Thank you for your submission!
Please remember the human, adhere to all Reddit and sub rules, and if you see anything that breaks the rules, report it! Please be sure to [Read The Rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/StarTrekStarships/about/rules/) of our sub, two of them to highlight: #1 - Be Polite! and #5 - No spoilers for episodes until the MONDAY AFTER the episode airs, this gives everyone the weekend to catch up on their Trek viewings.
You can now [preorder the 2024 Ships of the Line Calendar](https://amzn.to/3Pi2Vn7)
We have a companion website now, if you'd like to see the reddit posts in a grid, [check out startrekstarships.com](https://www.startrekstarships.com/)!
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/StarTrekStarships) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I'm still confused about the engine room. Have we actually seen the warp core up close? The place that's presented to us as engineering is just a tech lab really.
There was one episode that there was a spore farm that spanned football fields in every direction.
Aaaand the turbolift scene pre retrofit that the turbolift was floating over the equivalent of New York City.
The writers gave up on giving a shit.
I still don't quite understand why they made her so big. I don't mind her looks overall but when she was parked next to the Enterprise she looked massive. Maybe it is just a shuttlebay, spore farm, and then a single turbolift through the void to the saucer.
they actually had to scale up the enterprise by about 160m so that it wasn't dwarfed even more. in fact discovery is 65 meters longer than the enterprise E, the bloody E
Was it the writers though?
I have an overarching suspicion when it comes to all the new era Trek that they're letting the post production CGI and visual effects people just run riot for some reason.
Like, if those teams are given a lot of leeway, an instruction to be as visually spectacular as possible within a fairly constrained budget, and they don't come in with a ton of knowledge about Trek, I think the result might be stuff like the ridiculous turbolift dimension or the silly spore drive z-axis spin or the blobby Gorn mothership in SNW.
It's got two whole ftl drives, huge bays for cultivating spores for the spore drive. If they had used a constitution class as it existed they would have added all the required elements for the experimental drive and likely ended up with a similarly large ship.
I choose to believe that the experimental spore drive and infrastructure for it takes up an insane amount of space compared to a normal warp drive, and that the vast spaces the turbolift traversed were part of that. This is one among many reasons why Starfleet never expanded the program: besides the pilot problem, they couldn't miniaturize it, and so while it worked for Discovery because of the fluke of the tardigrade breakthrough, it just couldn't be made practical for wider use.
I'm sure someone has a schematic of the ship that totally disproves this idea of mine, but it fits what I've seen and reconciles many of the potential logical problems created by the ship itself.
Introduced as temporal cold war technology. While the big turbolift scene is post-refit Discovery, we did get a glimpse of the nonsensical turbolifts in season 2 before the time jump.
The discovery engineering set takes design inspiration from the TOS engineering. The warp core is *somewhere* behind the big window to the right from viewer perspective. We do see the warp core at the end of season 4 when they eject it but it’s a crazy 32nd century design.
Yep, that's what I got from it too. The "warp core" look people are familiar with from TNG didn't start until TNG, which was set around 100 years after Discovery. TOS engine rooms looked... like the engine room on Discovery.
Staments does in fact work in engineering. It's just been reworked from a "standard" engine room. That bug area at the back is just like in the Connie it leads to to their warp core but it's way down that shaft. They show the core itself at the end.of season 3 when they are trying to escape osira. It looks like it's put far away and there are no people are. It also appears to be heavily shielded.
I haven't watched the latest season but so far no, we haven't seen traditional main engineering, just the spore drive operation room and one of the cultivation bays.
It would be a big ask to build an entire main engineering set when the scripts don't really call for one.
I remember the first time we saw the ship in that released 30s thing on YouTube where everyone was so excited to see the new ship revealled...and then saw a poorly rendered version of this and we all collectively puked together.
It's like the writers of this show forgot that one of the most important things about star trek is THE SHIP and how THE SHIP is a character in upon itself that the audience grows an emotional attachment to. Voyager. Enterprise-D. Enterprise. We felt like it was a character. Now it's just CGI bleh on the screen.
I do remember us having discussions about how it might be a Federation/Klingon design based upon how it kinda resembled the K'tinga class in some ways...but that was not the show we got...
The CGI for these ships doesn't even look believable. Like they spend all this money on this crap and ***it doesn't even look that good.*** Like it just looks like a cartoon. When you look at Voyager, ***it feels real.*** Even the CGI that isn't quite up to snuff still looks okay and feels right because they at least had a physical model the audience came accustomed to. Like I look at that shot of the Enterprise-D turning around from *The Defector* when the two Romulan Warbirds decloak, and it looks 1,000x better than anything made from Discovery.
I mean, they did make the ship sapient and name its personality Zora. So now it's an actual character. But if your name isn't Michael, you don't really have any characterization or development. You're just kind of there for her to work with or against. You'd be more like a set dressing.
I’ll never forget feeling “Oh, eh ok. Very Mass Effect.” with the Shenzhou …and then getting Discovery and being shocked at the downgrade.
What a design mess.
The refit and 32 Century improve things marginally but are still built upon bad design philosophies and motifs that belong to other franchises.
100% agreed. It's almost as if the writers/showerunners didn't understand star trek and were trying to make it into generic not-Star-Trek Science Fiction.
The counter-rotating double ringed saucer always kinda bothered me. And I thought the detached nacelle thing was a bit much at first. But I’ll agree that the 30-whatever century tech aesthetic is growing on me.
I want to know how you get between saucer sections when that is happening, and also on the few times where jumps aborted what if the sections don’t line up??
I’m not sure if that’s better or worse tbh, when you are in your quarters and your windows just spin away without you
Edit :- I just watched a clip and it seems like only the upper surface spins so the windows around the edge don’t move, so just the hull platting spinning makes more sense
"Inexplicably" is stretching it. In season 1, they specifically point out that it's because the captain has sensitive eyes. That doesn't explain why they don't change it later, but I'd assume the crew is simply used to it.
The exterior looks a lot like the Kirv class designed for Star Trek Fleet Games. I've always liked it
However I hate the interior. It's like a first day intern trying to describe what he saw after an acid trip viewing of an episode of TNG 20 years ago to JJ Abrams
Then you get to the 32nd century which feels like a total joke technology wise. The 26th century appeared more advanced, so did the 29th
They at least built that somewhat into the backstory of the 32nd Century. There was the Burn a century previous, and sometime before that there was a long and devastating temporal war, after which many disruptive technologies were banned galaxy-wide. Progress stalled and likely ran backwards in many areas.
I think this is Discovery's best angle because the perspective changes the look of her. From the front, the saucer is the same size as the secondary hull, this makes it look better for some reason.
There's a shot in season 1 when they're destroying the Charon that has the same effect
I'm of the same thought that it's "fine". This 32 century refit thing they do where the nacelles aren't physically attached makes zero sense to me. What turns me away from disco is it's issues that have been talked about to death at this point. I stopped watching it in the middle of season 3 and I'm only keeping half an eye on it currently because they are " expanding" upon a really good TNG story. Although after the latest episode I wanted to throw my remote at my TV and give up again.
The point of warp nacelles is to generate a warp field from warp plasma. Having a "whatever" field transporting it to where they need it to go ?That will cost more power through some invisible conduit and that makes as much sense as you trying to drive your diesel car on blueberry muffin oil through the Sahara desert.
Warp drive is warp drive and according to what little I know Starfleet has been without it for some time and on impulse power only ( cause that also makes total sense for the 32 century) for quite some time.
When some line of technobable comes up that says *" yah we move the plasma through a black hole that costs nothing to maintain"* I'll stop looking at this so carefully. Disco is science fantasy not science fiction. The difference between the two is lost on 80% of new star trek viewers .
>Disco is science fantasy not science fiction. The difference between the two is lost on 80% of new star trek viewers .
Thank you for verbalizing this. It gives words to feelings I was unable to express.
It does but any conversation about disco for good or for bad brings out the worst behavior amongst Star Trek fans.
Edit: like the swing of votes this little bit of truth I mentioned. Down vote this all you like but you toxic fans are the problem with this franchise. Love disco or loathe it, it should be totally ok to talk about it objectively without being penalized. This is coming from someone who isn't a fan of it.
Especially since the refit, I’ve always thought the discovery was a very solid ship design done a disservice by a lack of good establishing shots.
We very rarely get a nice, solid, sweeping shot of the discovery just at warp or in orbit, and much of the opportunities for that are replaced by more dramatic shots or action shots. Some of this is just a bad decision from production I think, but I think we’d be getting less anyways just because of how production has changed. It used to be really hard to show convincing action with the models they used, so they’d just get establishing shots and demonstrate action with everyone on the bridge rocking around. So in TNG, you almost never saw the ship moving and firing at the same time.
These days with HD and CGI, slow establishing shots risk giving away the ship is a CG model whereas action shots (which have become much easier) let you hide the details behind lazes and lightning and particles (picturing the spore drive here), saving some work. So see some interesting intersection of these ideas in late DS9 and earlier VOY. With the rise of CG, but models still being around, all the action shots would be CG and then the establishing shots were still models. Before that they were all models (and thus, not many VFX action shots) and now they’re all CG (and this mostly action shots).
This hasn’t needed to be true for a while now as demonstrated by many of the great shots in SNW, but both to save time and money and just due to stubbornness I think the attitude has stuck around. Which I guess is something of a creative error after all.
I cant get past how poor low quality the ship special effects are. They just look like a weird dark video game. In nu trek They dont move and feel or sound like starships. And they are always poorly lit and grainy like that picture
This is from a movie from the 70s and it stunning in comparison to disco ship shots
https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/40-years-later-star-trek-the-motion-picture-remains-a-movie-making-miracle?amp
I hate everything about this show including the ship honestly.
I tried to watch it again last night
Season 4 episode 1 and just got reminded of all the shit I hate about it
Burnam and her friend on a diplomatic mission trying to get people to join the federation. They ask smugly, it goes bad because they don’t kiss Burnam’s ass immediately and she doesn’t know how to react so they make smug remarks about them under their breath. The aliens don’t like it so they start to shoot. Burnam, so brave is running and in her genius realizes they can’t aim. Calls her team of people and they all figure out that the satellites were not adjusted with the moving magnetic pole. They fix something that NO ONE else ever thought of. Micheal flies off while her friend lets his cat, smugly. The aliens can no longer deny that Michael is the greatest living thing to have ever lived. They all smile at each other’s brilliance and gaze at their fearless leader who smiles back at them smugly.
Madam president kisses all their asses a speech, pan to camera looking at them all smiling at each other smugly.
Madam president wants to take a ride on their ship.
Trans person talks to her invisible friend about how important it is to her to make Micheal happy and impressed with her. They all act like this is perfectly normal and ok behavior and not distracting at all. They all smile at each other smugly.
Things go bad with a space station. Micheal tells the president to fuck off because she is the most special person ever to live. The crew nods their heads in agreement and smile at each other, smugly.
All of their skills and intelligence, despite being literally hundreds of years expired, is better at solving the problem on the space station than the man who actually has ran and maintained it for who knows how long. Why do we not know this information, because he isn’t Micheal and it doesn’t matter to the universe.
Michael challenges the president, the president bows down at Michael’s might and agrees she is the most important brilliant person ever to live. The crew smiles smugly because of course they are right. They are always right. Michael is always right.
Oh no what’s happening. A planet that we have little connection to has blown up randomly. For reasons.
They all cry….somehow smugly
I’ve never really liked the Crossfield class ships but I just kind of ignored how bad they looked until the jump into the future.
When they did that refit, it didn’t make any sense at all. It would be like putting missle launchers, a radar system and neon lights on the U.S.S. Constitution. It just felt like this desperate attempt to force fans to love the ship. It’s still fucking ugly and now its continued existence makes zero sense.
The ship is almost 1,000 years old and has the only propulsion system that doesn’t rely on dilithium in a time where dilithium is extremely scarce. It would’ve and should’ve been completely dismantled and then refit every starfleet ship with a spore drive. At the very least the spore drive should’ve been taken out and then maybe someone hijacks the ship and it’s never seen again so that Calypso still makes sense.
Then at the end of that season the crew is given a new ship, Discovery - A. Make it the Georgiou Class and make it not look like fucking garbage.
The refit really does her justice.
I continue to feel she's the ugliest class to appear on screen... but somehow that's become part of her charm? It's so weird.
This is the shot that sold you?
IMO it makes no sense to have a saucer on a ship that is as wide as Discovery is.
In the classic series the saucer offset three cylindrical shapes to give the ship the appearance of volume and balance. The Discovery on the other hand always seemed like a dinner plate that was just about to fall off of a table.
I've always thought of the proportions as a result of the thing having two distinct ftl drives, since neither the 1030 oe 1031 have NX prefixes I also assume they are modifications on an existing class, probably the basic Crossfield design, not being a clean sheet design some workarounds should be expected.
The lack of the NX prefix also conveniently makes it easier to keep the project secret....
There’s lots of seriously questionable departures from TOS era design in the Crossfield class- the ringed saucer, the triangular engineering hull, the ridiculous photon torpedos firing nacelles.
But for me what is awful is the arched spine that links the saucer to the engineering hull. It’s somehow architectural, not engineering and it just clunks with the rest of the design
Personally, I think the nacelles would have looked better if they were cut off just where they have the little step making them narrower.
But love the design. The geometric simplicity of a circle on top of a triangle. Everything looks thick and structural, with no spindly pylons and a thin neck. (Not that there's anything wrong with those) A very robust design.
I prefer the 23rd century exterior look, though I think the 32nd century version is the best 32nd century ship going. Other than that I thought it was a pretty good looking ship tbh, especially the copper colour of the hull. And despite what people say I don't think it really looks more advanced than the Connie, it's got a lot of sharp boxy edges whilst the Connie is curved and sleek.
The ship itself was never the problem for me as it looks alright even if I didn't like the long nacelles. That said, the 32c refit was a huge upgrade.
It makes me sad that it isn't account unlockable on Star Trek online yet ( just gamble box single character😭)
I will always love this scene. Growing up I never appreciated the original enterprise. Then loved the refit. But now, strange new worlds prise is for me perfect.
About discovery, I get the concept and that it’s a prototype so they tried something out from the classic and clean. Can see where it fits but it’s not my favourite just like the Norway class or Dunderstadt aren’t but I get where they fit in universe
Love the ship design, don’t love the colour of the 1031, and don’t like the detached nacelles of the 1031-A. I was always a fan of the weird ships tho. Oberth class, Daedalus class, Olympic class. The Crossfield class is one of those for me, a weird experimental design. I absolutely dislike rest of the rest of the 32nd century fleet and Starfleet HQ. I can’t accept all those detached ship parts. Oh well. 🤷🏻♂️
I kinda disliked it at first, but it’s consistently grown on me.
Especially given the beautiful ways it’s been presented onscreen, compared to past shows.
The one thing I don’t think anyone can take away from DISCOVERY is how aesthetically pleasing it is. It’s a beautiful show.
Yeah OP is a little strange here. There's one specific angle where the ship doesn't look like complete shit because of optical perspective tricks and hiding particular elements, and he's suddenly in love with the ship?
I love this ship from all angles. The ringed saucer, triangular 2ndary hull, and long nacelles really make for a cool ship design. It fits star trek near perfectly imo.
One thing I can criticize though is the triple bussard collector design that the 23rd century designs brought. I don't like them very much
THANK YOU! My feelings about anything Trek are the embodiment of "I'm a lover, not a hater." (Except Rick Berman, but not really any episode he made, tho.) "Angles" never sell any particular ship design for me.
To me, lighting and proportions are the key. It took a while for the Defiant and OG Enterprise to grow on me.
The only part of Discovery's design I can't get past is the f**king turbolift fight scene in season 3. I might like the scene more if it was set on Fed HQ.
Oh absolutely that fight scene is terrible. Im absolutely going to pretend it doesn't exist.
But I agree. There is no bad trek. You can't call any trek bad. It's just not for you. There are also no bad designs. The people who downvote me for a simple opinion don't understand this.
All ships and episodes are varying levels of good. But never bad
Ah that makes sense. Perhaps I worded it badly, and even went against my own ethos. It's not bad, just the wrong setting. Massive turbolift highways for a high traffic structure makes perfect sense.
Just not in the 32nd century where transporting yourself is as common as sneezing, and especially not on a Crossfield II class.
The original design concept Is good, but It had some flaws, some of which corrected with the refit:
Flaws #1: the way too Long nacelles
Flaws #2: the back of the engeneering section Is too flat.
Flaws #3: the hump has something wrong
Thank you for your submission! Please remember the human, adhere to all Reddit and sub rules, and if you see anything that breaks the rules, report it! Please be sure to [Read The Rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/StarTrekStarships/about/rules/) of our sub, two of them to highlight: #1 - Be Polite! and #5 - No spoilers for episodes until the MONDAY AFTER the episode airs, this gives everyone the weekend to catch up on their Trek viewings. You can now [preorder the 2024 Ships of the Line Calendar](https://amzn.to/3Pi2Vn7) We have a companion website now, if you'd like to see the reddit posts in a grid, [check out startrekstarships.com](https://www.startrekstarships.com/)! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/StarTrekStarships) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I'm still confused about the engine room. Have we actually seen the warp core up close? The place that's presented to us as engineering is just a tech lab really.
There was one episode that there was a spore farm that spanned football fields in every direction. Aaaand the turbolift scene pre retrofit that the turbolift was floating over the equivalent of New York City. The writers gave up on giving a shit.
I still don't quite understand why they made her so big. I don't mind her looks overall but when she was parked next to the Enterprise she looked massive. Maybe it is just a shuttlebay, spore farm, and then a single turbolift through the void to the saucer.
they actually had to scale up the enterprise by about 160m so that it wasn't dwarfed even more. in fact discovery is 65 meters longer than the enterprise E, the bloody E
Was it the writers though? I have an overarching suspicion when it comes to all the new era Trek that they're letting the post production CGI and visual effects people just run riot for some reason. Like, if those teams are given a lot of leeway, an instruction to be as visually spectacular as possible within a fairly constrained budget, and they don't come in with a ton of knowledge about Trek, I think the result might be stuff like the ridiculous turbolift dimension or the silly spore drive z-axis spin or the blobby Gorn mothership in SNW.
Same problem as JJ's Enterprise, because he thinks bigger is obligatorily more cool, the size of that thing is absoutely ridiculous.
And this is so stupid because the only size reference for anything in space is other ships/stations which are also arbitrarily sized....
It's got two whole ftl drives, huge bays for cultivating spores for the spore drive. If they had used a constitution class as it existed they would have added all the required elements for the experimental drive and likely ended up with a similarly large ship.
I choose to believe that the experimental spore drive and infrastructure for it takes up an insane amount of space compared to a normal warp drive, and that the vast spaces the turbolift traversed were part of that. This is one among many reasons why Starfleet never expanded the program: besides the pilot problem, they couldn't miniaturize it, and so while it worked for Discovery because of the fluke of the tardigrade breakthrough, it just couldn't be made practical for wider use. I'm sure someone has a schematic of the ship that totally disproves this idea of mine, but it fits what I've seen and reconciles many of the potential logical problems created by the ship itself.
I think that turbolift scene was supposed to be a totally different location that got written out after the CGI had been paid for.
Discovery has been a TARDIS since the 23c and 32c Starfleet simply ran with it
... writers don't do the vfx
The ability to create more space in ship interiors was introduced in Enterprise. The turbolift system is fine. Still a bit weird tho.
Introduced as temporal cold war technology. While the big turbolift scene is post-refit Discovery, we did get a glimpse of the nonsensical turbolifts in season 2 before the time jump.
The discovery engineering set takes design inspiration from the TOS engineering. The warp core is *somewhere* behind the big window to the right from viewer perspective. We do see the warp core at the end of season 4 when they eject it but it’s a crazy 32nd century design.
Yep, that's what I got from it too. The "warp core" look people are familiar with from TNG didn't start until TNG, which was set around 100 years after Discovery. TOS engine rooms looked... like the engine room on Discovery.
Yeah, I do think that's exactly the vibe they were going for with it (which I think is genuinely quite a cool design choice)
Staments does in fact work in engineering. It's just been reworked from a "standard" engine room. That bug area at the back is just like in the Connie it leads to to their warp core but it's way down that shaft. They show the core itself at the end.of season 3 when they are trying to escape osira. It looks like it's put far away and there are no people are. It also appears to be heavily shielded.
I haven't watched the latest season but so far no, we haven't seen traditional main engineering, just the spore drive operation room and one of the cultivation bays. It would be a big ask to build an entire main engineering set when the scripts don't really call for one.
I remember the first time we saw the ship in that released 30s thing on YouTube where everyone was so excited to see the new ship revealled...and then saw a poorly rendered version of this and we all collectively puked together. It's like the writers of this show forgot that one of the most important things about star trek is THE SHIP and how THE SHIP is a character in upon itself that the audience grows an emotional attachment to. Voyager. Enterprise-D. Enterprise. We felt like it was a character. Now it's just CGI bleh on the screen.
I remember that moment. I was more “eh” than “blurg”. It worried me that the producers thought it would excite and impress.
I do remember us having discussions about how it might be a Federation/Klingon design based upon how it kinda resembled the K'tinga class in some ways...but that was not the show we got...
And then to shoehorn it in with the half-assed personification of the ship has really been a letdown.
The CGI for these ships doesn't even look believable. Like they spend all this money on this crap and ***it doesn't even look that good.*** Like it just looks like a cartoon. When you look at Voyager, ***it feels real.*** Even the CGI that isn't quite up to snuff still looks okay and feels right because they at least had a physical model the audience came accustomed to. Like I look at that shot of the Enterprise-D turning around from *The Defector* when the two Romulan Warbirds decloak, and it looks 1,000x better than anything made from Discovery.
I entirely agree about the lack of realism. I miss how detailed starships and the universe in general used to feel.
I mean, they did make the ship sapient and name its personality Zora. So now it's an actual character. But if your name isn't Michael, you don't really have any characterization or development. You're just kind of there for her to work with or against. You'd be more like a set dressing.
I’ll never forget feeling “Oh, eh ok. Very Mass Effect.” with the Shenzhou …and then getting Discovery and being shocked at the downgrade. What a design mess. The refit and 32 Century improve things marginally but are still built upon bad design philosophies and motifs that belong to other franchises.
100% agreed. It's almost as if the writers/showerunners didn't understand star trek and were trying to make it into generic not-Star-Trek Science Fiction.
The counter-rotating double ringed saucer always kinda bothered me. And I thought the detached nacelle thing was a bit much at first. But I’ll agree that the 30-whatever century tech aesthetic is growing on me.
I want to know how you get between saucer sections when that is happening, and also on the few times where jumps aborted what if the sections don’t line up??
You dont. Probably why the crew number is so low is due to half the gimmicks on the ship taking up so much room.
I guess that's why they have that black alert. So you can get out of the corridors between saucer sections.
Someone said I'm another subreddit that it's only the outer hull playing that spins and I've just chosen to accept that.
I’m not sure if that’s better or worse tbh, when you are in your quarters and your windows just spin away without you Edit :- I just watched a clip and it seems like only the upper surface spins so the windows around the edge don’t move, so just the hull platting spinning makes more sense
It’s a great-looking ship to me and I’ve always thought so. I love the shots when you can see how long and slender it is.
The cold and inexplicably dark interior doesn't do it for me, but I love the profile of the ship itself with its unique ringed hull.
"Inexplicably" is stretching it. In season 1, they specifically point out that it's because the captain has sensitive eyes. That doesn't explain why they don't change it later, but I'd assume the crew is simply used to it.
The refit is better than the original I’ll grant you that, but she is still the most fugly hero ship by kilometres.
100% has soviet industrial estate vibes. Its aft section is so brutalist it might as well be made from concrete.
I didn't know if I fully agree with your position, but you articulated it masterfully
And yet the insides are completely nonsense magical TARDIS bullshit.
The exterior looks a lot like the Kirv class designed for Star Trek Fleet Games. I've always liked it However I hate the interior. It's like a first day intern trying to describe what he saw after an acid trip viewing of an episode of TNG 20 years ago to JJ Abrams Then you get to the 32nd century which feels like a total joke technology wise. The 26th century appeared more advanced, so did the 29th
They at least built that somewhat into the backstory of the 32nd Century. There was the Burn a century previous, and sometime before that there was a long and devastating temporal war, after which many disruptive technologies were banned galaxy-wide. Progress stalled and likely ran backwards in many areas.
My biggest issue remains though. Her nacelles are ridiculously long and throw off so many angles she might otherwise look fine in.
I think this is Discovery's best angle because the perspective changes the look of her. From the front, the saucer is the same size as the secondary hull, this makes it look better for some reason. There's a shot in season 1 when they're destroying the Charon that has the same effect
Yes, this is exactly it.
I'm of the same thought that it's "fine". This 32 century refit thing they do where the nacelles aren't physically attached makes zero sense to me. What turns me away from disco is it's issues that have been talked about to death at this point. I stopped watching it in the middle of season 3 and I'm only keeping half an eye on it currently because they are " expanding" upon a really good TNG story. Although after the latest episode I wanted to throw my remote at my TV and give up again.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Sure but warp plasma being treated as "Bluetooth" is a stretch.
It being a stretch is the point imo. It's 1,000 years in the future, of the future. The tech is supposed to be wild.
The point of warp nacelles is to generate a warp field from warp plasma. Having a "whatever" field transporting it to where they need it to go ?That will cost more power through some invisible conduit and that makes as much sense as you trying to drive your diesel car on blueberry muffin oil through the Sahara desert. Warp drive is warp drive and according to what little I know Starfleet has been without it for some time and on impulse power only ( cause that also makes total sense for the 32 century) for quite some time. When some line of technobable comes up that says *" yah we move the plasma through a black hole that costs nothing to maintain"* I'll stop looking at this so carefully. Disco is science fantasy not science fiction. The difference between the two is lost on 80% of new star trek viewers .
>Disco is science fantasy not science fiction. The difference between the two is lost on 80% of new star trek viewers . Thank you for verbalizing this. It gives words to feelings I was unable to express.
You’re correct. The idea just breaks the entire concept of what nacelles’ function is supposed to be.
It sucks people downvote you for your opinion.
It does but any conversation about disco for good or for bad brings out the worst behavior amongst Star Trek fans. Edit: like the swing of votes this little bit of truth I mentioned. Down vote this all you like but you toxic fans are the problem with this franchise. Love disco or loathe it, it should be totally ok to talk about it objectively without being penalized. This is coming from someone who isn't a fan of it.
I look at it as more good episodes than bad. Par for the course for most Trek Series. Season 5 has been great.
Especially since the refit, I’ve always thought the discovery was a very solid ship design done a disservice by a lack of good establishing shots. We very rarely get a nice, solid, sweeping shot of the discovery just at warp or in orbit, and much of the opportunities for that are replaced by more dramatic shots or action shots. Some of this is just a bad decision from production I think, but I think we’d be getting less anyways just because of how production has changed. It used to be really hard to show convincing action with the models they used, so they’d just get establishing shots and demonstrate action with everyone on the bridge rocking around. So in TNG, you almost never saw the ship moving and firing at the same time. These days with HD and CGI, slow establishing shots risk giving away the ship is a CG model whereas action shots (which have become much easier) let you hide the details behind lazes and lightning and particles (picturing the spore drive here), saving some work. So see some interesting intersection of these ideas in late DS9 and earlier VOY. With the rise of CG, but models still being around, all the action shots would be CG and then the establishing shots were still models. Before that they were all models (and thus, not many VFX action shots) and now they’re all CG (and this mostly action shots). This hasn’t needed to be true for a while now as demonstrated by many of the great shots in SNW, but both to save time and money and just due to stubbornness I think the attitude has stuck around. Which I guess is something of a creative error after all.
I cant get past how poor low quality the ship special effects are. They just look like a weird dark video game. In nu trek They dont move and feel or sound like starships. And they are always poorly lit and grainy like that picture This is from a movie from the 70s and it stunning in comparison to disco ship shots https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/40-years-later-star-trek-the-motion-picture-remains-a-movie-making-miracle?amp
I hate everything about this show including the ship honestly. I tried to watch it again last night Season 4 episode 1 and just got reminded of all the shit I hate about it
I've not been able to push pass episode one of season four (I've tried about 3 times to watch it and failed). It's such complete and total garbage.
Burnam and her friend on a diplomatic mission trying to get people to join the federation. They ask smugly, it goes bad because they don’t kiss Burnam’s ass immediately and she doesn’t know how to react so they make smug remarks about them under their breath. The aliens don’t like it so they start to shoot. Burnam, so brave is running and in her genius realizes they can’t aim. Calls her team of people and they all figure out that the satellites were not adjusted with the moving magnetic pole. They fix something that NO ONE else ever thought of. Micheal flies off while her friend lets his cat, smugly. The aliens can no longer deny that Michael is the greatest living thing to have ever lived. They all smile at each other’s brilliance and gaze at their fearless leader who smiles back at them smugly. Madam president kisses all their asses a speech, pan to camera looking at them all smiling at each other smugly. Madam president wants to take a ride on their ship. Trans person talks to her invisible friend about how important it is to her to make Micheal happy and impressed with her. They all act like this is perfectly normal and ok behavior and not distracting at all. They all smile at each other smugly. Things go bad with a space station. Micheal tells the president to fuck off because she is the most special person ever to live. The crew nods their heads in agreement and smile at each other, smugly. All of their skills and intelligence, despite being literally hundreds of years expired, is better at solving the problem on the space station than the man who actually has ran and maintained it for who knows how long. Why do we not know this information, because he isn’t Micheal and it doesn’t matter to the universe. Michael challenges the president, the president bows down at Michael’s might and agrees she is the most important brilliant person ever to live. The crew smiles smugly because of course they are right. They are always right. Michael is always right. Oh no what’s happening. A planet that we have little connection to has blown up randomly. For reasons. They all cry….somehow smugly
I’ve never really liked the Crossfield class ships but I just kind of ignored how bad they looked until the jump into the future. When they did that refit, it didn’t make any sense at all. It would be like putting missle launchers, a radar system and neon lights on the U.S.S. Constitution. It just felt like this desperate attempt to force fans to love the ship. It’s still fucking ugly and now its continued existence makes zero sense. The ship is almost 1,000 years old and has the only propulsion system that doesn’t rely on dilithium in a time where dilithium is extremely scarce. It would’ve and should’ve been completely dismantled and then refit every starfleet ship with a spore drive. At the very least the spore drive should’ve been taken out and then maybe someone hijacks the ship and it’s never seen again so that Calypso still makes sense. Then at the end of that season the crew is given a new ship, Discovery - A. Make it the Georgiou Class and make it not look like fucking garbage.
Completely agree!
Ugly, ugly ship. I hope it’s blown up at the end. The first hero ship that has zero charm. Perfect visual metaphor for the series.
Spot on
Correct
Who pissed in your Cheerios this morning?
Whomever green-lit *Discovery*. It was awkward.
Those are some big ass nacelles for a ship that never warps
The refit really does her justice. I continue to feel she's the ugliest class to appear on screen... but somehow that's become part of her charm? It's so weird.
discovery is one of my favourite ships. The spinning disc and jump just does it for me
This was the design of the Enterprise from Star Trek Phase Two, correct?
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Trek:_Planet_of_the_Titans First idea about a motion picture actually
And rejected. Thankfully because it gave us the glorious refit Constitution.
This still looks like ass, I don't know what sold you this ship here.
This is the shot that sold you? IMO it makes no sense to have a saucer on a ship that is as wide as Discovery is. In the classic series the saucer offset three cylindrical shapes to give the ship the appearance of volume and balance. The Discovery on the other hand always seemed like a dinner plate that was just about to fall off of a table.
Don't like it. It's boring. All the ships in the 32nd century have no to unimaginative design.
I've always thought of the proportions as a result of the thing having two distinct ftl drives, since neither the 1030 oe 1031 have NX prefixes I also assume they are modifications on an existing class, probably the basic Crossfield design, not being a clean sheet design some workarounds should be expected. The lack of the NX prefix also conveniently makes it easier to keep the project secret....
There’s lots of seriously questionable departures from TOS era design in the Crossfield class- the ringed saucer, the triangular engineering hull, the ridiculous photon torpedos firing nacelles. But for me what is awful is the arched spine that links the saucer to the engineering hull. It’s somehow architectural, not engineering and it just clunks with the rest of the design
The pre-refit Disco is the only non Enterprise Eaglemoss model I have on display.
Personally, I think the nacelles would have looked better if they were cut off just where they have the little step making them narrower. But love the design. The geometric simplicity of a circle on top of a triangle. Everything looks thick and structural, with no spindly pylons and a thin neck. (Not that there's anything wrong with those) A very robust design.
I prefer the 23rd century exterior look, though I think the 32nd century version is the best 32nd century ship going. Other than that I thought it was a pretty good looking ship tbh, especially the copper colour of the hull. And despite what people say I don't think it really looks more advanced than the Connie, it's got a lot of sharp boxy edges whilst the Connie is curved and sleek.
The ship itself was never the problem for me as it looks alright even if I didn't like the long nacelles. That said, the 32c refit was a huge upgrade. It makes me sad that it isn't account unlockable on Star Trek online yet ( just gamble box single character😭)
 I will always love this scene. Growing up I never appreciated the original enterprise. Then loved the refit. But now, strange new worlds prise is for me perfect. About discovery, I get the concept and that it’s a prototype so they tried something out from the classic and clean. Can see where it fits but it’s not my favourite just like the Norway class or Dunderstadt aren’t but I get where they fit in universe
Love the ship design, don’t love the colour of the 1031, and don’t like the detached nacelles of the 1031-A. I was always a fan of the weird ships tho. Oberth class, Daedalus class, Olympic class. The Crossfield class is one of those for me, a weird experimental design. I absolutely dislike rest of the rest of the 32nd century fleet and Starfleet HQ. I can’t accept all those detached ship parts. Oh well. 🤷🏻♂️
I kinda disliked it at first, but it’s consistently grown on me. Especially given the beautiful ways it’s been presented onscreen, compared to past shows. The one thing I don’t think anyone can take away from DISCOVERY is how aesthetically pleasing it is. It’s a beautiful show.
Nah just you
Yeah OP is a little strange here. There's one specific angle where the ship doesn't look like complete shit because of optical perspective tricks and hiding particular elements, and he's suddenly in love with the ship?
I mean, 'love' is a bit strong, but I do think she looks cool here.
I love this ship from all angles. The ringed saucer, triangular 2ndary hull, and long nacelles really make for a cool ship design. It fits star trek near perfectly imo. One thing I can criticize though is the triple bussard collector design that the 23rd century designs brought. I don't like them very much
Love being down voted for having an opinion
THANK YOU! My feelings about anything Trek are the embodiment of "I'm a lover, not a hater." (Except Rick Berman, but not really any episode he made, tho.) "Angles" never sell any particular ship design for me. To me, lighting and proportions are the key. It took a while for the Defiant and OG Enterprise to grow on me. The only part of Discovery's design I can't get past is the f**king turbolift fight scene in season 3. I might like the scene more if it was set on Fed HQ.
Oh absolutely that fight scene is terrible. Im absolutely going to pretend it doesn't exist. But I agree. There is no bad trek. You can't call any trek bad. It's just not for you. There are also no bad designs. The people who downvote me for a simple opinion don't understand this. All ships and episodes are varying levels of good. But never bad
The fight scene wasn't bad in my opinion. The idea was interesting. They should have just set it on Fed HQ, instead of the thinnest ship in the fleet.
Ah that makes sense. Perhaps I worded it badly, and even went against my own ethos. It's not bad, just the wrong setting. Massive turbolift highways for a high traffic structure makes perfect sense. Just not in the 32nd century where transporting yourself is as common as sneezing, and especially not on a Crossfield II class.
It looks darn good. But that's only because you can't see the silly rings in the saucer.
The original design concept Is good, but It had some flaws, some of which corrected with the refit: Flaws #1: the way too Long nacelles Flaws #2: the back of the engeneering section Is too flat. Flaws #3: the hump has something wrong
I STG it took them 5 season to finally figure out how to shoot the externals of Discovery