StarTrek.com has posted the cover for Tony Daniel'S second TOS novel, Savage Trade. The cover was created by Doug Drexler. Source
Awesome. I love the Archer class and I'm glad it's really taken off as a famous design and keeps getting "screen time."
Wow. That's awesome. What a shame that paperback novels are only so big. What's that starship class alongside the Enterprise and the Montana? They remind me of Kazon ships, but they don't match any Kazon ship model.
I wish whoever had decided to use an Archer-class ship in this novel had consulted with me regarding the name. Montana doesn't fit the class's naming theme (archery and archers). In fact, there's a list of proposed ship names and registry numbers in the Vanguard and Seekers series bibles that I would have been happy to provide. Ah, well. That said, I'm glad the Archer-class starship designed by Masao Okazaki continues to be seen on the book covers.
They're Mister Tret's vessels from ENT: "Extinction". (http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Tret's_containment_vessel) Ships of the class also appear on the cover for DS9: The Missing.
Nice cover. It's always nice to see a ship cover by Doug Drexler. I wonder if there is some significance to the ships from Ent. or if they're just meant to be a for a new species' ships?
A question, David! Is this class still supposed to be named after Jonathan Archer? Or has he been ret-conned (or maybe pro-conned?) out of the honor? Other than the name, does Capt. Archer have any connection with archery (other than "Broken Bow"?)
No more significance than whenever various alien of the week ship designs have been re-used throughout the shows.
^I expect so. One thing CGI models have in common with physical ones is that it's cheaper and quicker to reuse an existing one than to build a new one. And I doubt the budget for book covers is all that high, so we'd be unlikely to see any new ship models unless they're for recurring hero ships like Titan, Aventine, or Sagittarius. Of course, back in the day, painted covers sometimes recycled old ship designs too. The Romulan Way showed two characters being strafed by Colonial Vipers from Battlestar Galactica, and TNG: Ghost Ship featured the inverted Galactica on the cover.
Personally, I welcome the reuse of ships. We get more limelight for rarely seen but good looking designs, and occasionally it adds fabric to the universe. For example, explaining that the Tellarite and Xindi-Arboreal ships are of Arkonian manufacture adds a facet to the alien-of-the-week Arkonians, and explains why Tellarite and Retellian freighters look the same. But I'm a starship afficionado and easily get drooling about seeing those CGI beauties again.
Good question. The series bible still says the class was named for Jonathan Archer. However, even a cursory glance at the list of proposed member ships in the class reveals the theme: NCC–xxxx U.S.S. Archer NCC–2012 U.S.S. Merida NCC–xxxx U.S.S. Arjuna NCC–xxxx U.S.S. Artemis NCC–1968 U.S.S. Bowman NCC–xxxx U.S.S. Kyudo NCC–xxxx U.S.S. Locksley NCC–xxxx U.S.S. Longbow NCC–1905 U.S.S. Rama NCC–xxxx U.S.S. Huang Zhong
Of course, we've had at least one interesting exception to the use of existing designs to represent unrelated vessels on book covers. The cover to The Shocks of Adversity featured what was a pretty accurately depicted Goeg ship; it was the right shape, colour and size and, so far as I can tell, was entirely new. On an unrelated note, that Archer-class looks beautiful.
It's another three hundred years until the launch of the Sagittarius-class. Surely there's enough room for a significant future archer named Montana? I can't get Hannah Montana out of my head, though.
Have you tried electroshock therapy? I'd like to think the ship is named after Tony Montana (as in "Say hello to my little friend")