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TOS-era ship Classes as of Star Trek Discovery?
ryan218
Member Posts: 36,106 Arc User
in Ten Forward
So, following my little dive into a TOS-era fanfic, I've been thinking about something a bit more in-depth. I've been trying to get a sense as to what classes were in service when at the time of TOS. Fun. 
I've started by trying to define what canon classes we have into 'Generations' based on what we know from BTS info and what we see on screen (this is heavily-based on Memory Alpha, so usual disclaimers about fan wikis apply). From this:
1. I'm starting with the USS Kelvin being in service around 2230 as per JJTrek, since that scene should take place in the Prime Timeline prior to the singularity. This forms the 'Kelvin Generation'
2. There appear to be at least two design lineages going on in the Fleet at the Battle of the Binaries, based on the Walker and Crossfield Classes respectively. Based on what John Eaves has stated about his design process for these classes, I'm classifying these ships as Early and Late Experimental periods.
3. Last we have the Constitution and her associated classes (several of which are Starfleet Battles designs, but were seen onscreen in ST:III so are technically canon).
Forming the 'Kelvin' Generation, we have the 'USS Kelvin'. Well, that was easy.
Forming the 'Early Experimental' Generation we have the Walker, Cardenas, Engle, Malachowski, Nimitz, Shepard, and Hiawatha Classes, and I'm being cruel calling the Shepards 'experimental' seeing as they seem to be the most populous of all of these.
And this is where the fun begins. Canonically, the Constitution-Class entered service around 2245, so it's generation should go here, even though I've already identified a 'late' experimental period. Why? Because in dialog the USS Discovery is referred to as 'brand new' in 2256, so she's about ten years newer than the USS Enterprise. Logically, the USS Glenn and USS Discovery would have been built around the same time, and given we know of only one other ship of this class (USS Crossfield, the namesake) then the Crossfield and her generation of designs either post-date or are contemporary with the Constitutions. So I'm putting the Constitution generation here. Constitution, Miranda, Saladin, and Hermes Classes.
Now for the Late Experimental Generation. Crossfield-Class, Galaxy-Class (mentioned in the Treaty of Armens on-screen text regarding the Sheliak. Probably a writer's goof, and it isn't referenced in the encyclopedia, but I'll count it here anyway. Based on MA, it was a light long-range explorer), Hoover-Class, and Magee-Class. Again, including the 'Hoover' as an experiment seems harsh given there are four named ships, so it's as 'experimental' as the 'Shepard-Class'. My two ECs? Each experimental class consists of four ships. Seems reasonable, since it means you can form at least a single squadron of one class theoretically.
Anyway, I'd appreciate some thoughts, especially as some here are more knowledgeable than I (and will have the Official Starship Collection magazines for these ships to hand), on how all these classes fit together. Based purely on size and guesstimates, I've calculated that around 2/3 of the 'experimental' class ships would fall into the cruiser weight class (with the Cardenas and Crossfields being 'Heavy' Cruisers), while the 'Shepard' seems logical as a 'Destroyer' type and the 'Magee' and 'Hiawatha' as frigates. But this is, again, based entirely on size and I'd appreciate more detailed thoughts.
Addendum: Also, one neat little happenstance is that based on this, these generations could be categorised roughly by decade, with the 'Experimental' gen being approx 2230s, Constitution gen 2240s, and 'Late Experimental' 2250s.
I've started by trying to define what canon classes we have into 'Generations' based on what we know from BTS info and what we see on screen (this is heavily-based on Memory Alpha, so usual disclaimers about fan wikis apply). From this:
1. I'm starting with the USS Kelvin being in service around 2230 as per JJTrek, since that scene should take place in the Prime Timeline prior to the singularity. This forms the 'Kelvin Generation'
2. There appear to be at least two design lineages going on in the Fleet at the Battle of the Binaries, based on the Walker and Crossfield Classes respectively. Based on what John Eaves has stated about his design process for these classes, I'm classifying these ships as Early and Late Experimental periods.
3. Last we have the Constitution and her associated classes (several of which are Starfleet Battles designs, but were seen onscreen in ST:III so are technically canon).
Forming the 'Kelvin' Generation, we have the 'USS Kelvin'. Well, that was easy.
Forming the 'Early Experimental' Generation we have the Walker, Cardenas, Engle, Malachowski, Nimitz, Shepard, and Hiawatha Classes, and I'm being cruel calling the Shepards 'experimental' seeing as they seem to be the most populous of all of these.
And this is where the fun begins. Canonically, the Constitution-Class entered service around 2245, so it's generation should go here, even though I've already identified a 'late' experimental period. Why? Because in dialog the USS Discovery is referred to as 'brand new' in 2256, so she's about ten years newer than the USS Enterprise. Logically, the USS Glenn and USS Discovery would have been built around the same time, and given we know of only one other ship of this class (USS Crossfield, the namesake) then the Crossfield and her generation of designs either post-date or are contemporary with the Constitutions. So I'm putting the Constitution generation here. Constitution, Miranda, Saladin, and Hermes Classes.
Now for the Late Experimental Generation. Crossfield-Class, Galaxy-Class (mentioned in the Treaty of Armens on-screen text regarding the Sheliak. Probably a writer's goof, and it isn't referenced in the encyclopedia, but I'll count it here anyway. Based on MA, it was a light long-range explorer), Hoover-Class, and Magee-Class. Again, including the 'Hoover' as an experiment seems harsh given there are four named ships, so it's as 'experimental' as the 'Shepard-Class'. My two ECs? Each experimental class consists of four ships. Seems reasonable, since it means you can form at least a single squadron of one class theoretically.
Anyway, I'd appreciate some thoughts, especially as some here are more knowledgeable than I (and will have the Official Starship Collection magazines for these ships to hand), on how all these classes fit together. Based purely on size and guesstimates, I've calculated that around 2/3 of the 'experimental' class ships would fall into the cruiser weight class (with the Cardenas and Crossfields being 'Heavy' Cruisers), while the 'Shepard' seems logical as a 'Destroyer' type and the 'Magee' and 'Hiawatha' as frigates. But this is, again, based entirely on size and I'd appreciate more detailed thoughts.
Addendum: Also, one neat little happenstance is that based on this, these generations could be categorised roughly by decade, with the 'Experimental' gen being approx 2230s, Constitution gen 2240s, and 'Late Experimental' 2250s.
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Now... if we use the Connie as an example of an older design, then use something like the Nimitz and Crossfield as newer designs... look at the evolution of the warp nacelles. Round to square... eventually to rectangular in the TMP era.
To me I see potential design progression.
normal text = me speaking as fellow formite
colored text = mod mode
The 2245 TOS version Enterprise had round engines because they were built into heavily armored tubes and round armor is more protective than flat slabs, not to mention easier to build than the detailed surfaces most of the non-round ones have since you only need full-circle and 'C' shaped sections (the slit was to accommodate the unavoidable grilles on the inboard sides of the nacelles). It is likely that all round engine ships built around the mid 2200s were armored, windowless wartime-build ships like the TOS Constitution class, though that is just speculation.
Originally that war was supposed to be with the Klingons and was the cause of the cold war between them and the Federation that was shown in TOS, but DSC went a different route so who knows who the Federation fought so desperately with in the early to mid 2240s that lead to building space-tanks like the Constitution class. That thick armor is why the hull has that blunted, slightly hammered look like some armored vehicles or those that use armor for weight like a fork lift have.
The ship had nine inches of dense tritanium armor over a light duranium alloy pressure hull, and according to dialog in The Conscience of the King the only windows that look out onto space are the three windows in each of the two catwalks in the shuttlebay section.
The glowing window-like patches on the hull are probably secondary sensors (note that they look exactly like the officially identified sensors like the big square patches on the upper hull) dispersed around it to make knocking all out difficult, and arranged that way because of aesthetics, and also explains why there are some of the "windows" in impossible areas like on the nacelle struts.
Another allegory that has bearing here is that the Constitution class is really what is known today as a fast battleship (like the realworld Iowa class) but the Federation council would not approve a battleship so Starfleet withdrew the proposal, then like Mr. Haney from Green Acres, turned around and came back with a "new" proposal for a heavy cruiser which was the exact same ship as before with a less "offensive" designation of heavy cruiser.
Roddenberry put that in as an allegory to the battle he had with NBC about it (he thought of it as a fast battleship but NBC was against "warlike" ship designations with words like "battle" in them), though of course he could not put it into dialog in the show itself (you have to listen to one of his convention talks for that) he did call the ship a battleship fairly often in interviews.
The Saladin and Hermes are nice looking designs though they are technically only quasi-canon since they only appeared as diagrams on screens in the background, the same way the Orion Wanderer is (though the Wanderer has an even better claim than the Franz Joseph ones since technically the terms of the license Paramount issued FASA effectively gave them joint ownership of anything FASA designed for the game though the terms were never tested in court). They were probably redesigned Kelvin types stripped down the the essentials and the weight that was freed up used for armor and heavier offensive systems.
Likewise the late-TOS (movie) era Galaxy class is fanon, it was an ultra-long range explorer from a novel which Paramount in all probability loosely based the TNG ship on, and was so well known that the slush readers probably missed the fact that the reference was to a third party ship and not the one in the show. As far as I know of there has never been anything but a rather sketchy text description of it so you could probably make it look like anything you want. The first of the TNG Galaxy class ships did not enter service until 2360.
One interesting thing is that both the Crossfield class and the original Planet of Titans ship class (they never gave it an actual class name) are canon since one is the hero ship in DSC and the other was in the background in TMP and the mothball yard in TNG (the model was only a concept-grade one so could not be used in foreground shots without looking bad). Unlike the Crossfield class, the PoT ship class was the reverse of the norm, with the delta-shaped hull the main ship (a descendent of the warp delta shown in the ENT credits most likely) with a saucer-shaped planetary lander/science section perched on its nose.
In addition to the Kelvin type ships there is probably something that looks very much like a Constitution class. Commodore Decker's ship had a hull number predating the Constitution class, and on a chart in the episode Court Martial it was listed as a Mk. VII while Enterprise (and the Constitution itself) was listed as a Mk. IX. It is therefore likely that the Constitution was a modification of an earlier ship class built on the same general hullform.
Not necessarily, an argument could be made that Nero's actions changed not just the future of the JJverse, but also it's past. Each of the Prime series has had their crew at one time or another go back in time and interact with/change the past, and the massive amount of death and destruction Nero caused would have changed or outright prevented all of those incidents of time travel, which would then have ripple effects on the rest of the timeline. So this could lead to all kinds of differences such as Starfleet following different design aesthetics, different people serving on different vessels, or even people existing in one timeline but not the other.
For example, I think it would be highly unlikely for the events of First Contact to happen in the JJverse (there are any number of potential reasons why). If that didn't happen then the Borg didn't kill a bunch of people at Cochrane's settlement, and there weren't any drones in the arctic waiting to assimilate that Starfleet research team during Enterprise. That's a bunch of people left alive who were dead in the Prime timeline, and a change like that would have MASSIVE ripple effects on subsequent events either from actions they would take later on or from children they would later have who never existed in Prime.
Obviously CBS can decide to go any direction they want with that, but if you think about it logically then the Kelvin should not exist in the Prime timeline in the same way that it did in the JJverse. So unless it someday appears in a Prime series I wouldn't factor the Kelvin's design into any attempts at interpreting the TOS era ship design lineage. I personally would classify the Walker as a post-Romulan War design, most of the others as part of a more recent pre-Constitution generation, and I'd assume the Crossfield used this older nacelle design because it was the test platform for a new drive system that, if successful, would make warp drive little more than a backup form of FTL.
True, in fact one of the two creators of the 2009 Trek (I forget offhand if it was Orci or Kurtzman) actually said that ripples of change went in both directions on the new timeline. That could explain the picture window on the Kelvin's bridge.
There is also the fact that temporal physics does not work the same on that "timeline", all the paradoxes that formed Prime Trek are impossible there because the grandfather paradox does not exist there. If you go back in time and change something it causes a branch and you just ride that branch out of the timeline at that point.
The thing is, DSC has distorted things so much that there is little that could explain such sweeping changes without a different stack of paradoxes than TOS and the rest had.
And I'd just like to point out for anyone who suggests DSC retcons too much of TOS; in 'Conscience of a King' Kirk flirts with and seduces Karidian's/Kodos' nineteen-year-old daughter. Kirk, who is in his thirties. Now, that sort of thing doesn't worry me so much as long as its a healthy and genuinely affectionate relationship, but it is a problematic phenomena for a lot of people and did raise my attention rewatching the episode last week. On top of that, pretty much every ST series since TOS has made at least a minor retcon to TOS - heck, TOS even retconned TOS!
In any case, this thread isn't really about timelines, but just an attempt to see how the DSC ship designs can fit into the era they represent. On the FASA designs point - if we can consider Jeffries' scale diagram of the USS Enterprise next to a D7 which you can barely make out the detail of on-screen, I think the appearance of the Paladin and Hermes-Class diagrams in ST:III should also stand, even if the names aren't exactly canon. Same for the Arnem Treaty Galaxy-Class, even if it was (as I speculated in my original post) a writers' goof.
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I think the FASA and Franz Joseph should be considered full canon too since they did appear in official productions even if only by way of diagrams, I suspect the only reason they are not is because Paramount lawyers probably pointed out that they may end up paying royalties to the other parties if they did that. Studios are loth to do that even though those royalties are usually trivial expense-wise (Virginia Hey has mentioned at conventions and interviews that residuals from Farscape, which are a similar thing, are about enough to buy a gallon of milk a year for example).
The Constitution/Saladin/Hermies trio along with the Ptolemy class tug (which is also one of the background monitor ships), perhaps along with a few FASA ships like the Loknar class cruiser (which has the same heavy struts idea as as the movie era ships) make a great stable of wartime builds, and the expense of scrapping hulls that heavily armored could very well keep them around for a while like the Enterprise herself.
In fact, the relative ease of scrapping the thin-skinned, more shield-and-field dependent DSC ships instead of upgrading their obsolete systems would make a good explanation of why you don't see them out on the frontier in the TOS era.
The timing is just right for that to have happened, Burnham's war was probably fought with older equipment built in the '30s (and 2240s from those older tried and true plans) and as it was destroyed or damaged past the point of economical repair they probably did not replace a lot of it, only rebuilding the most successful designs with newer systems and tweaks (which probably changed their look) and starting to phase in what were termed the "old workhorse" classes in movie era like the Miranda with their new set of aesthetics.
So its not hard to see which ships remained after the war, and which would be scrapped for poor quality.
Hast thou not felt ashamed of thy words and deeds
Hast thou not lacked vigor
Hast thou exerted all possible efforts
Hast thou not become slothful
I'd say the Malachowski and Magee were replaced by the Miranda and Oberth respectively in role and duty. The Shepard, Cardenas, and Nimitz are clearly the Excelsiors of their day. Who knows about the Engle, Hoover, or Helios, they're ugly.
DSC never had a problem fitting into the timeline established since ENT aired. It's that blip in the '40s that sticks out.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
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According to dialog the NX had a composite metal hull, a sandwich with a heavy slab of tritanium in the middle, a thick later of duranium on the inner surface and some dull silver-gray outer coating (which could be a thin outer layer of duranium but they were not specific). It was implied that those different layers were how they were able to polarize the hull (which makes sense, that layering is how real-world capacitors work more or less). While the outer layer was probably a metal, since the bulk was tritanium with the silver-gray metallic looking stuff over it I would not call it exactly "bare" even if it is metal.
The Kelvin and DSC ships probably used whatever metallic coating the NX had, or else a shiny grayish ceramic coating, except for the Hiawatha which had a simple, fragile, titanium (not tritanium) hull according to dialog and must have depended entirely on its shields and SIF fields from the way that it collapsed under its own weight in less than one gravity when powered down.
Up until the ENT series most or all of the Federation ships had a white or opalescent ceramic outer coating, the original Enterprise had flat white, the "refit" Enterprise had the pearlescent on its maiden voyage but was recoated in flat white later. I have no idea what the carrier version of the Enterprise that appeared in DSC was supposed to have for a coating, though whatever it was it was definitely NOT bare tritanium since that metal is a gold or deep bronze color (sometimes with a green patina) depending on the exact alloy used, not silvery gray.
For reference, according to dialog in TNG Klingon ships used bare tritanium hulls which is what gave their ships the dark brownish green or green color (and since the TMP ones have the same look they probably started leaving the coatings off around 2270). It is probably safe to assume that the Romulan ships look the way they do because the tritanium alloy they use has a strongly green patina, though both Klingons and Romulans coated their hulls with some light gray substance at least during the 2260s.
And what makes you think the TOS ship looked "primitive"? The naturalistic Euler spiral based original design was more sophisticated and elegant than the art deco industrial looking later ones.
At least in my own head canon, DSC era ships are the older designs coming out of the ENT period, and TOS ships are the state of the art advanced ships in the 2260’s. The NCC-1701 Enterprise of Captain Kirk’s first 5 year mission (2265 to 2270) is a state of the art cruiser after refit in 2264, not a resurrected relic. No other ship except, maybe USS Voyager, took the pounding the TOS USS Enterprise did and still come out to tackle the next mission. That tells me state of the art materials and design along with a heroic captain and crew.
I can also see the progression from TOS design to TMP design as a refit. I personally prefer TOS over TMP design, but can see the progression from TOS to TMP design.
I wouldn't call a 20 year-old ship a 'relic', and it was already established in dialog as around that age in TOS I believe. Also, able to take a beating =/= state-of-the-art. HMS Warspite was a British Battleship which was built in 1915, fought and was crippled at the Battle of Jutland, modernised during the 1930s, and served as flagship of the Mediterranean Fleet in WW2. She suffered a 500lb bomb hit at Crete, knocking out several secondary gun batteries and ripping open her side (as well as killing 38 crewmen); then in 1943 she was hit by two Fritz-X guided bombs (each with a warhead over 700lb), with one narrowly missing the ship itself and tearing open the torpedo bulge and the other hitting amidships near the funnel, going through several decks, exploding in the boiler rooms, and blowing a 20ft hole in her hull (blowing out the double bottom) and she didn't sink. To put that into perspective, the much-newer Italian Battleship RM Roma was also hit (in her case two direct hits, in nearly the same location) was completely crippled by one bomb, which almost broke her keel on its own, and a second bomb caused her magazines to explode. A US and British cruiser were also hit once each, and in both cases the bombs passed straight through the ships' and the concussive blast blew out their boilers.
Warspite was finally scrapped after running aground on her way (ironically) to be scrapped in 1947, by which point she was over 30 years old. She was affectionately known as 'the Grand Old Lady'. Kirk's Enterprise being an older ship doesn't make it a relic - if it did, then Warspite was even worse off by the start of WW2.
On the subject of the Discovery-Era ships, the issue you have there is the Discovery is specifically referred to as 'brand new' in its first appearance. That's why I split the ships we see in Discovery into two categories, one pre-Connie and one post-Connie.
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#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Except, funnily enough, their warships.
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In the same way, something like the trick Khan used to cripple Enterprise in the movie would not have worked so well against the heavily armored TOS configuration of the ship because while the refit had massively stronger shields they were not up when Khan launched his surprise attack. Without shields the thin skin of the refit could not significantly blunt the attack where the nine inch thick tritanium armor of the TOS version would have, perhaps even enough to keep the ship in fighting condition and avoid the rest of the events of the movie.
Out of curiosity, where does the 9-inch armour figure come from? I don't recall anything remotely that specific in the show, and there's nothing on defences at all in Franz Joseph's tech manual.
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Roddenberry mentioned it in convention talks, supposedly he cooked it up with Jefferies and the number is mentioned in some of the internal documentation for the show but the only time it was actually put into a script it got cut for time (just like the reference to Sulu returning from a Starfleet Intelligence mission to explain his absence from the show for a number of episodes, and was an inside joke referring to his The Green Berets character he was away playing) so was never actually mentioned in the show itself. Some people consider it canon because of that, some don't, but that was the intention nevertheless.
That armor was why the ship never had big holes blown in it like later ships did, the hull breaches mostly consisted of blown seams leaking air (sometimes fast enough to depressurize sections) rather than the people-swallowing things that are so popular in DSC and Kelvin stuff.
> Out of curiosity, where does the 9-inch armour figure come from? I don't recall anything remotely that specific in the show, and there's nothing on defences at all in Franz Joseph's tech manual.
Phoenix does that all the time, stating things as fact nobody heard about and if asked source it with undocumented convention talks. This is not to diminish their postings, I find that kind of information interesting. However, @phoenixc#0738 I personally would wish that these bits would be specificly marked as non-canon or hypothesis because if it never made it into canon it doesn't hold water in these debates.
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It is the colour of the underlying metal and not painted so it's bare metal.
Other than the Walker (which isn't a Kelvin or DSC era ship anyway) all the ships seen in DSC are also bare metal. Some are darker than the NX and some are lighter.
No ships are made of ceramic. Ironically the only one that could feasibly be is the NX due to the hull polarisation thing being based on making ceramics harder with electricity. But also no, the only white ships were the TMP era ships (and the Sovy in FC). TOS was matte grey (onscreen anyway) and the TNG ships were a mix of greys with some pastel greens and blues.
VGR and DS9 introduced a whole host of different colours from metallic silvers (Sovereign) to greenish greys (Intrepid). Some of those could be said to be coated with paint of sorts (especially the matte ones) but some (like the Prometheus or Sovereign) look more like they have patterns painted on certain parts of an otherwise bare metal ship.
The TOS Enterprise is grey not white. The DSC version is a pearlescent grey metal with no paint on it and readily reflects the ambient lighting of the scene.
I'm reasonably certain that nearly every word of that is made up and is also irrelevant. Aliens be aliens, how their ships are built has no impact on how Starfleet ships look.
The fact that it's a primitive 60s model and not a more sophisticated one built to the higher standards of every other show in the franchise. Compared to every other major design branch from an in-universe perspective it lacks warp plasma viability, hull detail, weapons points, a pretty hull material, flowing shapes, swept pylons, built in features, bridge windows, and basically any feature recognisable as Starfleet other than the very basic saucer, hull, nacelles configuration.
Which is an issue because every feature present on the Crossfield is also found on the Cardenas, Engle, Helios, Hiawatha, Hoover, Magee, Malachowski, Nimitz, and Shepard and next to none are found from those ships on the Constitution (the DSC version anyway) other than the hull material. So there's no evidence from a design standpoint that some of them can pre-date the Conni and some can post-date it.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
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The Shepard, Malachowski, Engle, Walker, etc (everything I put in Early Experimental) all have red bussard collectors. The Crossfield, Hoover, and Magee all have blue or indistinct bussard collectors. Crossfield (or Discovery at least) came after the Constitution-Class, as established by onscreen dialogue, so I'm extrapolating that the other two do as well.
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The colour of the collectors is of lesser importance than the fact that the nacelles are the same style across all of them (boxy, three bussards, no caps, no plasma) except the Walker (pylons attach to the short axis rather than long one with no visible bussards) whereas the Conni features nacelles more in common with the Kelvin than any of the DSC ships. It'd be a very unusual step to go from the nacelles on the Shepard, to the Conni, then back to the Hoover when the Shepard's features, in every aspect of it, are the same as the Hoover. There's also things like the bridge designs and deflectors that match the DSC ships together separate from the Conni.
It'd be like going from the Ambassador, to the Intrepid, then back to the Galaxy.
I do think the DSC ship consist of several generations, but I can only see all of them being from the '50s other than the Hiawatha (and, obviously, the Walker).
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
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I disagree. It's entirely plausible Starfleet had an unstable experimental phase where they, to use a real-world analogy, went from Arleigh Burke, to Zumwalt, then back to Arleigh Burke, (except in this case it would be AB to Z to AB to Future Surface Combatant).
Trials of Blood and Fire
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No one but you said anything about ceramic hulls, what I said was CERAMIC COATING (as mentioned in TNG dialog, which in turn was probably based on comments from Jefferies that the white was not paint but rather an advanced ceramic coating) over the metal of the hull which is completely different from a ceramic hull. As a guess I would say they probably use something like the plasma coat process though probably a much more advanced version than we have today.
As for exactly what color it was not light gray originally, though film deterioration and restoration, and later digital models, may make it look a little like it. If you look at the original shooting model in the Smithsonian it is an off-white with a faint green undertone similar to but much lighter than mintcream, which was designed to look as white as possible on camera without it washing out completely. The only parts that were supposed to be gray were the shield emitter lines, which were carefully drawn on the model in pencil graphite.
It did have streaks of gray and gray-green grunge on it though you really cannot see that as something distinct even on the original 35mm footage (I had a lot of the slides that were "printed" directly from the original negatives back in the day). Anyway, they made the ship white as a nod to Roosevelt's Great White Fleet (the book The Making Of Star Trek reprints memos talking about what they wanted the ship to look like and that was one of the factors, Roddenberry just loved his allegories).
Again according to dialog (this time in ENT) the NX hull was mostly tritanium with a "duranium backing" or "duranium lining". Just watch it if you don't believe me, they say it in a number of episodes. The outside surface was not tritanium though or it would look like a bronze alloy like a Klingon ship does. The TOS Enterprise was specified as having tritanium armor over a duranium pressure hull, I suppose the ENT description could be a clumsy description of the same kind of arrangement the NCC1701 had since the later Trek series liked to dumb dialog down to junior high level (or less) like most modern TV series do.
And no, your argument that Klingons are aliens is totally irrelevant, tritanium is tritanium no matter if it is on a Fed ship or an alien one, the only thing that is relevant is that the Klingons use tritanium hulls and don't bother coating it with something else like the Federation does (and that is mentioned in dialog in TNG, it is not speculation).
The fact is, both Roddenberry and Jefferies said the deflector dish and choke ring antenna rings in TOS were bare tritanium, in TNG dialog says the Klingon ships are bare tritanium (though with higher tritanium percentage alloy than the Federation uses) which locks what Roddenberry and Jefferies said into hard canon no matter how you look at it.
As for the DSC Enterprise, that almost battleship gray surface is considerably darker than the ceramic coating (not paint) that the TOS ship and most of the other hero ships had in other Trek series. Whatever it is it looks a lot like some of the gray titanium oxide coating you see on some knives and machine parts so it is possible they use that for a hull coating in DSC (and maybe even ENT though it does not look quite right for that).
The TOS Enterprise model actually holds up a lot better than any other sci-fi model of the time, it was quite sophisticated and detailed even compared to movies from that decade and most of the following one. All of the lights on the model had to be real physical light installations (the model got quite hot because of the main lights inside the hull that lit the "windows" without damaging it) because of the lack of CGI, which made the model itself more sophisticated than any other Trek model except the Galaxy version with its rather intricate motorized separation mechanics.
It is a shame that most of the TOS detailing is invisible because of the limitations of the filming process and no one has made any attempt to recreate them in a series since HD became viable for home viewing.
The fact that all of the special effects had to be done on film sandwiches run though a triple-head compositor does drag down the quality of the finished SFX a bit, especially with the lack of the bright backlit additive color effects available in the 1980s that TNG used to produce the "plasma" glows you seem so enamored of, but they made up for it in things like the intricate Bussard lighting that is so much more than the oversimplified digital version of them used in In a Mirror, Darkly and most of the other recreations.
The design aesthetics themselves were quite different from the Treks that followed. The TOS style was clean and elegant with playful hints of organic forms and symmetry precisely because they wanted to break away from the industrial art deco look that Flash Gordon and all the other low budget sci-fi tended to have. Jefferies stressed that the hull should be clean and smooth because everything should be serviceable from the inside, and of course armor is of little use if you hang all kinds of systems outside of it.
DSC goes totally in the opposite direction, and when I see the DSC Enterprise I find myself half expecting to see rivets in the close outside shots. To me it has a kind of WWI/early neon age look to it with its grungy crude-looking hull plating, transparent picture window on the bridge, simplified geometry, mechanistic strut angles, primitive turrets instead of the gliding track phasers of TOS, and the same overall busy art-deco-with-neon look that every Hollywood lemming and their dog uses nowadays under the mistaken assumption that it somehow looks "futuristic".
Except, again, there's nothing to distinguish the two section besides the colour of the bussards.
Going from the Kelvin to the Conni to the Shepard to the Crossfield to the Excelsior is a logical flow that fits all of the evidence onscreen. Going from the Kelvin to the Shepard to the Conni to the Crossfield to the Excelsior is a weird jump.
If the Conni was the only ship of its style then it may be feasible to say the designers went mad and reverted to primitive round nacelles after building the Shepard and so many others with boxy ones before writing it off as a failure and re-reverting to the boxy ones right up to the Cheyenne.
But the Conni isn't the only ship with those style of nacelles, the Huron and Antares freighters have them, as do the Cargo Drones, and various automated looking TAS background ships showing that there's a whole line of ships following the Conni's tech so it's not just an one-off experiment in the middle of a run. To date, the show has never shown a newly built ship of a previous style being built after newer ships replace it, to place the Conni in-between the 50s designs would be to do just that.
@phoenixc I don't really care what the hull materials are supposedly made of or if you're accurately quoting the show (as sourceless as it is) the fact remains that some ships appear to be bare metal and some appear to be painted, that's all I was saying and that's all that matters.
It's also irrelevant how the models look offscreen, it only matters what they look like on-screen (because off-screen they're plastic, wood, or data), it also matters even less what anybody says behind the screen because words don't make it into the episodes and have no baring on what things are (what they claimed were communications dishes are in fact deflectors for example).
So a first half of non-canon information presented as either in-universe fact or canonical and the second half is just complaining about how modern visual effects aren't as good as your olden day ones when real paper and string was used and none of these damn kids and their damn digital paper and string. Some things haven't changed in the period I've been off.
I would have thought it was obvious, from how I presented it, that my opinion on the style of the TOS Conni is nothing more than that, opinion. It didn't really need a small tangent about what was intended in ye olde days and how futurism in the '60s differs from futurism in the '10s and '20s. We get it, people like different stuff. And regardless of either of our opinions the Conni is an anomalous design in the internal Star Trek universe not fitting in with the metallic realism of every other series which is not debatable.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
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True, the various classes probably do not reflect design styles changing from decade to decade as much as reflecting different shipyards with different design teams all building their own ideas of how to meet the construction contract requirements. It is highly doubtful that they just Xeroxed off a big batch of ships once a decade or whatever that were all the same style, it is almost certainly a case of building various designs in various places each having a look influenced by the aesthetics of the local designers and the needs of the role the ship was to fill.
Realistically is unlikely to be the case of some overarching "this is the aesthetic for this decade, that is the one for another" design logic as much as it is probably a case of all the styles are out there somewhere but we are only seeing the ones that happen to be wherever the stories take place.
On the real world end, Star Trek suffered for a long time from the expense of making good shooting models so they showed only two Federation designs, one Klingon design, and one Romulan design in the whole series, and TNG recycled a lot of the movie ships and generally reused the same models with minor modifications or flipped upsidedown or end for end to represent a wider range of ships.
Even after they started using digital models they tended to modify and reuse or press meshes designed for other projects into use because of time and budget considerations (the ultimate example of that is the silly cut-n-paste fleets in PIC) so while the potential is there for a more realistic design mix those constraints along with distinct (and often narrow) the showrunners had of what looked good still made the result fall far short of that potential.
It is also probably a significant part of why in the digital age the ships are all based on art deco aesthetics since the simple geometry and industrial mechanistic symmetry of art deco is much much easier to do quickly in 3D modeling programs than the Euler spiral cross-sections and organic golden-ratio based angles, symmetry, and proportions of the googie style the TOS ship was designed with. The TOS style Enterprise is probably more "anomalous" because of those time and money considerations than because of its aesthetics.
And I see we agree that the aesthetics are a matter of personal point of view. I was not saying you are wrong in an absolute objective sense, only that the blanket statement that the TOS Enterprise looks "primitive" and the later ones look "sophisticated" is entirely subjective and not true for everyone, and gave examples of the opposite point of view from yours (which is how I and a lot of other traditional Trek fans see it).
As for the materials thing, I was not making it up and they do make those points I identified as coming from dialog in the shows themselves. Also, the offscreen parts like the production memos and intentions of the creative people on the shows is still important in gaining an understanding of what exactly it is being shown on the shows, though I suppose that analytic style of fandom has given away to the casual popcorn and eye-candy craving crowd long ago.
Compare the Battlestar Galactica from the new series to the Galactica from the old. I prefer the old series, but I will admit I find the new design a lot prettier to look at than the old one because there are fewer - frakking - greeblies and there's some rhyme and reason to it. A lot of the modern trek ships have introduced 'interesting' shapes that at best don't make sense, and at worst completely destroy an otherwise good design. The same goes for interior design. The DSC Enterprise engineering is...well...it's a cavern. The Discovery could spore drive into it!
Trials of Blood and Fire
Moving On Parts 1-3 - Part 4
In Cold Blood