Spoilers We now have Ship Class names for BotBS

[Kpnuts]

The Starfleet ships in Discovery really do remind me of the background ships in DC's Trek comics from the 80's

Even a comic book illustration like that reminds me how beautiful Starfleet ships used to be back in the day, love the curves and clean lines. Did Eaves design the Excelsior, Miranda, Constitution? My guess is no.

Maybe it's just the two second, gritty, shakey-cam space visual effects on Discovery that don't show off his designs very well.

 

[Gepard]

If this was, indeed, their reasoning, it goes a long way to explain why the TNG movies saw such a drop in quality and how the franchise ended up on hiatus for so long.

Huh? Who goes to a movie exclusively for the ship? I'd think movie audiences would care more about whether they could see Patrick Stewart, Brent Spiner, etc. than whether they could see a model spaceship. I'm not convinced this was their actual reasoning.

I too have heard that this was thier reasoning. It's also, per the VFX team, why the Aeroshuttle was axed from Voyager. Foundation Imaging/Eden FX did VFX tests for the shuttle that were rejected because Insurrection was in theaters around that time, and the powers that be didn't want to "steal the thunder" from the movie by showing two different ships that both had smaller craft drop out of the bottom of their saucers.

 

[XCV330]

Too many Americentric ship class names. They need to revisit that.

 

[Captain of the USS Averof]

Even a comic book illustration like that reminds me how beautiful Starfleet ships used to be back in the day, love the curves and clean lines. Did Eaves design the Excelsior, Miranda, Constitution? My guess is no.

Maybe it's just the two second, gritty, shakey-cam space visual effects on Discovery that don't show off his designs very well.

It’s not the shakey-cam. It’s the designs that are ghastly. That fat stubby Excelsior is a thousand times better than anything we’ve seen in the Binary Stars battle.

 

[Tuskin38]

Also, DSC is the bluniverse. Even their forests are blue.

There are Fed ships with red bussards. Also the Baron's ship.

 

[pst]

Also, DSC is the bluniverse. Even their forests are blue.

There are Fed ships with red bussards. Also the Baron's ship.

don't forget that shenzhou had red (instead of the traditional blue) warp field grilles. i seemed to be the only one here bothered by that one when i brought it up a few months back.

 

[Timo]

The warp engine side windows (or more like top windows) of the Gagarin also glow red, don't they? That color, too, appears optional.

In "Yesterday's Enterprise", we were treated to our first example of non-red impulse engines (that is, if lit at all, and the "rampable" color of the TMP ship notwithstanding), and the blue there was probably intended to denote damage of some sort. ENT then decided blue is cool for impulse, which is sort of logical if blue means low power (although blue is of course a "hotter" color than red). But warp glow always remained blue, even when damage was shown.

Here we might continue to play the game that impulse colors relate to power levels. Heck, it was great fun to play with phaser colors relating to setting in TOS, before TOS-R uniformized the shots...

But we could also say that atypical colors are alien influence, that is, remnants of early diversity in the Federation, and that Starfleet standardizes on the TOS movie colors because it gradually abandons specific Andorian or Tellarite or Nevahurdian engineering practices and, after a century of trial and error, settles on an average or optimum of some sort. And the 2250s, with its 2220s-30s-40s-vintage ships, is not yet it.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[ITDUDE]

Could have used some fictitious names of people or places from our future but still STD past. I want to see Picard-class (didn't Picard's ancestors colonize Mars? that's as worthy achievement as any to have a ship named after you). Or Archer-class (if they named a planet after him, might as well a ship).

 

[The Wormhole]

Or Archer-class (if they named a planet after him, might as well a ship).

There is an Archer class in the novels.

 

[cooleddie74]

There is an Archer class in the novels.

And the Excelsior-class U.S.S. Archer in Nemesis, one of the Federation starships assembled in the task force to confront Shinzon and the Scimitar.

 

[Tuskin38]

I was going over comments by John Eaves regarding the ship names, he says there are more diverse names in the pool of class names for the show, it just happens that the ones the people working on the show chose were mostly American.

Seems he isn't allowed to say much regarding what hasn't been used, but one possible name he did give was Laika, the Russian space dog.

 

[Ronald Held]

Should these ship classes and ancillary data be archived in Trek Tech?

 

[cooleddie74]

I liked that the NX-class impulse engines were blue. Not just because I thought the color looked good and flattering on those starships but because it was a nice change of pace from the previous series and films where pretty much every impulse deck glowed red or orange. ENT is set more than a hundred years before TOS and so I like the little visual differences between the time periods of history. Ships from the 22nd century should look different in many respects from their descendants one or two centuries later in the timeline.

The NX-class already got too much flak for looking like the Akiras of more than 200 years later so any little touch they could add to the ships to set them apart from Federation Starfleet vessels of the future was a good thing.

 

[Christopher]

I liked that the NX-class impulse engines were blue. Not just because I thought the color looked good and flattering on those starships but because it was a nice change of pace from the previous series and films where pretty much every impulse deck glowed red or orange. ENT is set more than a hundred years before TOS and so I like the little visual differences between the time periods of history.

It kinda makes sense too, I guess. If we assume the impulse vents are glowing from waste heat, then blue ones would be several times hotter than red ones, which would imply those earlier engines are less efficient and generate more waste heat.

But on second thought, I don't think that works. Impulse engines, by definition, would be rocket thrusters, and the ports would therefore represent exhaust ports -- in which case the hotter, bluer ones would be more powerful. So I probably have it backward.

 

[XCV330]

Impulse engines could be something more akin to an em-drive or Woodward Mach Effect Gravity Assit drive as well, which means the glow wouldn't mean much of anything.

 

[Christopher]

Impulse engines could be something more akin to an em-drive or Woodward Mach Effect Gravity Assit drive as well, which means the glow wouldn't mean much of anything.

Well, the original intent, according to the TOS bible, was that "impulse engine" was just a fancy name for "rocket." The TNG Tech Manual version is basically a fusion rocket enhanced by a low-level subspace field to boost the acceleration.

Of course, most people see red as a "hot" color (associated with fire and molten rock or metal) and blue as a "cool" color (associated with water and ice), the reverse of their actual blackbody temperatures, so sci-fi tends to use red light to represent higher-powered weapons, engines, etc. For instance, Kelvinverse phasers fire blue stun bolts and red kill bolts, and I think the same may go for Discovery phasers (or at least for the phaser props' LEDs, if not the animated beams/bolts).

 

[XCV330]

I can't remember now if the TOS unremastered showed lights on impulse or not. I guess it did. Glowing things are good. it would be visually boring if we didn't have them.

Maybe the originals leaked Cherenkov radiation (Blue) like crazy and whatever they did to turn it red cleaned up the friendly skies. There, my retcon for the day.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

That was indeed their reasoning. Whether it was reasonable or not is another story.

You're expecting logic and reason from studio bean-counters? Might want to rethink that....

 

[Tuskin38]

I can't remember now if the TOS unremastered showed lights on impulse or not. I guess it did. Glowing things are good. it would be visually boring if we didn't have them.

Maybe the originals leaked Cherenkov radiation (Blue) like crazy and whatever they did to turn it red cleaned up the friendly skies. There, my retcon for the day.

I didn't go through every image of TOS-R, but of the few on M-A I didn't see any glow.

 

[Fandango831]

I didn't go through every image of TOS-R, but of the few on M-A I didn't see any glow.

It's only in a few episodes. The one that comes to mind is "Ultimate Computer" when the Enterprise first arrives at Starbase 6 her impulse engines are on and then cut out for docking manuevers.