The Discovery influenced Klingon ship design?

Member when we first saw the discovery and there was this idea that she was influenced by Klingon design because of her *ahem* unusually shaped secondary hull?

And then we saw the Klingon ships and they looked like *nothing* that came before or since and were maybe Hurq designs or whatever?

What if the design of the discovery influenced the Klingon design language? What if the attack on the ship of the dead and discovery’s legendary status led the Klingons to try and emulate the design? Maybe they were trying to come up with something to match the Crossfield class? So they redesigned the D7.

Muh head canon needs to explain the visboot.

 

I think the Discovery's resemblance to a classic D7 is pretty weak, but even if you disagree with that, the Klingons were already using ships much closer to familiar Klingon designs a hundred years earlier in Enterprise. The K'tinga CGI model from DS9 was used for Vorok's battle cruiser with no changes at all, but even ignoring that, the other Klingon ships of the 22nd century are all quite similar to their 23rd and 24th century counterparts. The ships in DSC are the odd ones out.

But you know that obviously.

 

That actually bugged me the first time I saw it on ENT. The production team have since acknowledged that was a mistake iirc - it was supposed to be a D5 and they used the wrong model? That’s one issue with the “on screen is canon” view I suppose.

That’s true of course. But what if the Klingons abandoned that design lineage at the end of the 22nd century (maybe alongside the rise of the subspecies of Klingons that T’Kuvma and Voq belonged to) and they resurrected a load of Hurq designs? Then along comes Discovery and they’re like “woah this ship gave us a pasting like the one we got at Archer IV - we should try and reverse engineer it from all the data we gathered from the USS Glenn that we had all those warriors on that one time before starfleet scuttled it” and the classic D7 was born or reborn.

 

D4
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/D4_class_(concept)

 

Plausible, though a bit odd. I guess it's the best we can hope for that somehow they explain the differences and move on in a more traditional direction. Even that may be wishful thinking though.

They really should have used that model. Using the K'tinga instead over a matter of a few windows was a ridiculous decision. I guess it goes to show that the Berman era shows weren't above making visual mistakes.

 

It's not that they used the wrong model. The model they were going to use was unfinished (or, at least, unfinished in their minds), so they substituted it with a K'T'Inga, even though using that model made no sense. But they had to use something.

Don't take this personally, but people should really stop trying to justify anything that doesn't look like a Klingon design by saying that it was Hur'q. The "Hur'q" was just something name-dropped in one episode of DS9 and was never referred to again.

 

They were mentioned in Enterprise.

 

They were? When?

 

Doctor Antaak called the augment virus the worst thing to happened to the empire since the Hur'q invasion.

 

I had to look at Memory Alpha to know what you were talking about. So I’ll amend my statement: the Hur’q were only referred to in two instances, not one.

 

Nothing taken personally

My inner canon nerd would love it if they did refer to the Hurq - and because it was mentioned on ENT that’s the kind of thing I’d expect to be referenced on DSC as they seem to like referring to ENT.

But I wouldn’t care if they explained it as just some wappy new Klingon design fad that existed in the mid 23rd century - like gothic but Klingonified...

I just think it would be neat if the Discovery herself had a lasting effect on the Klingon empire and this was reflected in the design of a D7. I also find that the smell of whipped, rotting horseflesh (that is, my argument) is becoming unbearable at this point haha!

 

The thing is, at this point there’s really no way to logically rationalize Klingon ship design lineage because of the non-linear nature of Star Trek series production. ENT retconned that they had Birds of Prey a century before “Balance of Terror,” plus D-5s that resembled the later D-7s but looked and were colored more like the Vor’chas from TNG. Now we have a show that has multiple classes of ships that look completely alien, that alegedly takes place ten years before a show that has their ship design as standard D7s. It makes no sense at all. But that’s because the effects team doesn’t care about sense. They just care about putting their own spin on the design process. Which in and of itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing; it just doesn’t make a lot of sense when you abandon a clear design idea for something that’s not even remotely the same.

 

Perhaps a spacefaring empire has more than one starship design?

 

Whilst I acknowledge that the reason the ships look different is simply due to creative choices on the part of the designers, there is no reason why an in-universe explanation can’t be given. There is a precedent for this happening in Star Trek.

Perhaps the difference in ship designs is due to a breakdown in the command structures within the Klingon Empire. The uniformity of Klingon ship designs seen in Enterprise and TOS may be due to there being an organised central government in charge of both ship design and ship building. Yes, the ships are still operated by individual houses, but they all serve the Klingon Empire. However in DISCO it is each of the Klingon houses in it for themselves. Now they have begun to return a centralised leadership they may once again start to use the government contracted designs we are all familiar with.

 

Of course they would. But then we should be seeing a consistency in that design over time. What we see instead is a lot of inconsistency and illogic in the designs.

 

It’s also important to point out that we have no idea what “D7” actually means.

I mean, it’s obviously not a Klingon term, so it must be a Federation one. And who knows what it means? For all we know, it’s got nothing to do with appearance - it could be a reference to power output, crew complement, Great House affiliation, or any of a dozen other things.

So it is entirely possible that “D7” can refer to ship classes that LOOK nothing alike, but are similar in other ways.

 

I completely agree. And I also agree that it’s fine if they wanted to put their own DSC stamp on the Klingon ships and go in a whole nother direction, but why go to such an extent to make the starfleet ships look like starfleet ships? Square nacelles aside, I generally buy that the federation ships are pre-TOS for the most part. I do like me some round nacelle action mind you.

Heck yeah. I’d love a Hurq reference in DSC but I doubt they’d do it. Maybe, given Michael’s proclamation that there are 24 ships for 24 great houses at the battle of the binaries (a fact that she assumes following a massive leap in logic and she has no actual evidence for, but whatevs it’s DSC...) I thought it’d be cool if they were the 24 ceremonial ships and the rest of the Klingon fleet looks more like, well, what other Klingon ships look like.

But then there’s all those birds of prey that look nothing like anything so that scuppers that idea.

This notion makes the most sense. Like when Worf refers to a D12 bird of prey in GEN - the one that takes down the federation flagship - we’ve seen different birds of prey before and I think different class names for them - although now I think about it I’m not sure whether a BoP class name was ever seen or heard on screen? If it was, then the D12 classification may well refer to its capabilities and such like, rather than it being a class designation. In that case, D12 clearly means “this ship has the capacity to make us look all like incompetent fools who have no idea how to pilot our own galaxy class ship and we’ll end up giving the helm controls to someone with little to no recorded pilot experience and the ship will be half blown up half smashed into a planet at a fair old rate of knots. But we’ll be able to explode it with one torpedo before we all hurtle to our doom”.

Sorry went off on a tangent there - like the 1701D saucer could have done and bounced off the veridian iii atmosphere (like Picard got that kid to do in a shuttle that one time) if literally anyone but Troi had taken the wheel.

Great idea and cool scene but in a not so great movie.

Anyways, cmon DSC give us a reason for your trippy Dracula Klingon ships.

 

There have been at least two.

The mid-sized BoP, which has a few dozen crew, is of the K'Vort class. Most of the BoPs which appeared on TNG and DS9 were of this class.

The smaller BoP, the one from ST III that has "about a dozen officers and men", is of the B'Rel class.

And there have been a few other ship classes (which are not Birds of Prey). There's the Vor'cha class (medium to heavy cruiser), which appeared often on TNG. And there's the much larger, probably dreadnought-sized, Negh'Var class.

In all of these cases, we know the official Klingon name for the class - presumably linked to a specific ship appearance and configuration, like most other races do - so there's not a lot of ambiguity there. Again, though, it reinforces how meaningless the term "D7" is. We don't know why Starfleet uses that term, or what the Klingons call ships like this. So the fact that the "D7" as shown in DSC is so different from the "D7" we were all familiar with, really doesn't mean anything.

 

Ohhh yeah that rings a bell now. Wasn’t the K’Vort class mentioned in “yesterday’s Enterprise”?

That would lend credence to the idea that “D12” is a broader designation than simply the class of the ship, meaning that D7 could apply in the same way.

I’d still love a story where the design of the Discovery is being studied by Klingon scientists and they come up with the K’Tinga design as a direct match for the discovery. Who knows maybe a rogue Klingon faction will develop their own DASH drive in season 2.

Probably not.

Or they stumble on an Iconian portal and realise that the Iconians were also using the mycelial network to make their gateways work...

 

Yep.

And, IIRC, the term "B'Rel class" came from another TNG episode (Rascals) where the Ferengi have stolen some of these ships which they use to capture the Enterprise. Since those ships only had about a dozen crew, we can assume that Kruge's ship from ST III was also of that class.