Interesting find, but I’ll keep my enthusiasm in check until something more authoritative turns up. The article to which the link was provided is a third-hand account of information the author got from a blog called “birth movies death”, whose blogger in turn says that he’s “heard” some interesting rumours about what era the show will be set in. He doesn’t say where or from whom he’s heard these rumours. The closest he comes to making any attribution is in the sentence where he says that “a trusted source” told him that “it looks like” the show will be an anthology. So once again, unfortunately, we’re reading statements which provide no corroboration for what they’re saying and, on top of that, which are vague in nature and diluted by qualifiers of the “it looks like” type. I supposed that’s an inevitable consequence of the studio being so secretive about their plans for the show: people will be tempted to fill the information vacuum in which CBS is keeping us. The only certainty we can count on is the fact that CBS can’t keep it up forever because the show is due to air early next year.
I will take any hope I can get. Dashing it can’t be any worse than what has already happened to the modern Star Trek franchise.
I do so crave for some good Star Trek. And personally, I love tie-ins and any connections to events future and past so much more than a new complete stand alone. Like with Enterpise, when they did Soong / Augments, T’Pau, Section 31. Of course there are also many fans who want something new and unrelated.
More Star Trek, less planetoid-sized superweapons :)
@alexgreat:
More Star Trek, less planetoid-sized superweapons :)
Haha! Amen!
thx for that!
The only real question I have, namely the timeline, they do not answer, oc.
Oh well, and if the Romulans are featured heavily ;)
http://www.startrek.com/article/new-star-trek-series-premieres-january-2017
This article is from November of last year and doesn’t say anything we don’t already know. Just curious why you posted it… maybe you saw something I didn’t?
I did latch on to the phrase “all new” which, if I have read it before, it never sank in. It both means something and absolutely nothing at the same time though.
didnt check if that has been brought up here already, but its very well made and fits nicely into the temporal cold war story: Star Trek Horizon
RIP Anton. Very sad, such a great actor :(
As for the second Beyond trailer, thats beyond what I can take…
@alexgreat:
RIP Anton. Very sad, such a great actor :(
Yeah, man that sucks. Read that last night.
Is the funeral in Leningrad?
Star Trek TV series to begin filming in Toronto this fall, CBS confirms
New show to make its debut in January 2017
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/star-trek-tv-filming-toronto-1.3562759
http://www.startrek.com/article/introducing-the-u-s-s-discovery
Introducing the U.S.S. Discovery
StarTrek.com Staff
July 23, 2016
And the name of the newest Star Trek television series is… Star Trek: Discovery, with the show’s hero ship called the U.S.S. Discovery (NCC-1031). Executive Producer Bryan Fuller revealed the details and debuted the logo today during a standing-room-only “Star Trek 50th Anniversary” panel in Hall H at San Diego Comic-Con.
There’s a short video showing the new ship here…
http://trekcore.com/blog/2016/07/new-star-trek-discovery-show-launches-january-2017/
…plus a note saying “Bryan Fuller has confirmed at the after-panel press conference that Discovery will be set in the Prime Trek timeline, but will not yet confirm the timeframe.”
Thanks for keeping the discussion updated Marc. I read this the other day and didn’t even think to post it.
So… there she is. Not much to look at if you ask me. A couple nice design elements, but the overall geometry of the hull is… bold to put it mildly. Looks like a giant XB-70 with a saucer on the front. Or a Klingon K’T’inga. Apparently this is extremely close to a ship design put forth for the very first Star Trek film back in the 1970s, which was never made.
Also supposedly, the ship above is not the ‘final’ design. Such that Bryan Fuller stated, “[The influence of the McQuarrie art is] to a point where we legally can�t comment on it until we figure out some things.” To me, this says that they simply need approval to use the design or significantly borrow elements from it, before it can be official. Only a matter of time. http://trekcore.com/blog/2016/07/star-trek-discovery-producer-says-ship-designs-not-final/
What all this alludes to is very interesting however. The McQuarrie Design/Art/Model, abandoned and never used in the planned Star Trek film, was actually used in The Next Generation episode “Unification Part I”. You can see the ship in the foreground shot of the orbital junkyard (attached pic). Thus, the ship actually has canonical basis.
While I am not down on the design very much, a) it could be worse and b) if the writers/production team actually delved into obscurity to both come up with the design and find an in-universe basis for it… well that is darn impressive and deserves a standing ovation. They get a lot of respect from me for that alone. God knows how much easier it is to just make up something cool and new (e.g. Enterprise NX-class) and say F*** the whole continuity thing. IF they did all this purposely, they deserve a tremendous amount of credit. It had to be Mike Okuda’s doing.
See video in article below for a more detailed look:
http://trekcore.com/blog/2016/07/new-star-trek-discovery-show-launches-january-2017/
What this also tells me, again, IF done deliberately, is that the timeframe is somewhere between TOS and TNG. Fuller has already admitted to it being in the Prime timeline and the history of this ship design points to post-TOS and maybe pre- or very near to ST:TMP. Several elements of the ship indicate this also. The saucer is almost perfectly circular and the recessed/domed portions of it are quite similar to those of the Constitution-refit, Miranda and Excelsior designs. The deflector dish is very much like that of the Excelsior. The aft portions of the nacelles appear to be throwback in nature and have a cowling-like hood extending beyond the actual endpoint. Perhaps the most notable feature is the point-emplacement phaser banks, shown as pairs of raised bumps around the saucer. These were used on the TOS-era ships, including Constitution-refit, Miranda and Excelsior. TNG-era (and pre-TNG, ex. Ambassador class) ships use a more modern phaser strip which extends around the saucer and other portions of the ship. This is very noticeably absent.
They say that this design was thrown together in 3-weeks specifically for this teaser. So the design isn’t final, but I would be surprised if it is radically different from what they showed here. The ‘legal’ aspect of what Fuller brought up seems to reinforce that they are waiting on some sort of property rights approval. Thirdly, this is a very specific ship design and I do not see why they would publicize something so recognizable and unique without planning to use it directly or borrow from it significantly.
Just one point, because I’m not sure from the way your post is phrased whether or not you’re aware of this, but one of the four pictures in the great picture collage you posted is actually the old Ralph McQuarrie painting (which I recognize from one of my Trek reference books), not a picture of the new ship from the new series. If you compare the top right picture (the McQuarrie painting) with the bottom right CGI shot from the video that was just released, you’ll see that the McQuarrie design’s secondary hull is basically a solid triangle whereas the new ship’s secondary hull is more of an arrowhead; in fact, it has more than a passing resemblance to the Starfleet emblem, which is kind of a nice touch (whether intentional or not).
Also, note that the McQuarrie painting has the registration number 1701 (for the original Enterprise), while the CGI model has the registration number 1031, so they’re not the same ship. (Or at least I think it’s 1031; it’s hard to read.) Since 1031 is lower than 1701, this tends to support your theory that the new series predates the original one in its time-frame.
@CWO:
Just one point, because I’m not sure from the way your post is phrased whether or not you’re aware of this, but one of the four pictures in the great picture collage you posted is actually the old Ralph McQuarrie painting (which I recognize from one of my Trek reference books), not a picture of the new ship from the new series. If you compare the top right picture (the McQuarrie painting) with the bottom right CGI shot from the video that was just released, you’ll see that the McQuarrie design’s secondary hull is basically a solid triangle whereas the new ship’s secondary hull is more of an arrowhead; in fact, it has more than a passing resemblance to the Starfleet emblem, which is kind of a nice touch (whether intentional or not).
True. However, the designs are so recognizably similar overall that I think this is a very minor difference. Besides, as with anything more modern, I have no doubt they will tweak McQuarrie design as required for their purposes or for a bit of streamlining, while retaining the dominant flavor.
@CWO:
Also, note that the McQuarrie painting has the registration number 1701 (for the original Enterprise), while the CGI model has the registration number 1031, so they’re not the same ship. (Or at least I think it’s 1031; it’s hard to read.) Since 1031 is lower than 1701, this tends to support your theory that the new series predates the original one in its time-frame.
Very true. I did not think to compare the registry numbers. The McQuarrie design has 1701 because it was intended to be the new USS Enterprise in the aborted movie. The 2017 tv show will not feature the Enterprise, but rather the USS Discovery, as per the title. It may be in one of the articles I linked to, but the press release did indicate that the show will revolve around the crew of a new ship (Discovery), thus the registry would be different.
And just to advance this line of spaculation a bit further: based on a list I checked of Starfleet vessels, the registration numbers that come closest to 1031 while still being below 1701 are the ones for four ships of the Oberth class (USS Copernicus NCC-640, USS Grissom NCC-638, USS LaGrange NCC-617 and USS Oberth NCC-602). The best-known one is USS Grissom, which was featured in The Wrath of Khan; the Oberth class therefore clearly already existed in the timeframe of Star Trek II, though this doesn’t tell us how old the design is. (Starfleet gets a lot of service years out of its ships: a few Oberth-class vessels popped up in The Next Generation.) So while this doesn’t give us an actual time-frame, it shows that there’s nothing which rules out the ship in the new series being an older design than the classic Enterprise. Though of course that doesn’t prove that the show is set at a time when the design is a brand-new one (as was the case with Star Trek: Enterprise); the series could be about a design that’s in mid-career or maybe even edging towards obsolescence, though I tend to doubt that last possibility.
Nice investigation Marc. I like your line of thinking.
Actually, now that I watch the promo again, I am thinking this is probably set sometime closer to post ST:VI Undiscovered Country. Or in that area. The evolution of the nacelles to the now standard red/orange bussard collectors and blue down the sides was chronologically introduced after the TOS era. This seemed obvious at first, but I dismissed it offhand because ST:ENT really threw that out the window. I like to disregard ENT as an anomaly and ignore its poor contributions to Trek continuity.
Using the evolution of ship design as a basis for dating (again, ignoring NX-class), this USS Discovery should be somewhere in the 2290s - 2230s. I would put it at the lower end of that range. This fits very nicely into a very mysterious time period of Prime Star Trek history. There have been a number of things hinted at in this time span from TNG and DS9, though extremely little actually said or shown. It is very much a gap in the Star Trek lore. Seems like the perfect place for a new show to carve out its own history.
For reference to those not in the know…
Star Trek Enterprise 2121 - 2155
The Original Series was approx 2250s - 2293 (Undiscovered Country)
Aforementioned gap 2290s - 2350s
Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager 2360s - 2379 (Nemesis)
