Picard - general discussion [spoilers]

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Having the Enterprise-D and the Titan flying alongside one another and the latter being noticeably smaller than the former, they decide to rename it into the Enterprise-G. WTF? Each iteration of the Enterprise is supposed to be larger and more powerful than the one before, but the G is a definite downgrade and largely skipping over the F, and is no bigger than the Enterprise-C.

And Spacedock has the shielding and firepower of their entire fleet and is somehow integral to the planetary shields? I can see the parallels of ROTJ.

[Batman]

WHY does every followup enterprise HAVE to be larger and more powerful (I'm not sure the E-E would look that much bigger than the E-D? Sleeker and longer, yes, but bigger?), how are they skipping over the F when we literally SAW the F?
Spacedock having GOLAN III firepower and being an integral shield node was weird indeed.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

WHY does every followup enterprise HAVE to be larger and more powerful (I'm not sure the E-E would look that much bigger than the E-D? Sleeker and longer, yes, but bigger?), how are they skipping over the F when we literally SAW the F?
Spacedock having GOLAN III firepower and being an integral shield node was weird indeed.

You mean besides that's how it's been done with EVERY Starship Enterprise ever made? Here's the proof, you may notice a certain pattern.

Crazedwraith said it best:

The Enterprise is supposed to be the jewel of the fleet, the flagship, the most prized captaincy. This does not follow.

Considering the amount of screentime the F got could be measured in seconds I'd say that counts as skipping over, we're just supposed to believe that they chose a ship that was smaller than the D to be its successor, they've taken three steps backwards for fuck's sake. Especially as in just three more iterations we're supposed to arrive at the even bigger, uglier Enterprise-J. Or hopefully at least a fully finished version.

[AniThyng]

My main issue with it is really they should have christened a new NCC-1701-G that is NOT the Titan-A because holy cow what a way to disrespect the crew and legacy of the Titan - i mean yeah we get that it's basically Riker's rebound but still!

[Crazedwraith]

WHY does every followup enterprise HAVE to be larger and more powerful (I'm not sure the E-E would look that much bigger than the E-D? Sleeker and longer, yes, but bigger?)

Well there's obviously no actual law or rule but it's pretty much the custom to have the new ship be nearly always a new and modern ship. (The A is the only notable exception)

As AniThyng says:

My main issue with it is really they should have christened a new NCC-1701-G that is NOT the Titan-A because holy cow what a way to disrespect the crew and legacy of the Titan - i mean yeah we get that it's basically Riker's rebound but still!

It kind of shits on the Titan and it's this weird thing that implies only the Enterprise can have big notable adventures and save the Federation. Oh, the Titan did? Well promote it to Enterprise! But they'd already made out the Titan herself had enough of a rep to have an "A" herself which was until recently was a nearly unique thing.

It's especially weird, the fleet museum makes it clear the Federation has lots of notable ships, including ones we've never heard of.

Like it's so obvious fanservice that it loops back around to me throwing me off. Like a lot of the season to be honest.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

I half expected them to rename the Titan to "Picard" instead

[Lord Revan]

I half expected them to rename the Titan to "Picard" instead

Honestly that wouldn't have been bad at all.

[Crazedwraith]

They could name it Picard for Renee Picard but that would mean acknowledging season 2 happened.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

I half expected them to rename the Titan to "Picard" instead

Honestly that wouldn't have been bad at all.

USS Picard does have a nice ring to it and would have been more fitting than applying the name "Enterprise" to anything other than the flagship.

I did notice the original Stargazer in the fleet museum at the end, as well as an Akira-class starship (certainly enough of them have been destroyed). I'd have to view it again to identify any other starship classes.

[Batman]

Why are there TWO iterations of NX-01? I can see why there's 2 E-nil refits (despite it being pointless as they were identical) as there were two iterations of it (the original Refit and the E-A) but there being a second NX-01 would be news to me.
The secondary hull on the E-C looks wrong. And notice how the E-E as I mentioned earlier is LONGER but not LARGER than the E-E.

[tezunegari]

Why are there TWO iterations of NX-01?

The second one is the NX-refit that would have been introduced in the canceled fifth season.
She's in the Fleet Museum, or at least a ship of the same class, behind the K'tinga in the background.




The Ent-C looks like the original Andre Probert concept used for the gold ships in the Ent-D conference.
They did change the Ambassador class for Yesterday's Enterprise.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

It was the only side-by-side image I could find of each iteration of the Enterprise that included the F, illustrating how much bigger it actually is following the overall trend. Now the G is going to be a ship that as we saw when they were next to each other, is actually smaller than the Enterprise-D.

[Lord Revan]

It should be noted that in a length on comparison the ENT-F looks even bigger then it actually is as it has similar hull shape to ENT-E (not identical but similar), so she's not as tall relative to her length as the ENT-D is.

I fly the same class of ship as the ENT-F (well technically it's Legendary version I'm using but skin I'm using is the base Oddy) in STO so the hull shape is quite familiar to me.

[Formless]

I don't know what the fuss is about, when you rotate the Enterprise D's saucer around to be oriented the same way the other ships are, it becomes immediately obvious that its actually a much more massive ship than the Enterprise E. Not only is its saucer section longer, its fatter even after the transformation! People get confused by length, a long skinny ship is not necessarily bigger than a squat, fat thing, which is basically the D. We've often compared it to a flying hotel for a reason. With all due respect to Cetacean Ops, she looks like a beached whale. The E certainly isn't bigger than a Galaxy (in fact I think its only just bigger than the Enterprise C once you start ignoring length and consider volume instead), and I think the Odyssey class is only just about the same size once you realize this. It would be hard to calculate the exact volume of the ship let alone weight, but the trend breaker was the E and the F. Starfleet doesn't necessarily care if the newest incarnation of the Enterprise is really bigger than its predecessor, and after so much of the fleet got blasted to chunks by its own spacedocks' considerable defenses, it might well be that the Titan is one of the larger vessels left in the fleet now. And they aren't giving the D another refit just to press it back into service, clearly.

[Crazedwraith]

There's no need to obsess over "is it bigger?" When I've already conceded what was meant was newer/better and people have pointed out that renaming the Titan disrespects its own legacy.

I don't buy the Titan is the most advanced ship let or that that's a good reason to renamed it to Enterprise. There was a decade gap between C and D after all, they don't have to have one in commission constantly. (Also i don't think spacedock does manufacturing but it's vague where ship get built now with mars blown up because they won't reference s1 stuff like that)

But ultimately it's fanservice and its subjective. It either lands for you or it doesn't and a lot of it didn't for me

[AniThyng]

I would prefer fanservice that doesn't shortchange the sister shows and itself too. It's logical that Shaw and the Titan deserve to keep their own legacy while honoring Picard and the Enterprise. If there was doing to be fanservice I much rather see Janeway and O'Brien* name-dropped at the epilogue. But ymmv.

*And he's an ENT-D veteran too!

[Iroscato]

Season 3 really won me over after what I considered an absolutely horrendous first two seasons. They finally made the show that had been waiting in the wings this whole time and wrapped it all up in glorious, copious fan-servicey fun.

No, the Titan being rechristened the Enterprise doesn't make a lick of sense (the USS Picard would have been much more sensible narratively and creatively, given how they framed the leadup to the reveal - also note the name of the fucking show). Yes the infiltration plot required some EXTREMELY GENEROUS logical leaps though the idea itself I thought was quite clever. And yes Raffi is still terrible but at least we weren't subjected to her that much.

Also yes I would still like to give Seven at least Seven of my Nine.

But I enjoyed the hell out of things overall, especially the final few episodes. Hopefully they really listen to fans and critics' responses to this and SNW and get Trek properly back on its feet.

[Lord Revan]

Here's the front

and side

profiles(well as close to I could get them by eye) of the Oddyssey-class The class the ENT-F is a part of, the colors are incorrect due in-game cosmetic item I have so you can ignore those.

Though you can see the Oddyssey-class is a bit wider at base of the secondary hull relative to its overall size then the Sovereign-class.

[Crazedwraith]

Season 3 really won me over after what I considered an absolutely horrendous first two seasons. They finally made the show that had been waiting in the wings this whole time and wrapped it all up in glorious, copious fan-servicey fun.

I don't want to be a dick to you. Opinions are subjective and all that. And that opinion seems to the prevailing one on the internet from what little I've seen on youtube and imgur.

On the other hand, I really disagree. This is the show they were trying hard to be better than for the first couple of seasons. Patrick Stewart didn't want any other TNG cast in it at first before being convinced to let a few in. Why? So it could be it's own show and stand on it's own feet. Well Season 3 is nothing less than a surrender and an admittance that no, it can't stand on it's own. Is it because it was bad? or because fans just wanted the TNG reunion?

Up until the finale, I was going along with it. Yes, fanservice is fun to a point but the ending made it clear there was just nothing there. It a vapid soulless exercise in bringing back characters and murdering them if they weren't main cast and having the main cast wank each other of about how awesome they are and much they miss each other and doing pretty much fucking nothing worthwhile when reunited.

Like fuck they defeat the borg with the power of love and then shooting them. How often have i heard how terrible disco and Picard for solving their problems with action and shooting, and this is being praised? Like S1 the solution was love and peaceful acceptance of the synth. Season 2 the borg problem was solved by understanding and convincing them to change their ways. That's pretty Star Trek.

This one... play RotJ with a hitherto unknown borg supercube and blow up the glowy thing.

The previous two seasons had a fuckton of problems I admit but at least they were trying to do something interesting and new. This season was fan service and stealling plot points of the past to redo. (Picard/Jack = Kirk/David Marcus) and some of them weren't that good to start with.

I don't think Picard ever lived up to it's potential. I don't think it even tried to in season 3.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

The C & D also break trends because those two Enterprises nacelles do not significantly contribute to the overall length of the ship, the trend-bucking aspect of the E is that excluding the nacelles, the D is longer. However even without the nacelles, the Enterprise-F is the longest by a considerable margin. The G doesn't make any sense especially when three iterations later we're supposed to arrive at the J. I did find this video that has them all side-by-side:

[Formless]

So someone on a youtube comments section pointed out, it could be that the Titan was rechristened Enterprise because it just got a refit in the one year timeskip. They say its undergoing a shakedown cruise, which wouldn't be necessary unless something has changed about the ship's systems, and it makes sense that they would have to strip out a lot of the fleet's systems in general to eliminate the fleet wide integration and formation capability to finally eliminate the security vulnerabilities Geordie was warning them about, but which was presumably pushed through by a Changling admiral or something. So not only do they have to rebuild much of the fleet after the battle over Earth, they also have to rip out all the infected computer systems of every ship still in service, and this may include ships that haven't yet gotten out of production. The intended successor to the Enterprise F might have been delayed by a few years in an effort to fix all the Borg/changeling bullshit that got snuck into the design, whereas the Titan-A is now an older ship with less shit to pull out to make it into a true successor to the Constitution class of the 23'rd century. So it might appear like a downgrade, but the immediate situation is that the whole fleet needs to downgrade like a Cyberpunk character told they have to tone down on the chrome or they'll go cyberpsycho. The next generation of ships might actually be smaller in general so that they can rebuild faster, but under the hood they're still 25'th century ships built to 25'th century standards. A different design ethos for a very different decade to when the Galaxy class was getting repeatedly delayed and starfleet didn't care so long as it kept spinning off other useful designs like the Nebula and the California classes. Starfleet can't waste resources like that anymore.

Of course, behind the curtains, all of this really makes me think that this finale was a backdoor pilot for a successor series about the Enterprise G starring Seven as captain. They even did the Marvel thing with the post-credits scene involving a not-dead Q. Hopefully if they do make Star Trek Legacy, they will aspire to make it more like Strange New Worlds or Lower Decks and eschew these season long serial approach that seems to have doomed Picard. They've already learned the mistake of Discovery and gone back to using ensemble casting instead of trying to make the story about a single character, now they need to remember that Star Trek is best when it remains episodic and uses the myth-arc method for telling longer stories. It seems to be what they are good at, and what Star Trek does really well.

[Crazedwraith]

The Titan needed a shakedown cruise after a year because it had the shit blown out of it by the fleet and was almost destroyed and needed fixing up.

If the intended E-G was delayed.... so what? They don't have to have an Enterprise in commission. They can just wait for whatever shiny new ship comes along.

If it didn't come with Jack I'd welcome a Captain Seven series (she's been underused every Picard season with a few token plot point that could carry entire series) but there's no reason the series couldn't be about the Titan. Series not about the Enterprise are very much a thing in Trek old and new.

[bilateralrope]

Hadn't the Titan been in service for decades at that point ?

So no need to rename it. Just have a few lines of dialog to say that we are looking at a newly built ship because the Titan is no longer in service. Changing the external model and redressing one of the available bridge sets would be nice, but unnecessary.

As for a Captain Seven series, that would work well. But having Jack and Raffi there are both problems. The captain being in a romantic relationship with the first officer says bad things about Starfleet, while Jack getting that special advisor position after a year at the academy makes me think he was right about nepotism.

[Formless]

Officers being in romantic relationships with other officers has been a thing since the beginning, Kirk married two of his officers in the original series-- only for the groom to die the same day fighting the Romulans (ref: Balance of Terror). Beverly's first husband was also an officer. Riker and Troi were romantically involved from before TNG, to the point that in the pilot she can communicate with him telepathically (which is rarely acknowledged since then). Beverly then fell for Picard, her Captain, and had a son with him; Troi had a fling with Worf, then Riker and Troi finally sealed the deal right before serving together on the original Titan with Riker as Captain. Worf married Jadzia. Bashir started dating Ezri towards the end of DS9. On Voyager, the chief engineer ended up marrying the ship's pilot and they had a kid together right before getting back to Earth. In the Kelvin films, Spock and Uhura are an item. Etc.

This isn't something they just came up with, Starfleet clearly doesn't have the same rules against coworkers getting romantically involved that modern military institutions have. Or of officers serving with other members of their family in general. Because, as they often like to remind us, they aren't a military. We can criticize the hypocrisy of them saying that while being the Federation's official defensive wing and arming their ships appropriately, but there are indeed these procedural differences between how they operate and how the military operates that indicates a difference in thinking. They're explorers, so if an Admiral is married to one of the very captains underneath him (like Mariner's parents) that's fine, they can handle that. The first officer and Captain might find themselves romantically interested in one another, possibly even before getting assigned to the same ship. There was clearly romantic tension between Janeway and Chakotay as well, and as of Prodigy that might have resurfaced. Its no more unusual to Starfleet than the fact Seven and Muskier were, as Raffi herself put it, a former pirate and a spy (also, a recovering addict).

Also, I don't think Jack was assigned to the Enterprise as a special advisor, that's just the bridge position Seven gave him because he was, as he pointed out, multitalented even before joining Starfleet, so having him in the third bridge seat ready to help any of his other coworkers at their console and help formulate action plans based on what he knows outside of his Starfleet training makes a certain sense. Other characters have had a similar role on their ship as well: Chekov was technically the ship's navigator, but in practice they made clear he was an officer who could wear many hats despite his low rank, even advising Kirk on tactical considerations. Wesley could be the ship's pilot, but he was given a field commission specifically because The Traveler convinced Picard he was a genius and had indeed saved the ship already when the chief of engineering was clearly incompetent to do something as simple as reverse the polarity of a tractor beam. Harry Kim had no specific specialty like Tuvok, Paris, Bellana or the Doctor, yet he was one of the command staff at the rank of Ensign. Actually, in practice Voyager had three such people, because Tom was basically a jack of all trades in addition to specializing as a pilot, and Seven herself was quite literally a special advisor on Borg shit and the Delta Quadrant at large.

I think this kind of role is something Starfleet encourages captains to give ensigns on the command track who want to be a captain some day, because as Captain they will need to know a little bit about everything to begin with. We're told that Mariner could already have ranked up to Captain if it wasn't for her terrible attitude, and Freeman does indeed sometimes have her sitting in the third seat on her left. Yes, partially that's because of their relationship, but partly that's because Freeman realizes that her daughter specializes in problem solving rather than any specific field. And she does hope that eventually Mariner will shape up and realize her potential, so this is the best position for her when she's on the bridge. Jack doesn't have an attitude problem, but the ship already had a navigator, pilot, ops, tactical, and science stations covered, so special advisor to the captain and first officer? Makes sense. It gives him opportunities to have the conn from time to time without having to take night shifts like Harry was willing to do in order to get practice at command. And it makes more sense than giving the conn to someone like Dr. Migleemo...

[Crazedwraith]

Well Seven and Raffi seemed to have split up offscreen so no relationship there. Unless I missed something in the final scenes that had them back together?

Jack's position is dumb.