Thoughts on the Titan-A?

Star Trek : Picard
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SlipperyStream47
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Thoughts on the Titan-A?

Post by SlipperyStream47 »

Everything that I write below is just a reflection of my opinion, and I do not wish to impose on anyone else's thoughts.

When they first showed the U.S.S. Titan-A, I was disappointed and even a little bit upset. Its design is highly anachronistic; it's essentially just a revamped Constitution. The shape of the saucer is exactly the same as on the Constitution class, except for the impulse engine cutouts at the back. Starfleet moved on to a different saucer design starting with the Excelsior class. This was not just an aesthetics choice--it also had to do with the efficiency of the warp drive. There is no reason that Starfleet would ever return to that design. Obviously, no other Federation ship class that we have seen in Picard has regressed in design chronology. Another important point is that the window pattern is almost the exact same. There are no windows at all on the top or bottom surface of the saucer, which is different from all the other ships in the fleet. The Titan-A also has the same dual phaser bank layout as on the Constitution refit, but it also seems to have the modern phaser arrays. Why would it have both types of weapons?! This is all so confusing!
The strangest of all is that they keep trying to say this ship is a refit of the Luna Class. It is not a refit. It is a completely new/old ship. Refits look similar to their predecessors. This is an entirely separate design. They tried to kitbash some Riker history with old TOS nostalgia into the new Titan's design, and it has--in my opinion--been an odd and uncoordinated amalgam. The show is called Star Trek: Picard and not Star Trek: Kirk and Spock for a reason. It's not necessarily a bad idea to introduce old Trek nostalgia into the show, but that doesn't mean that the new hero ship has to look one and a half centuries old. The ship is called the Titan-A, not the Enterprise-K, and thus it should look similar to its namesake.
The ship looks weirdly off-balance to me. The secondary hull is oddly wedge-shaped, and looks oddly small compared to the saucer. The front of the engineering hull has weird slopes, and the small deflector dish is set deep in, where it fails to blend in with the blocky hull surrounding it. The impulse engines at the back of the ship are stacked weirdly and the neck does not look smooth and streamlined like every other ship in the entire fleet.

As the show has progressed, I have come to accept the ship. It is okay from certain angles, and it is the hero ship, after all. That said, I would have much preferred that the ship actually fit the era.

What are all your thoughts on the U.S.S. Titan-A?
“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.”
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McAvoy
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Re: Thoughts on the Titan-A?

Post by McAvoy »

I think nuTrek has a bunch of designers who actually don't care that much about starship design logic.

I don't know. Maybe its because for much of Trek, kitbashing was the way to go for new starships to be introduced. So we get the 'old' ships like the Stargazer looking like Kirk's Enterprise. Newer more capable ships would look like the Enterprise-D so we get the Nebula. Then we have the older former ship of the line Excelsior class that was built in large numbers doiny secondary things, but to reuse a existing model. But in reality, the Ambassador class or the more curvy version was supposed to be that ship that would meet up with E-D.

But when it came to new ships there was always some connection to other ships like the Intrepid class being easily recognized as being part of the same family as the Enterprise-D.

The problem with NuTrek is that the ship design doesn't show a distinct difference between a 23rd century ship and a 24th century one anymore. The Titan is an example of that.

The thing is that these are small details. Ship exterior looks, and interior looks are details and they are being overlooked. For what? Cool factor?
"Don't underestimate the power of technobabble: the Federation can win anything with the sheer force of bullshit"
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