I recently appropriated the Eaglemoss Discovery model for a dynamite price, and have spent the last while just admiring it... I've come to appreciate the design overall, and while it's not about to crack my top five list you simply have to admire the skill and effort put into making this ship look good for the 2017-onwards audience.
My headcanon has me justifying the ship as being "brand new" in 2258 while still having a lower NCC number, which I still want to believe is loosely chronological as of Discovery's premiere. I think it's reasonable that the Crossfield was designed and even built some time prior to our first Discovery sighting, and that at least the Discovery and Glenn were extensively modified into what we see in the show, to reflect the implementation of the spore drive.
This suggests therefore that there's some "unmodified" version of the Crossfield class out there, hypothetical or even in service at some point, that doesn't have a spore drive and is merely a beefy science vessel with a lot of space. I'm no artist, but I'm looking at the model and thinking how different a non-spore Crossfield would look, so I'll point you to the following resources:
Discovery-era ships
Ortho View of Discovery
And with those in hand, we could consider the various parts of the ship exterior and how they could look different:
- Warp nacelles: Arguably the most incongruent part of the ship, as they are incredibly long compared to any of its contemporaries. In a non-spore drive, I don't think their originals would be round nacelles; we see that there are a couple counterpart ship classes with those distinctive triple bussard collectors (or whatever they are) up front. Rather, I think they would simply be shorter than we see, by at least 25 percent or even half. There are convenient hull seams on the ship model where an "original" length nacelles would simply stop, so it's possible IMO that the ship's originally-designed nacelles are still there, but were just extended lengthwise to accommodate sporific stuff.
- Secondary Hull: There are these large, conspicuous diagonal "stripes" which aren't just paint. Given that most of her contemporaries don't have any similar features, I'd like to think they could be straightforward hull reinforcements. All the twisting and rolling the spore jump is known for (visually anyway) could help justify this.
- Hull Interconnect: This is where things start to get tricky, as this part of the ship would likely have needed a substantial rebuild or even replacement to accommodate the spinning saucer bits. Without all the moving pieces, the neck would not need to be so humped and may have been significantly smaller.
- Primary Hull(s): We know that it's really just the surface of both saucer rings that rotate and not the whole thing. The fact that there are two rings in the first place seems rather inefficient, but I've been wondering if it was a solid ring pre-spore, so they could save some weight elsewhere (like the extended nacelles or the hull reinforcements). In some TOS blueprints, the part of the saucer that's missing here doesn't have that much volume compared to other parts of the same lateral deck, so it could conceivably remain absent without losing too much critical infrastructure space.
- Deflector: I actually don't think there's anything to change here. The USS Shenzhou also had a two-pronged deflector dish, so that should be okay here too. I had a theory going that the prongs were actually torpedo launchers, but we've seen that Discovery had lots of tubes pointed in lots of directions!
- Other Greeblies: Since we don't really know what the purpose of the lit-up strips flanking the deflector is, I wouldn't necessarily say it's part of the refit; but no other ships of the era have them, so who knows?
This is obviously a nerdy random analysis, but I'm wondering what you all think as well. Cheers!
Mark
My headcanon has me justifying the ship as being "brand new" in 2258 while still having a lower NCC number, which I still want to believe is loosely chronological as of Discovery's premiere. I think it's reasonable that the Crossfield was designed and even built some time prior to our first Discovery sighting, and that at least the Discovery and Glenn were extensively modified into what we see in the show, to reflect the implementation of the spore drive.
This suggests therefore that there's some "unmodified" version of the Crossfield class out there, hypothetical or even in service at some point, that doesn't have a spore drive and is merely a beefy science vessel with a lot of space. I'm no artist, but I'm looking at the model and thinking how different a non-spore Crossfield would look, so I'll point you to the following resources:
Discovery-era ships
Ortho View of Discovery
And with those in hand, we could consider the various parts of the ship exterior and how they could look different:
- Warp nacelles: Arguably the most incongruent part of the ship, as they are incredibly long compared to any of its contemporaries. In a non-spore drive, I don't think their originals would be round nacelles; we see that there are a couple counterpart ship classes with those distinctive triple bussard collectors (or whatever they are) up front. Rather, I think they would simply be shorter than we see, by at least 25 percent or even half. There are convenient hull seams on the ship model where an "original" length nacelles would simply stop, so it's possible IMO that the ship's originally-designed nacelles are still there, but were just extended lengthwise to accommodate sporific stuff.
- Secondary Hull: There are these large, conspicuous diagonal "stripes" which aren't just paint. Given that most of her contemporaries don't have any similar features, I'd like to think they could be straightforward hull reinforcements. All the twisting and rolling the spore jump is known for (visually anyway) could help justify this.
- Hull Interconnect: This is where things start to get tricky, as this part of the ship would likely have needed a substantial rebuild or even replacement to accommodate the spinning saucer bits. Without all the moving pieces, the neck would not need to be so humped and may have been significantly smaller.
- Primary Hull(s): We know that it's really just the surface of both saucer rings that rotate and not the whole thing. The fact that there are two rings in the first place seems rather inefficient, but I've been wondering if it was a solid ring pre-spore, so they could save some weight elsewhere (like the extended nacelles or the hull reinforcements). In some TOS blueprints, the part of the saucer that's missing here doesn't have that much volume compared to other parts of the same lateral deck, so it could conceivably remain absent without losing too much critical infrastructure space.
- Deflector: I actually don't think there's anything to change here. The USS Shenzhou also had a two-pronged deflector dish, so that should be okay here too. I had a theory going that the prongs were actually torpedo launchers, but we've seen that Discovery had lots of tubes pointed in lots of directions!
- Other Greeblies: Since we don't really know what the purpose of the lit-up strips flanking the deflector is, I wouldn't necessarily say it's part of the refit; but no other ships of the era have them, so who knows?
This is obviously a nerdy random analysis, but I'm wondering what you all think as well. Cheers!
Mark
