▼

Tuesday, 5 January 2021

Our best look yet at Starfleet of the 32nd century

CBS Star Trek social media accounts have today shared some cool concept art montages of several of the new 32nd century Starfleet ships seen throughout Discovery season three, giving us our clearest views yet of several of the new and very varied designed. The images also name several of these ships, and identify their classes. Continue below to check them out:

  • Eisenberg class, USS Nog NCC-325070 
    • Named for the lost-too-soon actor Aron Eisenberg, and his character from DS9 of course. 
    • This is one of several of the more vertically oriented ships in the future fleet, which collectively seem to point towards a new movement in starship design within the Federation, sitting alongside the saucer-forms we know better - The Earth ships seen this season are not that different from this look too.
  • Mars class, USS Le Guin NCC-325060 
    • Presumably named for the planet (or Roman god?), and of course the master science fiction writer, Ursula Le Guin, who also recently passed.
    • This was the class referred to as a scout when it was first seen, and with it's chunky prominent nacelles, it kind of looks like a Federation-ified Disco-Klingon ship to me!
  • Angelou class, USS Maathai NCC-325023 
    • The class I imagine named for the writer and civil rights activist Maya Angelou, while the ship is presumably named after Wangari Maathai, a Nobel Prize winning Kenyan ecologist and founder of the Green Belt Movement. Both persons are also fairly recently deceased.
    • This is the beautiful and distinctive flying rainforest, which looks like an amazing ship to live on!

  • Intrepid class, USS Voyager NCC-74656-J 
    • Named of course for the USS Voyager of the series Voyager, its direct ancestor, with the class name being retained into a new design even.
    • The design strongly follows the original 24th century Intrepid class, but those new detached nacelles can probably move even more than the original!
  • Saturn class, USS Annan NCC-325051 
    • Another class named for a Sol system planet or Roman god? There are quite a lot of Annans in the world, but the most prominent to me, and another recently departed person, is Kofi Annan, the Ghanaian UN Secretary General and Novel Peace Prize winner.
    • This ship kind of follows the saucer and nacelle design we know well, albeit they took the middle out of the saucer! Unusually for these future ships the nacelles seem firmly built into the ship.
  • Courage class, USS Jubayr NCC-325068
    • Courage is quite a wide ranging word that could be after the general word for valor; but maybe this one is after Alexander Courage, the composer of the original Star Trek theme music? The ship would seem to be named after Ibn Jubayr, a 12th century Arab traveller and writer.
    • Also part of that vertical orientation lineage, this one kind of fells like a more organically inspired version of the Eisenberg class, minus the nacelles

A few of the new ships alas didn't make the cut for this set of images, which you can make out in these effects shots from Pixomondo:



And this still from the pre-Burn fleet scene:


The always brilliant Star Trek detail expert Jörg Hillebrand has been cataloguing the ships of the fleet all season long on Twitter, and I can't do much better than his observations at this point - FYI, his Twitter is amazing, well worth a follow for endless Star Trek insights.

So missing out on the treatment above, we have the "Constitution class":

The distinctive class with the very long nacelles:

The so far not-very-clearly-seen flat-ish four nacelled ship:

And the even less clearly seen vertically oriented backward leter-C ship, which seems to have eight (attached) nacelles!:

If you missed it before CBS previously released a cool Federation Headquarters travel poster, which gives us some other views of some of these ships:


I plan on a more in-depth look at all the ships from the season once the final episode has aired, as I did with the ships of Picard earlier in the year.

Meanwhile, for more starship goodness check back through my ships tag, and for more on Discovery have a look through the Discovery tag.




at

2 comments:

  1. Unknown6 January 2021 at 09:03

    I like how the variety implies the many different ways the Federation was trying to overcome the dilithium situation. The extra long nacelles are so unconventional, but it makes sense trying to picture desperate ship designers arguing that they managed to eek out 0.003 percent more oomph for less dilithium by making warp bubbles that look like sausages. It's also wild to imagine the USS Annan may have a specific use, a support vessel that works in tandem with another ship or tech that the ring hub can dock with. A rescue ship, or heck maybe it's a mining ship that slots an asteroid into its nest and works it in 360 degrees.

    Really sparks the imagination.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unknown18 August 2021 at 13:54

    I wonder what the U.S.S. Enterprise will look like in the 32nd Century hope it will make appear in season 4 of Star Trek Discovery

    ReplyDelete