Crossfield Class - My new favorite starship.

jake477

At first my must admit, I found the Crossfield to be uglier then a garbage scow but given time it really has grown on me. The Crossfield echoes a ton of Ralph McQuarrie's early TNG concept art. I think the larger argument for the class was because of how I like the Captain. Captain Lorca was just badass and Pike even commanded her for a time. Its the same process I felt with the NX-01, I thought okay she looks different but the Captain seems pretty cool so I'll give it a shot. It wasn't like the TOS Connie, TMP Refit, Enterprise D or Voyager where it was love at first sight. I don't really love the Defiant but I do respect it, kind of like a tank, she isn't designed for looks but designed for function. The Crossfield had to earn it and she did. I fly one in game myself. I however still absolutely loathe the Enterprise E, that monstrosity trying to be a Connie with a Voyager interior. The Crossfield is unique and it shows, sure she has the traditional Starfleet design but unlike the Enterprise E she is her own thing. Its part of the reason why I actually started to watch Discovery after previously hating it as well. Discovery for all of its bumps and bruises as a show, they did get the star of it right, that's the starship (not Burnham). Each ship is a character just as much as the Captain and the star of the show is always the ship.

rattler2

Sometimes it just takes some time, and maybe some good angles, to have a ship grow on you. I remember I was kinda turned off by the Kelvin Connie back in '09. But I gave her a chance and watched the movie. Seeing her pop out of Titan, that was awesome. The Beyond refit though... ugh. Kinda glad that one got shredded... It was just really unbalanced and seemed to actually exacerbate the weaknesses of even the TOS Connie. But DID bring in saucer seperation. The A variant... from the angles we got... she's chunky and I kinda don't like the chunk.

Back to the Crossfield... when they released the teaser with the unfinished version of Discovery, I didn't like it. The bronze color felt out of place, and at the time she looked more like the offspring of a D7 and a Connie. The final design though, feels a lot better to me.

I think the initial problem for me with the teaser version is that while she did have Starfleet elements she didn't feel Starfleet overall. The stubby nacelles and bronze color just didn't do it. Maybe if the nacelles had been upturned like most Fed ships I might have liked that variant more.

phoenixc

I like the look of the Crossfield, though I am one of those weird people who prefer the more McQuarrie-like one from the pre-production teaser, and I like the idea of the spearhead mechanics. I might actually get one with the coupon or whatever it is the next event campaign awards, though I would have to see what exactly is available.

I would actually like to see the all three versions in the game, the Crossfield, the teaser one, and a well finished version of the one McQuarrie designed for Planet of Titans (the ship never went beyond sketches and low quality concept models but it had a lot of potential).

The bronzish color of the teaser ship almost certainly is from its not having the white/pearlescent ceramic coating most Federation ships have, tritanium is that color naturally and some alloys of it can develop a greenish patina which is why Klingon and Romulan ships tend to look the colors they do since they apparently stopped bothering to coat their hulls after the TOS era. It is why the deflector dish and the inner rings of the choke ring antenna at its base on the TOS ship are that color in fact.