Star Trek: Picard (CBS All-Access)

[Thom]

9 hours ago, JB0 said:

Well, what if the runabouts are Super Danubes instead of regular Danubes? 

One of them at least has a weapons rollbar on the top. Fair to assume they all do.

 

What I also like is that he paired down the number of ships on both sides drastically. Don't have time to do an accurate count, but there are maybe only twenty or so Romulan ships with equal Federation, rather than 200 per side..!

[Mog]

Didn’t they have fighter ships during the Dominion War?

[Thom]

Yes.

The Academy also had the trainer.

[Seto Kaiba]

15 hours ago, Mog said:

Didn’t they have fighter ships during the Dominion War?

Improvised ones, apparently... the "Federation Attack Fighter" design was originally presented in Deep Space Nine as a lightly armed civilian-use courier craft that the Maquis used as a raiding craft after being retrofitted with aftermarket weapons.

[Mog]

Guess the Feds figured they could take the Maquis’ idea and improve upon it.

[kalvasflam]

7 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Improvised ones, apparently... the "Federation Attack Fighter" design was originally presented in Deep Space Nine as a lightly armed civilian-use courier craft that the Maquis used as a raiding craft after being retrofitted with aftermarket weapons.

Aftermarket?    That sounds strangely capitalistic.... oh no, is the Federation being corrupted by the Ferangis?  

[Seto Kaiba]

20 minutes ago, kalvasflam said:

Aftermarket?    That sounds strangely capitalistic.... oh no, is the Federation being corrupted by the Ferangis?  

Well, it was a capitalistic arms deal... brokered by a Ferengi (Quark) no less.

The Maquis weren't getting any weapons under the table from Starfleet the way the Cardassian colonists in the DMZ were getting theirs from the Central Command, and they weren't willing to wait for the Federation to solve it diplomatically.  Their solution was buying weapons and equipment from third parties like the Pygorians (and later, the Klingons) to retrofit their standard Federation courier ships and other craft with.

It's not clear if the Starfleet fighter is an upgunned courier based on the Maquis approach, or the Maquis upgraded their couriers based on the Starfleet fighters.

[Thom]

I think the only time we ever saw actual fighters from Starfleet was in regards to DS9 and the Dominion War, after we were introduced to Bajor and the Maquis. So I like to think that it is a design adopted by Starfleet and pressed into service.

[Mog]

And knowing the Feds, they probably classified it as a defense courier vessel.

Kinda like how they classified the over-powered, over-gunned, “built to fight the Borg” Defiant as an “escort” vessel.

[Seto Kaiba]

3 hours ago, Mog said:

And knowing the Feds, they probably classified it as a defense courier vessel.

Kinda like how they classified the over-powered, over-gunned, “built to fight the Borg” Defiant as an “escort” vessel.

To be fair, what we're told in Deep Space Nine itself is that those ships (the ones the Maquis had) were really basically defenseless in their stock configuration.  They really were courier ships originally.  The fact that they could support weapons capable of going head-to-head with a then-state-of-the-art Danube-class runabout just goes to show they were every bit as overbuilt as everything else the Federation builds.

(La Sirena is a fair example, being a civilian ship that somehow can fight on a level footing with a modernized, but century-old, Romulan warship and survive an uncontrolled crash landing from orbit in good enough shape to be rendered flyable with minimal repair.)

Edited July 28, 2020 by Seto Kaiba

[JB0]

Say what you will about the Federation, but they build hardware like nobody's business.

[renegadeleader1]

26 minutes ago, JB0 said:

Say what you will about the Federation, but they build hardware like nobody's business.

"Nobody's business" as being nobody's in the business of building circuit breakers!

Edited July 29, 2020 by renegadeleader1

[JB0]

2 hours ago, renegadeleader1 said:

"Nobody's business" as being nobody's in the business of building circuit breakers!

Well, yeah. They definitely need an OSHA.

But they build 'em like overpowered tanks, too. A century of use and the only thing in the galaxy that's better is a new federation ship.

[Seto Kaiba]

So... it turns out that, according to Star Trek: Picard production designer Todd Cherniawsky, the La Sirena was/is intended to be a non-Federation freighter design.

Its various Federation mod-cons like the emergency holograms, holosuite, and so on are additions/retrofits Rios made after he acquired the ship.

Admittedly, looking at the internal layout its alleged role as a freighter makes about as much sense as the Millennium Falcon's... which is fitting, I guess, given that the showrunners very obviously fondly imagined La Sirena to be Star Trek's Millennium Falcon.  There's nowhere to actually put cargo, unless they just pile it up unrestrained around the transporter pad, and even then it won't hold much.

[JB0]

9 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Admittedly, looking at the internal layout its alleged role as a freighter makes about as much sense as the Millennium Falcon's... which is fitting, I guess, given that the showrunners very obviously fondly imagined La Sirena to be Star Trek's Millennium Falcon.  There's nowhere to actually put cargo, unless they just pile it up unrestrained around the transporter pad, and even then it won't hold much.

OBVIOUSLY you just keep it in the transporter buffer with a harmonic quantum nanoloop to regenerate pattern integrity. Cargo bays are an unnecessary waste of space.

[Mog]

. . . And don’t forget to adjust the Heisenberg buffers to their lowest subatomic quantum setting levels.

[David Hingtgen]

Cargo transporters operate at a lower "resolution", than stuff intended for life-forms.  I believe it is "quantum" vs "molecular" resolution.   Since you need "quantum" level, to preserve all the "fine details" of the mind, you need to have Heisenberg compensators etc.   But "low-res" cargo can omit much of that, and operate at far lower power requirements, since if it's only 99.99999% accurate, that's fine for most matter.  (at which point, a cargo transporter, and a replicator, are pretty similar tech....)  

[Dynaman]

Trying to rationalize transporter differences gets you into good and evil Kirk convention snafus...

[Mog]

Well, I would hope that my cargo of frozen chicken and well-aged medium rare ribeye roasts would still be delicious and nutritious at the quantum level.

Or else, it would be no different than eating algae paste like a haggard Galactica Colonial.

[Seto Kaiba]

2 minutes ago, Mog said:

Well, I would hope that my cargo of frozen chicken and well-aged medium rare ribeye roasts would still be delicious and nutritious at the quantum level.

Or else, it would be no different than eating algae paste like a haggard Galactica Colonial.

There's one of the little things in Star Trek: Picard that really bugged me... everyone bagging on replicated food.

When replicators were introduced in TNG, they were praised as producing excellent food and drink.  Like that drunk they revived in "The Neutral Zone" who praised a replicated martini as the best he'd ever had or the Bringloidi settlers who were taken aback by the quality of replicated booze.  Later on there were occasional cases of people claiming replicators couldn't do justice to one specialty dish or a family recipe, but the only ones who ever presented replicated food as inferior to traditionally-prepared food were food snobs like the Siskos (who are restaurateurs), crazy survivalist types like the Maquis, and aliens who preferred live food.

But it seems like every character in Picard hates the replicator... which is WEIRD given that replicators are so commonplace and so high-quality that most people don't even bother to learn how to cook.

[Thom]

Its like ration bars. No matter what, book or show, the ration bar is always disgusting and barely palatable. I would love to read or see a show where the beleaguered ration bar is treated like a delicacy.

[renegadeleader1]

49 minutes ago, Thom said:

Its like ration bars. No matter what, book or show, the ration bar is always disgusting and barely palatable. I would love to read or see a show where the beleaguered ration bar is treated like a delicacy.

Firefly.

[Seto Kaiba]

53 minutes ago, Thom said:

Its like ration bars. No matter what, book or show, the ration bar is always disgusting and barely palatable. I would love to read or see a show where the beleaguered ration bar is treated like a delicacy.

O'Brien liked the field rations...?

(I know, he's weird.)

[kalvasflam]

Imagine if the Federation was a capitalist society.  The inventor of the replicator or the holodeck/holosuite would be able to buy entire sectors.  
 

All they want is to sell a bunch of programs, it’s the ultimate razor blade model.  Would be so weird.  

[Thom]

Yes, O'Brien was weird and Firefly was just all-around great. They would show the bars as being 'good' at least to a few. But still, overall, they are still decried in most stories as yucky...

Thinking about it, it's possible the ration bar is made to be only partially palatable so that people save them for last, but I think when I introduce a ration bar in my story, it's going to be delicious!

[Seto Kaiba]

3 hours ago, Thom said:

Yes, O'Brien was weird and Firefly was just all-around great. They would show the bars as being 'good' at least to a few. But still, overall, they are still decried in most stories as yucky...

Thinking about it, it's possible the ration bar is made to be only partially palatable so that people save them for last, but I think when I introduce a ration bar in my story, it's going to be delicious!

Ration packs being horrible is kind of truth-in-television, tho... it's a rare soldier who thinks military ration packs actually taste good, most usually think they're iffy at best.

They're at least VERY consistent in Star Trek that field rations are bloody awful.  Even Gul Dukat chimes in that they've possibly started tasting even worse since the Cardassian border wars. 

(One thing in Picard that's really bloody incongruous WRT the show's weird hate-on for replicated food is Maddox's insistence that baking cookies with replicated ingredients somehow is different/better than just replicating the cookies.  It's the same synthesized matter one way or the other.)

[Mog]

Speaking of rations:

Unintentional comedy galore!

[Dynaman]

By the time Sherman's March to the sea in the civil war was done the soldiers were actually happy to have hard tack again...

[Lexomatic]

On 7/29/2020 at 8:06 AM, Seto Kaiba said:

Admittedly, looking at [La Sirena's] internal layout its alleged role as a freighter makes about as much sense as the Millennium Falcon's [...] There's nowhere to actually put cargo, unless they just pile it up unrestrained around the transporter pad, and even then it won't hold much.

Have internal layout plans been published? The external layout (via high-res, well-lit images to promote the ship's addition to Star Trek Online in May) show the ship to have at least three decks and two large hatchway-like insets flanking the central fuselage, implying there's a lot of cubic apart from two-deck open space (transporter, flight deck) where most of the action is set. (During the pre-show buzz for ST:PIC, when the only promo images were of that space and fans wondered how a cargo ship could adapt to carry as many persons as shown, I speculated that it might use holodeck-like technology to create partitions as needed. Alas, nothing so interesting.)

After its controlled crash on yet-another-Soong-world, did any shots establish its scale? I didn't see that ep myself; I tuned out midway through the season, and only followed the episode reviews by Trek scribe KRAD on Tor.com.

FWIW, I'm still perplexed by the catamaran/mandible-like structures on each side. They're not in the right place for warp nacelles, they're too narrow for cargo or quarters ... maybe they contained large gun-like weapons, or vertical launch tubes? Which were removed before the ship was sold on the second-hand market, and the hull retained for aesthetics. Otherwise they're like the huge fins on Star Wars vehicles that have no evident aerodynamic, thermal radiator, or shield-projecting function.

[Seto Kaiba]

2 hours ago, Lexomatic said:

Have internal layout plans been published? The external layout (via high-res, well-lit images to promote the ship's addition to Star Trek Online in May) show the ship to have at least three decks and two large hatchway-like insets flanking the central fuselage, implying there's a lot of cubic apart from two-deck open space (transporter, flight deck) where most of the action is set. (During the pre-show buzz for ST:PIC, when the only promo images were of that space and fans wondered how a cargo ship could adapt to carry as many persons as shown, I speculated that it might use holodeck-like technology to create partitions as needed. Alas, nothing so interesting.)

After its controlled crash on yet-another-Soong-world, did any shots establish its scale? I didn't see that ep myself; I tuned out midway through the season, and only followed the episode reviews by Trek scribe KRAD on Tor.com.

The La Sirena set layouts shown on The Ready Room suggest the ship is MUCH smaller than that... and that the internal spaces we see comprise somewhere on the order of half or more of the ship's internal volume.  That, combined with exterior shots (most tellingly the bridge windows) points to the ship being only two decks tall and maybe 2-3x the size of Picard's captain's yacht Cousteau from the Enterprise-E.  Given that it's depicted as being a fair bit smaller than the 23rd century Romulan Bird-of-Prey, it's probably less than 100m end-to-end.  (Cousteau was 33m, and the average Danube-class runabout is 23m, the BoP is 150m.)

 

2 hours ago, Lexomatic said:

FWIW, I'm still perplexed by the catamaran/mandible-like structures on each side. They're not in the right place for warp nacelles, they're too narrow for cargo or quarters ... maybe they contained large gun-like weapons, or vertical launch tubes? Which were removed before the ship was sold on the second-hand market, and the hull retained for aesthetics. Otherwise they're like the huge fins on Star Wars vehicles that have no evident aerodynamic, thermal radiator, or shield-projecting function.

Granted, most of the technology in Star Trek: Picard fails to follow the established design conventions of Star Trek or anything resembling common sense... prompting the Star Trek: Picard creative team to trot out a variety of half-assed attempted justifications.  (To date, I think my favorite is the half-assed excuse for their terrible props.  The reason the phasers from La Sirena's armory and various other places look like modern guns with random crap glued to them is because they're old.  REALLY old.  Like a century and a half old, making them models introduced around the time the original USS Enterprise was commissioned.  Rios can afford the latest holosuite and emergency hologram technology for his ship but makes do with phasers and tricorders from his great grandfather's era?)

Based on the creator commentary, La Sirena was designed and built as a freighter... so it's unlikely that it was ever heavily armed.  They seem to be too narrow for anything, really, unless they're meant to be fuel tanks or something like that.  They're definitely not where the weapons are mounted, since La Sirena's only apparent phaser bank seems to be in its nose.  What appear to be the ship's warp nacelles are connected to their bottom edges, however.

[Thom]

Really wish they'd used the Raven as the base design. That has some volume.

[tekering]

5 hours ago, Thom said:

Really wish they'd used the Raven as the base design.

Nah, that looks too much like... you know... a Star Trek design.  

[Thom]

43 minutes ago, tekering said:

Nah, that looks too much like... you know... a Star Trek design.  

YES!!

[pengbuzz]

On 7/31/2020 at 2:11 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

The La Sirena set layouts shown on The Ready Room suggest the ship is MUCH smaller than that... and that the internal spaces we see comprise somewhere on the order of half or more of the ship's internal volume.  That, combined with exterior shots (most tellingly the bridge windows) points to the ship being only two decks tall and maybe 2-3x the size of Picard's captain's yacht Cousteau from the Enterprise-E.  Given that it's depicted as being a fair bit smaller than the 23rd century Romulan Bird-of-Prey, it's probably less than 100m end-to-end.  (Cousteau was 33m, and the average Danube-class runabout is 23m, the BoP is 150m.)

 

Granted, most of the technology in Star Trek: Picard fails to follow the established design conventions of Star Trek or anything resembling common sense... prompting the Star Trek: Picard creative team to trot out a variety of half-assed attempted justifications.  (To date, I think my favorite is the half-assed excuse for their terrible props.  The reason the phasers from La Sirena's armory and various other places look like modern guns with random crap glued to them is because they're old.  REALLY old.  Like a century and a half old, making them models introduced around the time the original USS Enterprise was commissioned.  Rios can afford the latest holosuite and emergency hologram technology for his ship but makes do with phasers and tricorders from his great grandfather's era?)

Based on the creator commentary, La Sirena was designed and built as a freighter... so it's unlikely that it was ever heavily armed.  They seem to be too narrow for anything, really, unless they're meant to be fuel tanks or something like that.  They're definitely not where the weapons are mounted, since La Sirena's only apparent phaser bank seems to be in its nose.  What appear to be the ship's warp nacelles are connected to their bottom edges, however.

As far as I'm concerned, that ship is a flying explodium exhibit looking for a place to happen.

[Lexomatic]

On 7/31/2020 at 3:04 PM, Thom said:

Really wish they'd used the Raven as the base design. That has some volume.

That looks to be a fan image, but how conjectural is it? Lessee ... there was an MSD (screencap at Memory Alpha) in the relevant episode of ST:VGR ("The Raven", 4.07), and it does show five decks with an aft shuttlebay, but most of the other details are different. The Decipher RPG identifies it as an Aerie-class surveyor with a length of 90 meters. I agree, that would be plenty of cubic for cargo and a half-dozen supernumerary passengers. It's a rather boring boxy shape, but Rios could've given it the red-stripey antithesis-of-sober-Starfleet Narn-reminiscent paint scheme seen in ST:PIC.

That a ship of that size and capability can be operated for years on end by a crew of two (viz., Annika Hansen's obsessed-scientist parents) attests to Federation-built mid-24cen durability and automation. (When not being abused by cosmozoans and space anomalies every other week; Starfleet vessels need crew mainly for damage control, I guess.) Of course, we've had solo operators at least since TOS, with the Cyrano Jones and Harcourt Mudds of the universe.