This equates to a modern person being able to look at a car and land within a decade or so, even before today's wacky desperate-to-be-different designs. Show me a car with round replaceable headlights and shiny silver trim around the windshield and I'm in the mid-20th Century. Add on curved window glass producing a barrel shape for the car rather than a slab-sided look and I'm in the 1960s or 70s. Swap to a rectangular headlight and I'm probably in the 1980s. Ditch the replaceable headlights for funky plastic ones and we're into the 1990s, and then you start curving those, et cetera.
Original Universe starships work the same way. Give me a wide oval saucer section and we're sometime after 2340 or so, since the ones before that were circular (even the NX). Give me a circular saucer and black-grilled nacelle without visible glowing Bussard collector and we're looking at a late 23rd Century style of design, in the 2270-2290 range. Give me a simple-looking design with round nacelles and we're talking mid-23rd at the latest. And it goes on from there.
Indeed, the main difference between starships and cars, insofar as stylistic continuity, is that registries suggest some members of a class of ship get constructed long after the initial design and build of the class, e.g. the late-model Mirandas with 3xxxx registries, late-model Excelsiors with 4xxxx registries, and so on.
 |
| 1955 vs 2005 |
The new build F-15EX fighters may have minor exterior differences from the earlier F-15s, but they're not readily apparent to the untrained eye but for an extra set of weapon attachment hardpoints further out on the wings. And yet, despite looking the same, we're also talking about leaps in technology, such as from hydraulic and cable-actuated controls to fiber optics-based fly-by-wire.
(Using 2285 for the Excelsior, that would be like building a new ExcelsiorEX in 2331. Why do so? Well, the new F-15s, despite differences, are riding on a proven airframe, and are still cheaper than the process of designing and testing and altering the major maintenance planning and ground support gear for a new aircraft. Indeed, there's also a parallel insofar as both the F-15 and Excelsior are proven Cold War designs, and in the F-15s case suddenly new ones are needed because we've been dawdling in the post-Cold War peace, and new threats are emerging. Translated to Trek, perhaps the fleet languished from 2293ish until 2311 or so, had a burst of building, then it stopped but some frames were done, then languished again for a time until something else happened and the frames were put to use, et cetera, and it was quicker and easier to make Excelsiors than anything else (or at least easy to make some extra Excelsiors) when all that occurred.)
One would think, then, that the Excelsior Class USS Hood, NCC-42296, is quite a bit different from the Excelsior Class USS Repulse, NCC-2544, under this way of thinking. Maybe it is, though the exterior details look virtually unchanged. Of course, given one of my pet thoughts, one is left to wonder why the nacelles didn't change.
As the opening image of New Orleans-style nacelles on a B-type Excelsior makes plain, this is a thing I've tended to imagine for many years. And, as you can see . . .
. . . Voyager-esque nacelles even makes Mirandas almost look cute and cuddly, like little baby starships, even if the styles technically clash.
After all, given that one of the most notable events in the Star Trek canon is the Enterprise 'refit' between TOS and TMP, a refit which completely changed the look of the ship, the lack of appearance changes for apparent new-build ships is very odd indeed. On the other hand, given that the Enterprise was fairly quickly put out to pasture as a training ship, only a bit more than a decade after the extensive rebuilding, it may be that there was something ultimately unsatisfactory about the effort to rebuild a ship this way.
For all this stylistic continuity, however, we do run up against some ships that strain it, toward the end.
"The late 24th Century saw some significant starship design departures from what we'd observed from Starfleet prior. To be sure, there were always some rather unique approaches to starship design that would pop up from time to time, and in some cases the classes of ship that resulted worked well and were built and operated for a long while. The classic example is the Oberth Class, an early Starfleet heavy tug that so often appeared as a science ship with an underslung add-on sensor package that later versions of the vessel often included it as a default secondary hull."
- From: "300 Years of Starfleet: A Fake History I Made Up Just Now", by Unnecessary Madeupalienname, 2461.
One thing we learned from all the time spent in the Star Trek Original Universe from 2364 to 2375 (plus glimpses through 2379) is that the Galaxy Class starship was not a revolutionary design, in-universe, but instead a deeply conservative one. While she was undoubtedly the queen of the stars, all the derivative models presented as being ships older than the Galaxy . . . classes like Nebula, New Orleans, Springfield, Cheyenne, Challenger, et cetera, ad nauseum (sometimes literally) . . . make it clear that the shapes and even many of the design details existed for many years prior to the Galaxy's introduction.
However, it seems she was just about the last of her kind. The last ship that seems to carry any significantly similar parts is the Danube Class runabout with her boxy space-truck version of the Galaxy's nacelles. The only other vessels we've seen with registries in the 7xxxx range are the Defiants, the Intrepids, the Novas, and the Sovereigns, with maybe a Prometheus in there, too. Of those, the Intrepid is the closest in style, but even then only on account of general surface details. The Sovereign, with its mottled hull, wildly different deflector, lengthy nacelles, and overall harsh and angular look (including a hideously terraced underside), looks nothing like the Galaxy breed or even any of her stablemates but for a passing resemblance to the Nova. The Defiant's equally odd, but with reason insofar as her unique design intent. The Nova, which is rather oddly first of these, by registry, is the love child of all of them.
In other words, starship design experienced some sudden and as yet unexplained changes in the late 2350s or early 2360s, just as the Galaxy Class was appearing. Suddenly gone would be the smooth nacelles, except for in the Danube and, arguably, the Intrepid, with the preference leaning toward triangular tapering nacelles. Suddenly gone would be the wide elliptical saucer in favor of narrow ellipses or somewhat dart-shaped versions. Suddenly gone would be secondary hulls with a taper to delicate edges for sensor palettes, and in their place would be somewhat tubular hulls, either wider than tall or taller than wide. Suddenly gone would be graceful combinations of saucer and secondary hull across a tall neck (where applicable), and in its place would be sharp and disjointed kludgings that look like hasty neck deletions from one side and graceful masterwork from the other (here referencing the sharp joint of the area around the deflector on Voyager and the Nova versus more graceful dorsals, and the just-plain awful area around the shuttlebay on the Sovereign versus her graceful ventral, neither of which compare favorably to the Nebula's comparative artfulness).
Even internally, we saw some departures from prior vessels. In the case of the Sovereign and Intrepid, gone are the round-backed consoles that had been seen on Federation ships for a century. For the Sovereign and Defiant, gone are the standardized Starfleet internal corridors. Indeed, there's basically nothing consistent between the Intrepid and Sovereign bridges at all. Even the Sovereign's bridge chairs look more like Klingon chairs.
Out of universe, of course, the reasons are simple. Producers wanted the ships for specific shows to be readily distinguishable, since they think people are on the verge of confusing the Enterprise with a Star Destroyer even on their best days. Beyond that bit of projectionism, there's also their desire for fresh and new stuff even just a year or two after something else, leading to them wanting to avoid too much Intrepid in their Sovereign, continuity be damned.
(They found just the right person for that job in the designer John Eaves, whose designs largely have continuity only with each other in the form of repeating designs elements even across species. (Not to give him grief -- how many ships have you designed and how different were they? -- but once your brain locks on to certain features of the Insurrection Scout, like the forked nose or that funny curve surrounding the upper round docking port in the middle, you'll start to realize they appear in almost every single design. There's even a whole ship that's just that funny curve on top of itself over and over and which doesn't fit the rest of the Earth fleet at all. Then there's the nacelle style with outer curve he cannot escape for alien designs, the love of funny little slanted breadboxes sticking out (either in symmetric form like on the back of either version of this thing, or 'aero' form, where they're wider at the rear, the latter being best exemplified by the Scimitar's weird upper rear boxes), and the general slashing angularness that shows up randomly on everything just to break up the monotony.)
In universe, these sudden changes and going off in different directions seems like chaos. This level of scattery-ness is the sort of thing one finds at the start of an industry, when all the kinks haven't been worked out, rather than a mature field, unless something drastic has changed. Once a bit of chaos is introduced, a variety of discarded ideas can come out to play. But what, really, could the chaos be, and why would so many ship systems and design cues get changed? Certainly the encounters with the Romulans and the Borg could be used as an excuse, to an extent, as could the issue leading to the Warp Five Speed Limit, but that potential panic, even if it came out amongst the shipwrights, would hardly change the underlying science of warp drive that seemed, at least previously, to favor wide elliptical saucers and relatively smooth hulls . . . not that the show ever directly suggested such.
In my head, there seems to have been some sort of separation in design and construction between two groups, a Utopia Planitia-led group that ended up with the Intrepid, and another group in San Francisco that created the Sovereign. I'd even happily go with the Sovereign being created somewhere else or by an alien species in the Federation, really . . . an Andorian team, or a Federation-Klingon alliance team . . . something, with the Nova being created by a confused guy looking around at all the chaos and trying to bring it all together, then ending up with a mess of a ship that can't even exceed warp eight.
And yet, even as things got weird at the end, Enterprise did fairly well in its own time, and of course any chaos I've called out here is better than the Trek that followed. The Star Trek: Discovery fleet features a mix of saucer shapes (including the wide elliptical T'Plana-Hath and possibly Europa, or the elongated Clarke and Zimmerman), a hopeless mish-mash of nacelle designs (including the Eaves-shape ones on the Shenzhou), and so on, with even relatively unobtrusive ships like the Kerala type (an upside-down Shenzhou with different nacelles and less obnoxious pylon superstructure) being styled overall much more like the Sovereign than the original Constitution Class she was intended to be a contemporary of.
None of that matters to the Original Universe, of course, but it just goes to show how comparatively well-made the TNG era of production really was.
Those were the good ole days, and boy how we miss them.
6 comments:
The issues of the new era speak to me of stark laziness, and a lack of understanding of good storytelling and use of storytelling mediums.
Need a big fleet for a Romulan-Federation stand-off?
We'll just make one teenage fanfic version of a super-Sovereign, and copy it a hundred times. Same for the Valdore on the Romulan side.
Fans didn't like the lack of variety? Let's borrow a bunch of teenage fanfic models from Star Trek: Online and copy-and-paste them all over.
Nothing at all like the time, effort, care, and concern that was put into the modeling work for TNG shots or most DS9 episodes.
Instead, producers are relying high-fidelity VFX to make things look good, all while using them in ham-fisted motions with poor efficiency and effect. All of the VFX in Discovery and Picard that I've seen have been BAD VFX with high-fidelity. Both in what the VFX actually show, and how they are employed.
As for an in-universe justification for the massive and late production numbers of Mirandas and Excelsiors (and to a lesser extent, other ships of that era), and the design changes we see in the 2350s, 60s, and 70s, I think there is a logical explanation.
Following the end of the Federation-Klingon Cold War, Starfleet saw a significant demilitarization, but did not see a reduction in numbers. In fact, they saw an explosion of numbers, based on registry number count.
My theory is that, while demand for Starfleet to maintain a top-level military posture against the Klingon Empire no longer existed (partly because of the end of the Cold War, and partly because of the aftermath of Khitomer would have caused a significant internal political shift in the Federation, giving a lot of political clout to the pacifist/"peacehawk" factions, and this would have only gotten worse after the Tomed Incident), demand for Starfleet ships did not. With the threat of the Klingons over, and the increased range of the Excelsior's new Trans Warp Drive (which just became the new Warp Drive, much like the Constitution's new Time Warp Drive just became the new Warp Drive), Starfleet was able to refocus its attentions back to its more preferred primary directive: Exploration.
This actually significantly INCREASED the demand for Starfleet ships: Space is big, and Starfleet could now reach further across it than ever before, but so many more ships were needed to reach all of it.
So Starfleet started ramping up production on its existing classes of ships. There were upgrades and improvements to those designs, as time went on, but much like the F-15 (or the Arleigh Burke), the base frame was largely unchanged.
Starfleet still produced some new ships, like the Ambassador (and what a beast she was), but with the Klingons no longer a threat, and the Romulans still solidly behind the Federation, the Excelsior and other contemporary ships of its day were deemed more than sufficient to meet the bulk of Starfleet's needs, especially with various upgrades incorporated to the base hull design. These ships were "good enough" to match or exceed the capabilities of any other neighboring powers that might be hostile, besides the Klingons, who weren't a threat anymore. And enough Ambassadors were in service that if more weight was needed, they'd bring in the new capital ship to show the flag, and nobody had anything in service that could compete.
Then, the 2350s rolled around. In the late 2340s, Starfleet had fielded the Niagara class as a replacement for the Ambassador, but it was only a marginal size increase, and while it featured a brand-new, state-of-the-art nacelle design, it was nothing like the generational leap forward that the Ambassador was, and much of its design was rendered obsolete by technology that was introduced right after it entered service.
lol character limit ...
The Excelsior was also showing its age. For most of the first half of the 24th Century, she would have served as a powerful Large Cruiser, a bit too big and powerful to be considered a Heavy Cruiser, but not large and powerful enough to be considered a Battlecruiser. This powerful cruiser became the face of the Federation for most of the 24th Century, even as she drifted down into the role of a Heavy Cruiser, and lower.
By the 2350s, however, she would be struggling to compete in her role. Still large enough to be a Heavy Cruiser by size, she didn't have the base technological capability, even with upgrades and improvements, to really function in that role anymore.
So Starfleet started producing a number of new cruisers to fill that gap, and to field new technology that was now available. The Cheyenne class Light Cruiser, and the Challenger, Springfield, and New Orleans class Heavy Cruisers. But this wasn't the end of the Excelsior Replacement Program. The Excelsior had come to fill nearly all the roles of a Cruiser, but in the modern age it just didn't have the capability to do that job anymore, and a number of specialized cruisers were built to fill more specific roles, or do more specific jobs (Cheyenne and Challenger), while other cruisers were built with configurable modules (Springfield, New Orleans).
The 2360s rolled around, and the Excelsior Replacement Program continued with the introduction of the Intrepid and Steamrunner class Light Cruisers, and the Akira class Heavy Cruiser. Again, each class was designed towards certain specializations. The Intrepid was designed to be a short- to mid-range sprinter, with variable geometry nacelles to improve field efficiency (and probably lessen the impact of warp fields on subspace, though with the USS Intrepid in service in 2368, I think the issue came up too late in her design cycle for it to have been a major influencer in the design). The Steamrunner was a bulldog torpedo boat (I've counted 10 torpedo launchers, 8 visible on the model and 2 seen launched from on-screen in an area that was corrupted on the physical model after the fact). The Akira was an even larger Heavy Cruiser with its own swapable pod (though we've only ever seen it with the turnstile torpedo launcher module).
The 2360s also saw the development of the Saber class, not really as part of the Excelsior Replacement Program, but for similar reasons, supplementing the Freedom class (that launched alongside the Niagara) in replacing the Miranda class and Centaur type (I always believed it to be the Renaissance class) in the role of Frigate/Destroyer.
lol character limit x2 ...
The Excelsior was also showing its age. For most of the first half of the 24th Century, she would have served as a powerful Large Cruiser, a bit too big and powerful to be considered a Heavy Cruiser, but not large and powerful enough to be considered a Battlecruiser. This powerful cruiser became the face of the Federation for most of the 24th Century, even as she drifted down into the role of a Heavy Cruiser, and lower.
By the 2350s, however, she would be struggling to compete in her role. Still large enough to be a Heavy Cruiser by size, she didn't have the base technological capability, even with upgrades and improvements, to really function in that role anymore.
So Starfleet started producing a number of new cruisers to fill that gap, and to field new technology that was now available. The Cheyenne class Light Cruiser, and the Challenger, Springfield, and New Orleans class Heavy Cruisers. But this wasn't the end of the Excelsior Replacement Program. The Excelsior had come to fill nearly all the roles of a Cruiser, but in the modern age it just didn't have the capability to do that job anymore, and a number of specialized cruisers were built to fill more specific roles, or do more specific jobs (Cheyenne and Challenger), while other cruisers were built with configurable modules (Springfield, New Orleans).
The 2360s rolled around, and the Excelsior Replacement Program continued with the introduction of the Intrepid and Steamrunner class Light Cruisers, and the Akira class Heavy Cruiser. Again, each class was designed towards certain specializations. The Intrepid was designed to be a short- to mid-range sprinter, with variable geometry nacelles to improve field efficiency (and probably lessen the impact of warp fields on subspace, though with the USS Intrepid in service in 2368, I think the issue came up too late in her design cycle for it to have been a major influencer in the design). The Steamrunner was a bulldog torpedo boat (I've counted 10 torpedo launchers, 8 visible on the model and 2 seen launched from on-screen in an area that was corrupted on the physical model after the fact). The Akira was an even larger Heavy Cruiser with its own swapable pod (though we've only ever seen it with the turnstile torpedo launcher module).
The 2360s also saw the development of the Saber class, not really as part of the Excelsior Replacement Program, but for similar reasons, supplementing the Freedom class (that launched alongside the Niagara) in replacing the Miranda class and Centaur type (I always believed it to be the Renaissance class) in the role of Frigate/Destroyer.
Then, in the 2370s, the culmination of the program was finally put into service: The Sovereign Class. At 2 million m^3 (the model you used for your volumetrics page had some errors, all of the top-quality models of the Sovereign my friends and I could find back when we did volumetric work for a Star Trek Legacy mod indicated about 2 million m^3), it's less than half the size of the Galaxy or Nebula (again, the models you used for both are in error; we got varying results, depending on model, but the most accurate ones gave us about 5.2 million m^3 for both Galaxy and Nebula with the triangle pod, though I believe the AWACS pod was closer to your listed Nebula figure), but half-again as large as the next largest Heavy Cruiser (which itself was significantly larger than any of its predecessors). She's not big or powerful enough to be a Battleship or even a Battlecruiser, but she's so much larger and more powerful than any other Heavy Cruiser of her day. Just like the Excelsior. (And, indeed, Eaves and Sternbach said they designed her with the idea that she would replace the Excelsior as Starfleet's workhorse of the fleet, not as a replacement for the Galaxy).
lol character limit x3 ...
This is why we see so many Mirandas and Excelsiors in service in the 2360s and 2370s. Even by the Dominion War, so many had been built, and they had been the mainstay frigates and cruisers of the fleet for so long, that they still comprised a significant percentage of Starfleet's total operational ship count (and a great many of them wouldn't have been in mothballs for very long).
This also explains why the Federation was losing the war against the Klingons in the Yesterday's Enterprise alternate timeline. The war started in the 2350s, when the vast majority of Starfleet ships were Excelsiors and Mirandas, and the new cruisers were only just starting to enter service. An Exclesior would have been a match anything the Cardassians or Talarians could field, but not a modern Klingon warship. The Ambassadors and Niagaras and the new cruisers would have been much more competitive, but they would have only been available in so many numbers. The Klingons would have been able to overwhelm the out-dated/under-strengthed Starfleet of the 2350s, and make significant strategic gains against the Federation before they could start fielding new cruisers in significant number.
A general push for modernization in the mid-to-late 24th is plausible enough, with a lot of stagnant or alien-shipwright-inspired classes as a plausible rationale for having so many designs with often questionable commonality. However, I will note that Niagara is hideous, and I am thankful it never appeared again. Indeed, most of the kitbashes are vomitous, to be honest, and I'm not even too keen on the ST:FC fleet types . . . among the many things I'd do with time travel, one weekend I'd drop off some better ships to the DS9 VFX folks.
As for my volumetrics figures, many are original "received wisdom" from elsewhere, though I have re-rum the numbers on many classes. See:
http://flare.solareclipse.net/ultimatebb.php/topic/7/1172.html
That said, I would want more detail about different values. I recently had a worry about the Galaxy nacelle, for example, but she checked out. That your figures are all *less* suggests that the problem was on y'all's end, because it is super-easy to lose volume with gaps and such but I don't think I have ever seen it gained by any method I have tried
I've checked the Galaxy and it's good (I'm composing a related blog post), but I am worried about the Nebula though I'm still grying to get a good model to check.
Also, if you'll pardon me for being nosey, I did a little research hoping to find out more info. The result is that I'm working on pulling down the only version of The Legendary Generations I can seem to find. Do you still have the 2.3 installer? I don't know how active the Legacy community is but I'd consider hosting it, since it sounds great. Canon and balance is basically what I end up seeking to do with games, and while I've never played Legacy that I recall it sounds like I'd want TLG if I ever did.
Post a Comment