Yeah - I'm not quite sure what it looks like, but I definitely wouldn't want to meet it in a dark corner of subspace. My only concern is that it looks a bit "thuggish" compared to the rest of the IPO designs, which might make for a bit of a PR problem. Not that that's stopped Gryphon & co. before, mind you...

Offsides

[...] in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.
-- David Ben Gurion
EPU RCW #π
#include <stdsig.h>

Well, the IPO probably wouldn't paint theirs black. Except for the special-ops one, but that doesn't officially exist anyway. :)

(The name of the class is also a bit aggressive, but then the project will have been launched in the direct aftermath of the Qo'noS Coup and specifically staffed with people inclined to build the balls-nastiest midsize warship they could come up with. "A quarian, a Klingon, a turian, and an Andorian walk into a design studio" may be the setup line for a joke, but the punch line is pretty sharp. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Hmm, interesting. Clearly not the case later on (nor even fully consistent in the Elder Days - I mean, look at the Klingon bird-of-prey), and never true in the UF universe, where ships with a single warp nacelle are not particularly rare. (Most of those wacky variants in the old Franz Joseph Star Fleet Technical Manual a/o the FASA Star Trek game existed at some point in the late 23rd/early 24th century.) But interesting from a production design standpoint.

I've always been vaguely fascinated by the way Star Trek has both tried, and occasionally failed, to have a consistent starship design language in spite of the ever-shifting nature of television and film production. In the old days, that was naturally informed by the fact that they had about $12 to work with (which is why every single Federation starship you ever see in the original series is Constitution-class, even the one with the hilariously out-of-sequence hull number), and it all went rather horribly wrong in the TNG era, but for most of the '80s it was nicely executed. They didn't even bother redesigning the Klingon battlecruiser for Star Trek VI, even though they surely had the money to do so by then.

> That's
>why most of the ships seen on-screen all the way up through early TNG
>(that weren't built by enigmatic aliens with enigmatic technology or
>what-have-you) had nacelles set standing away from the main hull or
>hulls

See, I've always assumed it was because there's a lot of potentially dangerous energy getting thrown around there, and you don't really want to have it too close to the meatsacks. (Obviously the Klingons give less of a shit about that than other races, and the Cardies even less of a shit than that, but that's perfectly in character. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Indeed; it's typical of a larger problem of some members of the Trek production staff, at various times, trying to enforce or institutionalize something that others either don't understand, don't care about, or don't care to understand. It's easier to keep things consistent when there's basically one person doing it all (see, for example, Okudagrams), but when you've got ever-changing staff, showrunners, and executives? Forget it.

The stardate system (such as it was) is an example of that. Roddenberry pitched the original series as a "wagon train to the stars," but he did that not because he wanted to make a space western, but because, in the 1960s, westerns were the sure thing. It'd be sort of like if, in 2003 or so, someone pitched a "reality" show set on the ISS, if it were as cheap to produce as that genre's darlings when it was riding high. (I've gathered that they're still a go-to thing because they're stupidly cheap compared to fully scripted TV, but they're not the sure-fire ratings grabber that they used to be.) Anyway, one of the things he and his co-creators had originally wanted was to make the time in which it was set deliberately vague, which is one of the reasons for using stardates instead of the Gregorian calendar. Another reason for the stardate system? They wanted to have some sort of vague handwave acknowledgment of how FTL travel could wreak havoc with trying to figure out relative timing (i.e. acknowledging the difficulties invoked by time dilation and traveling outside the light cone); the stardate system was intended to reflect some sort of complex underlying system defined by acceleration, vector, location, and other things that start mattering a lot more when it's trivial to move to a radically different light cone and inertial frame.

They deliberately didn't try to actually codify this; the guidance they gave to the writers was, in addition to the numerical format of xxxx.xx, that stardates should increase strictly monotonically within an episode (and ISTR there being some guidance about which digits to increment when), but could increase or decrease between episodes. In practice, they increased from one episode to the next in production order, though, losing some of the nuance of the intention.

Of course, all of that went out the window with TNG, which linked stardates to the Gregorian year, but in a way that makes the epoch somewhere around 2323 CE for some reason. (Well, there were Doylist reasons, but Watsonian? Nothing given, AFAIK.)

"Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis."
- Kenneth Boulding

It's worse than that, when it came to filming the Constellation they realised they'd need that and the Enterprise in view at once, but they only had one model. The Constellation therefore was modelled by an off-the-shelf Enterprise kit model with (as you alude to) the decals reordered to give a different hull number. I have no clue why they didn't just call it 1710 though.

S.

Michael

Michael C. Fortner
"Maxim 37: There is no such thing as "overkill".
There is only "open fire" and "I need to reload".

It looks better in 3D than in the screenshot on the wiki page, but I'll take anything that's Not The Intrepid.

There's one weird thing about the Discovery-class which isn't obvious in that screenshot: the pylons have this weird thing going on where part of them project beneath the engineering hull at an oblique angle, forming a kind of flattened, broken "V" shape. I'm not sure what that's there for, and it must look doubly weird on the retrofit.

"Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis."
- Kenneth Boulding

Apparently, this cosmetic feature being lacking from the baseline version was a glitch; yesterday's patch notes indicated that it would "animate properly," and, sure enough, when the Soong goes to warp, the nacelles cant upwards and inwards. It also appears that the fins projecting out beneath the engineering hull are part of the nacelles, as they move with them, so they're much closer to perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic when she's in sector space.

"Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis."
- Kenneth Boulding

"They're escorts, not 'warships'."

Are they licensed?

S.

One would assume that they did, in fact, pass inspection at their last drydock before being allowed into active service, so yes. To be frank, given the inherent dangers of outer space, anyone who would be willing to fly in a non-licensed escort would either be 1) clinically insane, or 2) living in the crapsack universe that is Warhammer 40K (which is really a subset of 1, if you stop and think about it).

Yes, I knew where you were going with that joke. I just refused to jump at the bait.

Ebony the Black Dragon

"Life is like an anole. Sometimes it's green. Sometimes it's brown. But it's always a small Caribbean lizard."

The thing is, human sexuality being what it is, if and when humanity is a starfaring species with cheap and reliable FTL travel*, I fully expect there to not only be a paraphilia involving space ships and major components thereof, I would expect there to also be a fair amount of material produced to cater to said paraphilia, and probably an advocacy group of some kind.

And, probably, screening for such a proclivity for certain shipboard career paths, particularly in the military.

"Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis."
- Kenneth Boulding

"Dammit, Tom, get your pants back on. We have an inspection today."

* Yes, I know enough about physics to know how improbable this is, given that FTL travel, by our current understanding of physics, would break causality. I don't particularly care.

* the "Gundam Girl" concept applied to, say, an Excelsior or Bird of Prey.

My life is like space; primarily lonely and cold.

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

Disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence?

--G.
hey, it's no more complimentary than your own conclusion, but it might be more exciting.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

"For every creature or object in the universe with a hole or a pointy-out bit, there is at least one man or woman who has looked at it and thought, 'Hey, I bet I know what I could stick {in that| that in}.'"
- T'Vek of Vulcan, quoting from her doctoral thesis, Thoughts on a New Idiomatic Standard Translation of the Suppressed Apocrypha of Vulcan Philosophy

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

That's humanity for you, going boldly (as it were).

If I may quote Ben Sisko:

"Officially she's classified as an escort vessel... unofficially the Defiant's a warship. Nothing more, nothing less."

--------------------------
CdrMike, Overwatch Reject

The Defiant escorted a lot of Jem'Hedar to Hell :)

------
Jon Helscher

Oh God, it was me. I was the grognard all along.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Of course, given that anything going the speeds that probes are capable of going is going to do quite a bit of damage when it hits in any case, a warhead may be extraneous.

"Yes sir, we got some beautiful sensor readings on that Klingon cruiser, right up until we hit the port nacelle."

Ebony the Black Dragon

"Life is like an anole. Sometimes it's green. Sometimes it's brown. But it's always a small Caribbean lizard."

The thing is, the probe itself isn't all that massive, and given that Trek ships stay in realspace even when traveling at warp (in general), their navigational shields (i.e. the shields the deflector generates, not the combat shields) should, under normal circumstances, be more than adequate to defeat all damage a probe might do from collision, given the kind of damage they'd have to defeat from the random bits of matter floating around in the not-quite-perfect-vacuum of space. In the otherwise thoroughly disavowed second-season TNG episode "The Outrageous Okona," it's stated explicitly that the deflector alone is sufficient to defend against a laser.

"Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis."
- Kenneth Boulding

If memory serves, that's a class 8 probe. 1-7 are smaller.