo before it can cause catastrophic damage to the Enterprise.
It's loud, boring and annoying and makes Section 31 seem even stupider than many of us already believed it to be.
It's loud, boring and annoying and makes Section 31 seem even stupider than many of us already believed it to be.
