View of USS Newton and USS Defiant

[137th Gebirg]

Hmmm...no confirmation if this thing even exists on the discs? Is this thing vaporware?

What you want isn’t on the dvd, it’s on page 59 from “The art of the film”.

That's interesting, because a brief glimpse of the drawing with the Newton and Defiant was seen in the DVD/Blu-Ray preview video that was released during Comic-Con. I would have figured that it would turn up as part of the Starships featurette on the Blu-Ray set, or somewhere in the documentary feature.

That's exactly what I thought. Guess they must have done some last minute reshuffling of features before release. Oh, well, at least it will be in the book. Thanks all for the info!

 

[BolianAuthor]

They are in the book. Anyone wishing to make a 3D model of any of those ships ought buy the book, because each "type" of fleet ship is shown with a 4-view drawing... 3 profiles, and 1 3/4 view. The names of each ship are also shown.

 

[137th Gebirg]

^^^ Sounds like they're doing it right this time instead of waiting many months, sometimes years for this kind of thing to trickle out. Hopefully this is a sign of the way they'll do things from now on.

 

[cooleddie74]

^
Pocket Books and Viacom have been severely mercurial with their TREK releases in recent years. I hope for the best and some positive changes in the near future, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it.

 

[BolianAuthor]

I really wish they'd start crankin' out the tech manuals and such again...

 

[Crazy Eddie]

If the Miranda class is still in service in the 24th century, I wouldn't expect it to look ANYTHING like the 23rd century version except with the same basic hull shape and the original registry number; basically, it would be a dead ringer for the Nebula class except smaller and without the engineering pod.

Unless you remove whatever's inside (the warp cores had to fit in the nacelles somehow) and put the new stuff inside. I remember some cop drama show had a criminal who put a powerful sports car engine in a normal van.

I tend to think it would be a kind of Ship of Theseus type thing: they replace the outer hull to accommodate new components (new nacelles, phaser arrays, modern sensors) then change parts of the inner hull to accommodate newer internal technologies. There would still be huge parts of the ship well over a hundred years old, while some would be less than a decade in service. I'm basically thinking along the lines of what would happen if the Iowa battleships were still in service and super-modernized; replace the big 16 inch guns with railguns and a compulsator, swap out the Phalanx CIWS with SeaRAM missiles, replace the remaining 5-inch guns with Mk-26 launchers or something of that nature.

Space craft with modular designs would never have to be retired, you can literally swap out every single part of the ship with a new part to stay ahead of its aging cycle. You'd almost never have to build new starships at all, just keep upgrading old ones, or build new ones of the same class to the specification of older designs. That would mean each "class" of starship is really just a general configuration, with fittings and loadouts changing year after year.