I can't get my head around this idea. It's just weird. Since when have esthetics played a role in engineering design? When the British Empire collapsed, did they start building wooden ships of the line and cosplaying Trafalgar to make themselves feel better?
Luke. When you rebuilding a fleet you rebuild it using the designs that you have available and take if it is updated you can fit in. The Dominion war ALONE required Starfleet to rebuild much of its fleet. And you're going to rebuild back to what you know.
@lukedogwalker for me, the constitution iii design is silly. Might look good for TV but in universe I highly doubt they would use that design again. Same with the Excelsior ii design. The only way i can head canon this is to think that maybe this design profile is just inherently a really good and efficient design. Obviously there's new tech in it and the design has been updated.
@@navblue20 sorry bud, real life shoots that one down. After WW2 did the allied fleets rebuild using the pre war designs? Did the air forces re-equip with prop driven planes or the new jets? The only nations that invested in pre war ships were those that couldn't afford new build and so received second hand vessels from the US/UK. Design time is not a limiting factor. New designs are in constant development, merely awaiting a budget and an order before becoming reality. Construction of long lead items and fabrication/installation/fit out/trials takes far longer. When given the choice by the politicians, navies and air forces have always gone for the new stuff and have never rebuilt last years stuff. Holds true right back to the age of sail. Connie III breaks my suspension of disbelief, which is the cardinal sin of writing, and because of this it kicks me out of the fantasy and ruins my immersion in the story every time it shows up on screen.
Does the federation maintain a proper military? Or at least a defense force? If no then the federation needs at least a proper defense force if they don’t already have one. Maybe style it off of the JSDF to name one possible candidate. Definitely not the U.S. armed forces as that’s reserved for a civilization that’s much more focused on *ahem* … *INTERVENTIONISM*
The ship class so popular it got a sequel! Jokes aside, I do like the look of the Excelsior MK II, actually, a part of me might like some parts of the Excelsior MK II when compared to the original like the look of the MK II’s secondary hull.
I said this one and Ill say this again Ive seen the Excelsior class as that spaceframe that is such a perfect ship that while its role wouldnt be as impressive as the oringal its still does everything it needs to be a reliable ship that doesnt need many design changes to keep up with later tech
I do like that little detail of it has the ability to break out of fleet formation (on its own without a cloak) and did it in Picard and that ended up being its doom
The thing I find incredibly interesting about this ship is the “Venator-ish” “hangar” thing going on along the spine of the secondary hull. I would imagine its meant to be an engineering staging deck like on the Sagan…but I like to think it’s got a bit of a flight deck thing going on there!
it's interesting visually... but it's kind of gross from a design standpoint. The secondary hull, especially towards the aft is already thin and they hollowed it out. That makes me wary of the safety of primary engineering and the warp core. Also the ship in general is stretched enough that I'd hate to have to get around to different sections of the ship, having to go from the left side of that trench to the right either means going down to the lowest decks and crossing or going all the way around it.
I really like this design, it's like a perfect blend between the classic _Excelsior_ and the _Sovereign_ classes. Unmistakably modern but keeping the classic aesthetic, like the better retro-styled cars that pop up every so often.
I really like the idea of reviving older designs through the Constitution-III and Excelsior-II. On one hand, it can be seen as a sort of fan service or pandering to the viewer. But in universe, imagine that it's one where Kirk's Enterprise adventures have been virtually immortalized as Starfleet legend while the Excelsior is one of the longest serving ships alongside the Miranda. And now they're seeing ships that look similar and are meant to take up the roles of their predecessors. The original Constitution, Excelsior, and Miranda were so iconic to Starfleet and Federation history that it makes sense to create their successor classes that look just like them for morale and nostalgia. The Starfleet officer down to the ordinary citizen would look at these new ships and remember a time from decades to over a hundred years ago when they played a part in some of the most important things to happen in the Federation. Makes me wonder if they'll continue the trend to create maybe a Neo-Galaxy or Galaxy-II class maybe sometime in the 2450s given that class's own adventures with the Enterprise-D (especially in 2401) and other ships.
I love the Excelsior-class. It's such a practical, solid all-around vessel for Starfleet. Not overly large, not tiny, just right size and capability to handle the vast majority of missions it would ever be tasked with. Plus it just looked awesome.
Missed opportunity to have an Enterprise B/ Lakota style version. I want a beefier version with bigger impulse engines and the secondary hull blisters.
@@JakCei i was meaning for the Excelsior 2. It doesn't have an excelsior refit looking one that can be a long range patrol and science version. It also looks incomplete without the refit parts.
She looks just fine to me. It isn't Meant to be a copy. And I might add considering the losses that Starfleet suffered in the dominion war how many of the original Excelsiors are still left. There's never been an actual count about how many ships were lost in that war but I've seen figures as high as 60%. You're not gonna bring back those designs. The excel you're talking about is 100 years old her life expectancy and it ends this replacement.
@@navblue20 for me it's a missed opportunity for fleshing out the fleet. The Enterprise B/ Lakota looks just as good as the original so why not make a science oriented version of the Excelsior 2 but with improved impulse drives and bulked out sensors and QSD systems in the secondary hull. The Excelsior 2 just doesn't feel the same without that counterpart in overall style.
Barry. Did you listen to the video. Everything you just described is in the new Excelsior II. To me the Lakota was a very good vessel but she was also ugly as homemade sin. Give me this version with everything the old Lakota has in it and that ship would do everything better than the old Lakota ever did. Especially if you got a crew that is really on the ball.
I wouldn't be surprised if the ship has a lot of space doors on it like the Excelsior does too. There is some design issues as a consequence of it being stretched & a lot of stuff missing that it could do with having, I think it needs further refinements like the Inquiry class got though.
This always takes me back to when I was a wee little nerd (like maybe 7 or 8) and collecting what I think were Micromachines? or something--tiny little plastic sculpts that were stocking stuffers at the time--and playing TONS of Star Trek with them, most notably the first Excelsior class. (Also there was a lot of Babylon 5.) And, of course, being the kind of nerd who literally rushed home from elementary school (got out at 3:35 pm) to watch TNG (aired at 4:00 pm), I've designed many a starship in my time. What I cannot understand (apart from why scifi designers are under the impression that transparent touchscreens would be AT ALL something anybody would ever want and why, in an emergency situation, you would EVER want the bridge to be DARKER than normal) is windows in the pylons connecting the nacelles. It prompts the question: whose quarters are there? It must be like literal redshirts because what is the first thing an enemy is gonna target? The things that literally brace your escape options. Which, ultimately, is why I hated the Excelsior design and this redesign. Not only does it look like the unfair stereotype of a Trekkie neckbeard (seriously, look at it and tell me that ship design is not a person with a double chin trying to hide it with a beard); it has nacelle pylons at a 90 degree bend, which is insanely dumb for many reasons, not least that the Micromachines version tore apart in my pockets immediately (hence why they just fell apart at Wolf 359). Anyway, that's one of many things Lower Decks did so well, imagining the crew member who was like, "Hey guys, let's go back to my quarters! It's Deck The Elbow, the turbolift will know it."
I had a bunch of those Star Trek micro machines, in fact I probably still have a few. The nacelles on some of them were flimsy and not as straight and even as they should be, but I still liked them.
for about 6 years, all I wanted from my family for christmas and birthday presents was more of those micromachines! There was a lot of "but you already have an enterprise"... I'm not sure that all the 'windows' actually are windows though... some of those may be illuminated panels for 'reasons' or something altogether different, especially in the pylons... but you're right about the 90 degree bend... if there's one thing about this ship I don't like, its the 90 degree bend with the forward swoop. I don't mind some change of angle to the pylons, but that hard corner and the forward swoop on these are not things I like on her... a gentler angled set that curve gently towards the nacelle would look nicer, more like the ones on the Endeavour and Yorktown.
Looking forward to the Obena video! Why does it predate the rest of Starfleet's push to update old designs? Why do they end up with two simultaneous Excelsior sequels? It raises a lot of interesting questions.
Given the earlier gag about having friends whose ships came out “looking all Sovereign-class” I wish it hadn’t been declared its own class - being a heavily (STO style) customised Excelsior is both funnier to me, and doesn’t require a bigger explanation nor cause lore headaches like this.
Simplest explanation is that Starfleet had some Excelsior hulls damaged from the Dominion War. To rebuild the fleet, they got a massive upgrade during the repair process. Due to the extensive refit, they were given a new class designation, but had to use something other than "Excelsior-II", because development of the new class had already begun.
Because of STO giving type desigations to many of the ships used in the game and because we got a couple variants for each kind, I like to think Starfleet looked at the range of ships it had in service and needing better coordination in case another "Dominion War" scale conflict ever broke out they began making newer ship classes fillign certain "roles", taking existing ships and using them as a basis to built from. Though some classes like the Neo Connie and Excelsior 2 are entirely vanity projects, meant to take some of the most storied ship clases and "update" them, the Neo Connie being meant specifically for 5 year exploration missions, or at least simply very deep space exploration, so it's upscaled from the OG Connie's size to better handle general combat on it's own, but not as resource heavy as a dreadnought like the Oddessey would be, as Oddessey's and their variants will stick close to home and explore closer, ready to respond shoudl a major conflict need heavy firepower. Meanwhile the Excelsior 2 is entirely a vanity ship, simply carrying on the legacy of the OG, but still not as powerful as an Oddessey. I also liek to think at least in STO's timeline that tech evolved enough that ships were desighned to be more modular and easy to upgrade, thus any ship if given enough upgrades could be as powerful as an Oddessey, thus ships wre easy to mass produce, but like the intro of the game it's skilled Captains Starfleet lacks, with the Klingon War breakign out officers could be ship Captains even as low a Leutenant, but always had to use a weaker ship like Miranda class Frigates and it's cousins. Yes I have a decent number of basic lore explanations of the game's interesting things. Liek for example the constant conflict with the Klingons results in Starfleet to stop naming mass produced ships, and beginning a new class of "specialist", essentially the players, Captains who are seperate fromt he main chain of command with "rank" issued based on combat experiance, they command ships that get some of the best gear but are expendable, shoudl a ship be destroyed the Captain and very small crew enter into an emergency beam out, essentially the old ship for a few seconds puts the crew into a beamed state as an identical replacement warps in with the crew immediatly beamed onto the replacement, these ships have no actual registry and the name is anything the Captain wants. THey are highly modular and upgradable. Specialists also get performance enhanceing genetic modifications and nanotech to give them special capabilities, Thus all the abilities the players can do. I got more but this is some of it.
That's a long explanation. Good one though. You are quite right that these ships are modular and adaptable and I think the excelsior ii class is no exception.
I like the idea that the Obena class were Excelsiors that sustained heavy damage during the Dominion War, but were salvageable. Post-war, since they were getting repaired anyway, they were stripped to their bones and basically given a full refit with modern stuff. In contrast, the Excelsior-II was an entirely new design, capable of housing new equipment that even a full refit can't accommodate, but intentionally given the silhouette of a classic staple of the fleet for morale and nostalgia, plus a recognition of the predecessor's accomplishments.
I love that idea. Fits in with modern navies. The Nimitz kept getting upgraded but the Ford is still better as a purpose driven new design even with similar tech.
For some reason, this design looks like what I would expect a cruise ship to look like if one were imagined for space travel. I can even picture the large dining room, buffet, and grand stairway.
It's kind of ironic that Star Trek seems to introduce entirely new hull designs in prequels, disrupting continuity in the stylistic choice, while it repeats and reiterates classic designs in its sequels. That being said, I quite like the Excelsior II.
It's not breaking continuity, it's filling the void of eras we haven't seen before. I hate when people say stupid things like it's breaking continuity. It's NOT!
@@jeremydale4548 Do you understand what the word continuity even means? Introducing the Denobulans in ENT does nothing to the continuity. It is filling the void, as you said, because there are many species that can exist alongside each other. Retroactively applying new design trends to older eras does in fact disrupt continuity because it interjects an element into the singular, monolithic design flow that shouldn't be there. If you don't see the distinction, stop trying to wrap your brain around concepts too difficult for you to capture the nuances of... only to then call other people stupid.
I am glad to see this ship. The excelsior ii class is my current flagship for my Star Trek Andromeda rp campaign, that me and a friend are currently working on. The name of the ship is the USS Roon NCC-2010-A
They could just cut out the grey blocky bit of the neck with the windows then shift the saucer section forward by the same amount it would be excellent. As is, it has the same saucer/secondary hull imbalance that most of the kelvin timeline ships have.
Looking forward to the Obena video. I think it's kinda crazy to redo Excelsior 90 years later with the Obena only to do it again 10 years after that with Excelsior 2.
Feels like the Obena class is more of a variant of the Excelsior class and an older design that were continued being built. But the Excelsior II class is a completely new design that incorporated the new 25 century technology then trying to fit the technology into a older design also season 3 of picard does take place a few decades after Lower Decks
@@trekkieraccoon3343 Obena looks like if you made and Excelsior with Sovereign class parts. I would say it's a bit more than a variant. And given how long Excelsior 1 stayed in service a decade or 2 is not that long. Lower decks season 2-4 takes place in 2381. PIC season 2 is 2400. So it's just under 2 decades.
It was a treat to see the fleet in seasons 2 and 3 stacked out with "new" 25th century ships like the Gargarin, Pathfinder, Ross, etc... In my opinion, however, the meat of the new 25th century era ships is in the Sagan/Echelon, Excelsior II, and (it's having to grow on me a bit) Constitution III. Carrying on the iconic designs of the TMP era into a new era while being "...bigger, sleeker, and with more power..." 8:57 is no easy task. This one is an instant knock out of the park, catching the instantly recognizable lines of the classic while making the ship feel more like how the Excelsior always wanted to feel. Fast. In additon, completely just in my opinion, fixing the biggest eyesore in Starfleet in the neck was a perfect design decision. The original's neck has always looked like one big radiator with no clear idea that there is nothing but machinery there. This one fixes that by making it clear that sections there are designed for crew inhabitation. Also, I've seen some interpretations of this with a shuttle bay between the neck impulse engines. I'm torn on whether I like the Excelsior II or Sagan the most. The reveal of the Stargazer in season 2 eps 1 was a fantastic moment. For my first viewing, though, I was instantly drawn to the Excelsior II when the fleet warped in. Even as only a background ship, it was a pause-worthy moment having an entirely original design for Picard that still payed homage to a classic. Excellent video and breakdown as always Ric!
Real talk, the radiolytic phasers it uses, would make 9 of them = a dominion war galaxy (with phasers alone) but with rapid fire quantum torpedoes, regenerative ablative hull, and stronger shields, better turn rate, and being faster in every way.
The fact this is an entirely new ship, so you can't use any of the Excelsior variant skins with it, rubs me the wrong way. Especially since the only way to do that and get them all is to buy the Ship Bundle with the Legendary Excelsior and Legendary Ambassador. The price tag on that thing is insane, it'd take me _years_ to earn that much even with the Lifetime Subscription, especially with Exchange rates being maximized. I wish Cryptic would add the Legendary ships to the C-store individually so we could buy them individually. Maybe make Legendary Coupons we can earn in events like the T6 Coupons we can get currently.
In this case, I wouldn’t say it’s entirely Cryptic’s fault and more on whoever arbitrarily decided it should be larger than the old Excelsior. Because of that, it’s incompatible with old Excelsior skins.
It’s a ship from Picard. That means two things. 1) It’s a knockoff of a TOS design and 2) it’s bigger for no reason. Though the latter is more an issue with nuTrek in general. So no that part isn’t Cryptic’s fault.
Awesome video. I’ve always liked the Excelsior Mark II as shown in Picard Season 2 and 3. However it still doesn’t beat the original NX Excelsior design.
When you look at the Excelsior 2 class outside of Star Trek lore and just in comparison to other Starfleet ships structural designs, it looks a lot stronger than most. Indeed the only point where you could point out any structural weakness is the how thin the warp pylons appear to be in relation to the rest of the ship. However, they are also longer (forward to rear) than many other such designs (allowing for scale) which makes them relatively strong in terms of forward/rear stresses and that makes a lot of sense since in lore it is the nacelles that push the ship along. Another factor is that the bulky design of the neck and engineering section should allow a pretty good amount of space within the basic hull design and as such allow an increase of modularity in comparison to sleeker designs where the internal hull capacity would be far more limited. The most obvious down side of such a design is that the increased hull area would need a far greater amount of physical resources to build than a smaller design but in the end the Excelsior 2 design could very well out-last two or three generations of sleeker ship designs by virtue of its modularity and ease of upgradability.
I think it's incorrect to say that a resource poor fleet would revert to earlier designs. Far more believable to say that the Excelsior had many role-specific features (the cargo bay, black neck, warp pylon arrangement) that had not been rendered obsolete, and so we see this updated version with a Sovereign style saucer and more refined hull. Consider the real world HMS Victory. For those who don't know, every future wooden ship of the line built in the 1800's by the Royal Navy was basically a Victory, but a bit bigger. Even the massive 120 gun ships of the mid century. Victory worked, so they kept doing it. However, this does not excuse the Enterprise mark III which remains, to my eyes, silly and stupid. It's like rebuilding a world war 1 coal fired battleship when just a few years earlier you were riding around in a WW2 era ship, and when the last thing you built was a nuclear powered aircraft carrier (which would be the equivalent of a Galaxy or Sovereign). It's a stupid idea forced upon us by bad decisions at the studio. They seriously couldn't find the money to design something better? From a budget that big? No. For now and forever, no. But Excelsior II is cool 👍
The thing is, besides a few details and the overall layout the Connie III doesn't really have much in common with the originals. Its much larger, the secondary hull is radically different. The only thing thats the "same" is the forward 2/3 of the primary hull, but if we assume hulls are determined bybtheir operating conditions like they are for ocean-going ships then its simply a case that the ships were designed with similar conditions in mind.
@@DrewLSsix the first thing I noticed about the mark III was the concave saucer and the "cadillac" nacelles. Looking at designs that came later, we can presume these features were obsolete, remaining only on in-service ships like the Mirandas because if it ain't broke, why pay to fix it? If it wasn't just a quick reuse of the strange new worlds model, it's reasonable to assume we'd have seen a continuation of the blended hull designs that Voyager started, and a convex saucer, not a retrograde concave one from a less advanced era.
Love the _Excelsior_-II. I recently saw a fan theory that it's so narrow with an elliptical saucer to keep it the same width as the original _Excelsior_ so it can use the same docks.
I don't call it paranoia Rick I call it adapting to conditions. Upgrading a ship of that type in giving it that kind of stuff makes sense. The way the excelsior 2 is to me if she is a jack of all trades
Even a short range transwarp drive would be a huge logistical boost, as ships could get to any trouble spot within Federation borders quickly and thus in numbers. That means less ships are needed to patrol a region as backup can arrive _fast._ Just a few minutes of transwarp can make a big difference within or adjacent to your own territory. As well it would be assumed that transwarp technology would improve over time, so having the ships hull designed to accommodate it and withstand the stress makes sense from a longevity perspective. It's not going to have a century long service life if within the next decade or two if stable transwarp becomes a standard feature on new ships.... and can't be retrofitted to this one.
Honestly, I personally consider it the Excelsior IV. Because we've had the original Excelsior, the Enterprise-B variant, the Obena and now this one. Seems like an organic progression.
This incarnation of Excelsior is the embodiment of if it ain't broke don't fix it. I like it it is a natural progression that adds to the strengths of an already proven design
I wonder why the canon Ex 2's had such low NCC numbers, with the known ones being in the range of older TNG-era (mostly Excelsior) ships but without any A's, B's, etc. It seems like they 1:1 rechristened the new ships from existing and decommissioned Ex's treating them like they were the same ship.
At this point i have to imagine the in universe registry system is a convoluted mess, probably consisting of several registry schemes working in parallel trying not to confuse one another. Thay said, the Excelsior here wouldn't be the A or B because it didnt inherit the originals 2000 refistry number, there's several cases in canon of ships using older names without the matching registry and without the suffix, and there are arguably ships running legacy registry numbers but apparently not the associated names because of the lack of suffix. By the 25th century i imagine they were looking at the long and indistince registry numbers of later ships and wondering when they should change things, when would a registration number become an unwieldy serial number wrapping around the entire ship??
I really like the ship and it's design personally, though I could be biased since Excelsior is one of my favorite designs. And out-of-universe, it's clearly a nostalgia craft through and through, much like the USS Titan. That being said, I'm not a fan of the in-universe reasons for it's existence. It doesn't make any sense to build this ship when Starfleet already has a 24th~25th Century "Excelsior".....it's the Sovereign. It serves all the roles the Excelsior is meant to, has clearly been produced in large numbers by the 25th Century, indicating relative ease of construction, and has much the same capabilities as this new Excelsior II. The new Excelsior type isn't exactly a smaller, leaner ship like the Constitution III that has it's own fleet role, it's quite contemporary to the Sovereign. The Sovereign is clearly a reliable design Starfleet continues to use as a workhorse, just as Starfleet did with the Excelsior in the early 24th century, even as they continue to build even bigger and more capable ships, namely the Odyssey Class. So this isn't about a classic design being more reliable or something along those lines compared to the Sovereign, both are battle- and time-tested designs. It would be a different matter if these new Excelsior IIs were built from refitted Excelsiors. But this is a new design, a much larger ship. Realistically, Starfleet should just be building even more Sovereigns in this type and weight class.
From what we saw we in the Picard series and seeing the dings Starfleet took to build new ship classes, it would be fair to say the Excelsior class probably went through a refit program to the Excelsior 2. The same could be said the Nebula and Miranda classes as we saw the updated Sutherland and Reliant classes.
Excelsior class was Starfleet's most produced/successful vessel, even more so than the Miranda, after its time as top of the line cutting edge was behind it, it became the true workhorse of the fleet. Why you ask? because it is incredibly versatile, incredibly tough, very reliable, incredibly agile, and incredibly loved. :) Long may its legacy continue. I like the new one very much, but the original always takes top spot of the class.
My biggest issue with this design (aside from the class name and known registries), is that they essentially scaled up a 2270s-2280s hull design. Warp field theory and thus hull design advanced a lot since then, and should have a visual impact on things (which is also why I don't like the Reliant, Gagarin, most other STO borrowed designs, or "Constitution III" designs either; Ross is fine, Sutherland if scaled down closer to Nebula in size is fine). And I highly doubt they lost so many ship design personnel that they'd need a crutch of "use this general hull design and scale/modify it as needed to add what we need." Also, the known registries would put this class as predating the Nebula-class, much less the Galaxy-class, which would mean we'd have Excelsiors and "Excelsior IIs" in service at the same time (I mean, USS Hood has a higher registry than all known Excelsior II registries...). We can't go with "it got rebuilt like the Enterprise" when the rebuilding at a minimum adds ~120m to the length vs 16m length increase on the Constitution. It's not a terrible looking design, no. I just don't think it fits ship design "evolution" continuity.
I adore the original Excelsior and its refit... but this just feels uninspired. They pretty much just stretched that sumbich out, slapped some different nacelles on it (that honestly don't match the ship that well), and called it a day. Even the fact that the black area of the neck doesn't extend all the way back feels somewhat slap-dash... almost as if someone said, "Oh no! They're gonna see that we just stretched out the 3D model for the normal Excelsior. Quick, make the back part of the neck slightly different!" It just feels like a wholly unnecessary ship.
i was about to write a very similar comment myself (bit less ranty maybe 😅); i don't hate the ship, but those are pretty much my issues with it too: it feels like someone just took an excelsior, squished it and stretched it; it's not an awful looking ship by any means, but from the side the saucer looks too thin and from the front it looks fat. To its credit tho, it does look way better than the Resolute (the T6 Excelsior). The one ship i really hate tho is the Titan-A and don't get me started on it.
@@ROBERTO-in2iq well yeah the excelsior is a hard ship to make look ugly and it being a ship design that in some form reappears is ironically smart. Excacution however could use work. Also why I dont hate the Resolute from STO...yeah only certain ships work with the odyssey's oringal look
i think this design is implying Starfleet after such a era of massive leaps in both ship design and technology due to encounters with the Borg and Dominion is finally heading into a time of stagnation and trying to keep it's public image by going back to the golden age of the Federations exploration as a lot of people seem to be disillusioned or outright hostile to Starfleet. Kirks starfleet was about adventure and facing the unknown, the TNG was quality of life and diplomacy, DS9 was protecting freedom and fighting for the Federation but by the end of Picard Starfleet is the ' We get stuck with the crap jobs you don't want to do now and you hate us for it anyway '
It's because navies have always done that throughout hundreds of years Rick. And despite the howling complaints from some of the people on your video it is not a bad design. Is Starfleet gave me a ship like this as a captain I would not complain one bit.
I came here to see whether or not there would be someone who caught the reference of this awesome title to one of the titles made by Team Four Star for their Cooler movie. So far, somewhat disappointed.
This is like the current age F-15EX. While we have had the F-22 and F-35, both way more advanced planes, the EX was designed to bring a capability into the modern age, that of the missile truck. I could see Starfleet looking back to what was arguably the most successful ship ever designed, and making a new one. This should have been the Enterprise G. And then be a home for a new exploration focused show.
I love these new ship designs as well. One thing I very much dislike, is CBSParamount's propensity to destroy them on a whim. Long gone are the days where we can come to love a ship over the period of several years, many seasons with two dozen or so episodes of one-per-week storytelling. Now we hardly get a good glimpse of a ship before we lose her. I'm talking to you, Stargazer-II. Tragic. The Enterprise-F, we saw her on screen only to be abused and tossed aside. Sure, the nod to gaming communities is great but they are providing "real" trek with "real" money. So give them more than a nod. The quality of fan-made trek material is becoming obscenely good, and I am here for it.
It exists for the same reason as the T-70 X-Wing: brand recognition. Star Trek isn’t about progress and seeking out new things anymore, it’s about nostalgia.
Starfleet revisiting older style designs could be said to be a political move, something comfortably familiar, focusing people on the golden age between TOS and TNG where things were pretty stable from day to day. With improvements in health care, humans are regularly living to 150 while maintaining good mental faculty. Picard starts 115 years after the Excelsior first went into service and the Constitution class remained in service for decades after that, pretty much any human middle age and up is going to remember them and the regular stability of day to day life, might help calm people down as the politicians reassure everyone that things are returning to normal....
Visually and in universe, the lower cut out of the secondary hull by the bottom shuttle bay should have been instead extended all the way back to the rear of the engineering hull, to provide a lot more internal space. It could be used to explain having a lot of shuttles and runabouts, and cargo space etc. It's what you need in a workhorse.
11:07 There are windows all the way to nearly the very aft of the vessel; imagine being the officers/crewmen whose quarters were that far back and away from everything! After a thought, those are likely guest/transient passenger quarters, if anything.
If anyone plays Star Trek Online and gets their hands on this ship (you can get it for free too), I highly recommend the Odyssey material skin. It brightens up the hull to a nice clean cinematic look, and the soft azure glow of the nacelles and deflector dish are very easy on the eyes. Plus, it gets rid of those weird oversized spaghetti noodle windows you see throughout this video (John Eaves really messed up adding those, imo). On mine, I added teal patterns on the livery to make it look as close to a next-generation Lakota as possible.
Not related to this video, but will you all make a video about why the 32nd century still only has basic warp? When we know for a fact Star Fleet had the tech in the 25th century for multiple different types of trans warp engines. I imagine it'll take some work to communicate with the actual directors of Discovery (are we using STD for Discovery? Or is this a Voyager acronym situation?). Thanks!
In general, I think reusing old designs wholesale is a bit cheap...but the Excelsion is such a beautiful ship, with a preestablished history as a long-term workhorse, that I'm willing to forgive it.
The Problem with Star Fleet Ships was that they were like Luxury Ships instead of Navy Ships made for Attack and Defence of Star Fleet, the Dominion had the right idea of Function over form and luxury and they could build more ships than Star Fleet Ship yards
Such nicer looking nacelles than the ones thrown on the Connie-III, Duder, and Sagan. Wish it was possible to throw them on those other classes in STO. Very similar style, just less obnoxious.
![ทุกครั้งที่หลับตา (Lucid Dream) - AYLA's [ Official MV ]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/4i1OBAQyv58/mqdefault.jpg)
The Excelsior mafia is alive and strong.
THANK YOU! I'M NOT THE ONLY ONE GOING TO MAKE THAT JOKE!
As it should be.
Every member of the excelsior mafia OHHHHHH !!
Not to mention a lot of star fleet officers Include a lot of Captains cut their teeth as junior offices on ships like the Excelsior class.
Is that Starfleet's equivalent of the E4 Mafia?
I like the idea of a hurting, demoralized Starfleet looking back on it's greatest hits as it tries to pull itself back together.
I can't get my head around this idea. It's just weird. Since when have esthetics played a role in engineering design? When the British Empire collapsed, did they start building wooden ships of the line and cosplaying Trafalgar to make themselves feel better?
Luke. When you rebuilding a fleet you rebuild it using the designs that you have available and take if it is updated you can fit in. The Dominion war ALONE required Starfleet to rebuild much of its fleet. And you're going to rebuild back to what you know.
@lukedogwalker for me, the constitution iii design is silly. Might look good for TV but in universe I highly doubt they would use that design again. Same with the Excelsior ii design. The only way i can head canon this is to think that maybe this design profile is just inherently a really good and efficient design. Obviously there's new tech in it and the design has been updated.
@@navblue20 sorry bud, real life shoots that one down. After WW2 did the allied fleets rebuild using the pre war designs? Did the air forces re-equip with prop driven planes or the new jets? The only nations that invested in pre war ships were those that couldn't afford new build and so received second hand vessels from the US/UK.
Design time is not a limiting factor. New designs are in constant development, merely awaiting a budget and an order before becoming reality. Construction of long lead items and fabrication/installation/fit out/trials takes far longer. When given the choice by the politicians, navies and air forces have always gone for the new stuff and have never rebuilt last years stuff. Holds true right back to the age of sail.
Connie III breaks my suspension of disbelief, which is the cardinal sin of writing, and because of this it kicks me out of the fantasy and ruins my immersion in the story every time it shows up on screen.
Does the federation maintain a proper military? Or at least a defense force? If no then the federation needs at least a proper defense force if they don’t already have one. Maybe style it off of the JSDF to name one possible candidate. Definitely not the U.S. armed forces as that’s reserved for a civilization that’s much more focused on *ahem* … *INTERVENTIONISM*
The ship class so popular it got a sequel!
Jokes aside, I do like the look of the Excelsior MK II, actually, a part of me might like some parts of the Excelsior MK II when compared to the original like the look of the MK II’s secondary hull.
The Excelsior class has always been my favorite of the 23rd century designs. The Excelsior II is just as elegant.
I said this one and Ill say this again Ive seen the Excelsior class as that spaceframe that is such a perfect ship that while its role wouldnt be as impressive as the oringal its still does everything it needs to be a reliable ship that doesnt need many design changes to keep up with later tech
Okay, the explanation for how Override Subsystem Safeties works in-universe was fantastic. Well done!
I do like that little detail of it has the ability to break out of fleet formation (on its own without a cloak) and did it in Picard and that ended up being its doom
The thing I find incredibly interesting about this ship is the “Venator-ish” “hangar” thing going on along the spine of the secondary hull. I would imagine its meant to be an engineering staging deck like on the Sagan…but I like to think it’s got a bit of a flight deck thing going on there!
it's interesting visually... but it's kind of gross from a design standpoint. The secondary hull, especially towards the aft is already thin and they hollowed it out. That makes me wary of the safety of primary engineering and the warp core. Also the ship in general is stretched enough that I'd hate to have to get around to different sections of the ship, having to go from the left side of that trench to the right either means going down to the lowest decks and crossing or going all the way around it.
The entire secondary hull should be flat like an Aircraft carrier with elevators for shuttles and staging.
I really like this design, it's like a perfect blend between the classic _Excelsior_ and the _Sovereign_ classes.
Unmistakably modern but keeping the classic aesthetic, like the better retro-styled cars that pop up every so often.
The Excelsior class is one of the best designs ever. Glad it got an update.
Excelsior Class is my favourite too.
The Excelsior II Class would have made a better Enterprise G
Thank you so much for putting out this video. The Excelsior II is my favorite non-STO derived class of the entire Picard series.
I really like the idea of reviving older designs through the Constitution-III and Excelsior-II. On one hand, it can be seen as a sort of fan service or pandering to the viewer. But in universe, imagine that it's one where Kirk's Enterprise adventures have been virtually immortalized as Starfleet legend while the Excelsior is one of the longest serving ships alongside the Miranda. And now they're seeing ships that look similar and are meant to take up the roles of their predecessors.
The original Constitution, Excelsior, and Miranda were so iconic to Starfleet and Federation history that it makes sense to create their successor classes that look just like them for morale and nostalgia. The Starfleet officer down to the ordinary citizen would look at these new ships and remember a time from decades to over a hundred years ago when they played a part in some of the most important things to happen in the Federation. Makes me wonder if they'll continue the trend to create maybe a Neo-Galaxy or Galaxy-II class maybe sometime in the 2450s given that class's own adventures with the Enterprise-D (especially in 2401) and other ships.
I love the Excelsior-class. It's such a practical, solid all-around vessel for Starfleet. Not overly large, not tiny, just right size and capability to handle the vast majority of missions it would ever be tasked with. Plus it just looked awesome.
Ah, I see you finally programmed in some smooth non-keyboard/mouse camera sweeps around the ship model. Production value +1000%.
It makes some sense that after the Dominion war and with the loss of Utopia Plantia the Federation would want to revive its golden era.
My life is instantly better now lol! I’ve dreamed of a modern take /appearance on the classic ship frames! This is gorgeous
That main shuttle bay must be huge!
Great video, thanks! [the Search for the Wrath of the Voyage to the Return of the Excelsior Strikes Back against the Undiscovered Final Frontier]
The Excelsior II is a nice design, but i am more of a fan of the Obena class
I get the feeling that the Obena was the stepping stone for this ship.
Missed opportunity to have an Enterprise B/ Lakota style version. I want a beefier version with bigger impulse engines and the secondary hull blisters.
Do you mean in STO? Because that variant also exists there.
@@JakCei i was meaning for the Excelsior 2. It doesn't have an excelsior refit looking one that can be a long range patrol and science version. It also looks incomplete without the refit parts.
She looks just fine to me. It isn't Meant to be a copy. And I might add considering the losses that Starfleet suffered in the dominion war how many of the original Excelsiors are still left. There's never been an actual count about how many ships were lost in that war but I've seen figures as high as 60%. You're not gonna bring back those designs. The excel you're talking about is 100 years old her life expectancy and it ends this replacement.
@@navblue20 for me it's a missed opportunity for fleshing out the fleet. The Enterprise B/ Lakota looks just as good as the original so why not make a science oriented version of the Excelsior 2 but with improved impulse drives and bulked out sensors and QSD systems in the secondary hull. The Excelsior 2 just doesn't feel the same without that counterpart in overall style.
Barry. Did you listen to the video. Everything you just described is in the new Excelsior II. To me the Lakota was a very good vessel but she was also ugly as homemade sin.
Give me this version with
everything the old Lakota has in it and that ship would do everything better than the old Lakota ever did. Especially if you got a crew that is really on the ball.
I wouldn't be surprised if the ship has a lot of space doors on it like the Excelsior does too.
There is some design issues as a consequence of it being stretched & a lot of stuff missing that it could do with having, I think it needs further refinements like the Inquiry class got though.
This always takes me back to when I was a wee little nerd (like maybe 7 or 8) and collecting what I think were Micromachines? or something--tiny little plastic sculpts that were stocking stuffers at the time--and playing TONS of Star Trek with them, most notably the first Excelsior class. (Also there was a lot of Babylon 5.) And, of course, being the kind of nerd who literally rushed home from elementary school (got out at 3:35 pm) to watch TNG (aired at 4:00 pm), I've designed many a starship in my time.
What I cannot understand (apart from why scifi designers are under the impression that transparent touchscreens would be AT ALL something anybody would ever want and why, in an emergency situation, you would EVER want the bridge to be DARKER than normal) is windows in the pylons connecting the nacelles. It prompts the question: whose quarters are there? It must be like literal redshirts because what is the first thing an enemy is gonna target? The things that literally brace your escape options.
Which, ultimately, is why I hated the Excelsior design and this redesign. Not only does it look like the unfair stereotype of a Trekkie neckbeard (seriously, look at it and tell me that ship design is not a person with a double chin trying to hide it with a beard); it has nacelle pylons at a 90 degree bend, which is insanely dumb for many reasons, not least that the Micromachines version tore apart in my pockets immediately (hence why they just fell apart at Wolf 359).
Anyway, that's one of many things Lower Decks did so well, imagining the crew member who was like, "Hey guys, let's go back to my quarters! It's Deck The Elbow, the turbolift will know it."
I had a bunch of those Star Trek micro machines, in fact I probably still have a few. The nacelles on some of them were flimsy and not as straight and even as they should be, but I still liked them.
for about 6 years, all I wanted from my family for christmas and birthday presents was more of those micromachines! There was a lot of "but you already have an enterprise"...
I'm not sure that all the 'windows' actually are windows though... some of those may be illuminated panels for 'reasons' or something altogether different, especially in the pylons... but you're right about the 90 degree bend... if there's one thing about this ship I don't like, its the 90 degree bend with the forward swoop. I don't mind some change of angle to the pylons, but that hard corner and the forward swoop on these are not things I like on her... a gentler angled set that curve gently towards the nacelle would look nicer, more like the ones on the Endeavour and Yorktown.
Looking forward to the Obena video! Why does it predate the rest of Starfleet's push to update old designs? Why do they end up with two simultaneous Excelsior sequels? It raises a lot of interesting questions.
Given the earlier gag about having friends whose ships came out “looking all Sovereign-class” I wish it hadn’t been declared its own class - being a heavily (STO style) customised Excelsior is both funnier to me, and doesn’t require a bigger explanation nor cause lore headaches like this.
Simplest explanation is that Starfleet had some Excelsior hulls damaged from the Dominion War. To rebuild the fleet, they got a massive upgrade during the repair process. Due to the extensive refit, they were given a new class designation, but had to use something other than "Excelsior-II", because development of the new class had already begun.
Because of STO giving type desigations to many of the ships used in the game and because we got a couple variants for each kind, I like to think Starfleet looked at the range of ships it had in service and needing better coordination in case another "Dominion War" scale conflict ever broke out they began making newer ship classes fillign certain "roles", taking existing ships and using them as a basis to built from. Though some classes like the Neo Connie and Excelsior 2 are entirely vanity projects, meant to take some of the most storied ship clases and "update" them, the Neo Connie being meant specifically for 5 year exploration missions, or at least simply very deep space exploration, so it's upscaled from the OG Connie's size to better handle general combat on it's own, but not as resource heavy as a dreadnought like the Oddessey would be, as Oddessey's and their variants will stick close to home and explore closer, ready to respond shoudl a major conflict need heavy firepower. Meanwhile the Excelsior 2 is entirely a vanity ship, simply carrying on the legacy of the OG, but still not as powerful as an Oddessey. I also liek to think at least in STO's timeline that tech evolved enough that ships were desighned to be more modular and easy to upgrade, thus any ship if given enough upgrades could be as powerful as an Oddessey, thus ships wre easy to mass produce, but like the intro of the game it's skilled Captains Starfleet lacks, with the Klingon War breakign out officers could be ship Captains even as low a Leutenant, but always had to use a weaker ship like Miranda class Frigates and it's cousins. Yes I have a decent number of basic lore explanations of the game's interesting things. Liek for example the constant conflict with the Klingons results in Starfleet to stop naming mass produced ships, and beginning a new class of "specialist", essentially the players, Captains who are seperate fromt he main chain of command with "rank" issued based on combat experiance, they command ships that get some of the best gear but are expendable, shoudl a ship be destroyed the Captain and very small crew enter into an emergency beam out, essentially the old ship for a few seconds puts the crew into a beamed state as an identical replacement warps in with the crew immediatly beamed onto the replacement, these ships have no actual registry and the name is anything the Captain wants. THey are highly modular and upgradable. Specialists also get performance enhanceing genetic modifications and nanotech to give them special capabilities, Thus all the abilities the players can do. I got more but this is some of it.
That's a long explanation. Good one though. You are quite right that these ships are modular and adaptable and I think the excelsior ii class is no exception.
I like the idea that the Obena class were Excelsiors that sustained heavy damage during the Dominion War, but were salvageable. Post-war, since they were getting repaired anyway, they were stripped to their bones and basically given a full refit with modern stuff. In contrast, the Excelsior-II was an entirely new design, capable of housing new equipment that even a full refit can't accommodate, but intentionally given the silhouette of a classic staple of the fleet for morale and nostalgia, plus a recognition of the predecessor's accomplishments.
I love that idea. Fits in with modern navies. The Nimitz kept getting upgraded but the Ford is still better as a purpose driven new design even with similar tech.
@@jonathantifone8001 unfortunately that wouldn't work since the obena is larger than the Excelsior
For some reason, this design looks like what I would expect a cruise ship to look like if one were imagined for space travel. I can even picture the large dining room, buffet, and grand stairway.
Basically a slightly smaller galaxy
The only problem with this ship is going to be that whatever important thing you need... you'll get it next Tuesday...
The new upgrades have improved it to Sunday.
It's kind of ironic that Star Trek seems to introduce entirely new hull designs in prequels, disrupting continuity in the stylistic choice, while it repeats and reiterates classic designs in its sequels.
That being said, I quite like the Excelsior II.
It's not breaking continuity, it's filling the void of eras we haven't seen before. I hate when people say stupid things like it's breaking continuity. It's NOT!
@@jeremydale4548 Do you understand what the word continuity even means?
Introducing the Denobulans in ENT does nothing to the continuity. It is filling the void, as you said, because there are many species that can exist alongside each other. Retroactively applying new design trends to older eras does in fact disrupt continuity because it interjects an element into the singular, monolithic design flow that shouldn't be there.
If you don't see the distinction, stop trying to wrap your brain around concepts too difficult for you to capture the nuances of... only to then call other people stupid.
I am glad to see this ship. The excelsior ii class is my current flagship for my Star Trek Andromeda rp campaign, that me and a friend are currently working on. The name of the ship is the USS Roon NCC-2010-A
Absolutely legendary name for a video.
They could just cut out the grey blocky bit of the neck with the windows then shift the saucer section forward by the same amount it would be excellent.
As is, it has the same saucer/secondary hull imbalance that most of the kelvin timeline ships have.
It looks strong and powerful yet elegant at the same time. It's absolutely my favourite ship ❤
Great ship. Love the look of it. The trait and console are among my favorites.
That is defiently a title of all time
She is beautiful! Would love to see it as a hero ship in a series some where. The Excelsior has been my favorite ever since she come on the screen
Looking forward to the Obena video. I think it's kinda crazy to redo Excelsior 90 years later with the Obena only to do it again 10 years after that with Excelsior 2.
Feels like the Obena class is more of a variant of the Excelsior class and an older design that were continued being built. But the Excelsior II class is a completely new design that incorporated the new 25 century technology then trying to fit the technology into a older design also season 3 of picard does take place a few decades after Lower Decks
@@trekkieraccoon3343 Obena looks like if you made and Excelsior with Sovereign class parts. I would say it's a bit more than a variant. And given how long Excelsior 1 stayed in service a decade or 2 is not that long.
Lower decks season 2-4 takes place in 2381. PIC season 2 is 2400. So it's just under 2 decades.
History will never forget the name …. Excelsior!
It was a treat to see the fleet in seasons 2 and 3 stacked out with "new" 25th century ships like the Gargarin, Pathfinder, Ross, etc... In my opinion, however, the meat of the new 25th century era ships is in the Sagan/Echelon, Excelsior II, and (it's having to grow on me a bit) Constitution III.
Carrying on the iconic designs of the TMP era into a new era while being "...bigger, sleeker, and with more power..." 8:57 is no easy task. This one is an instant knock out of the park, catching the instantly recognizable lines of the classic while making the ship feel more like how the Excelsior always wanted to feel. Fast.
In additon, completely just in my opinion, fixing the biggest eyesore in Starfleet in the neck was a perfect design decision. The original's neck has always looked like one big radiator with no clear idea that there is nothing but machinery there. This one fixes that by making it clear that sections there are designed for crew inhabitation. Also, I've seen some interpretations of this with a shuttle bay between the neck impulse engines.
I'm torn on whether I like the Excelsior II or Sagan the most. The reveal of the Stargazer in season 2 eps 1 was a fantastic moment. For my first viewing, though, I was instantly drawn to the Excelsior II when the fleet warped in. Even as only a background ship, it was a pause-worthy moment having an entirely original design for Picard that still payed homage to a classic.
Excellent video and breakdown as always Ric!
I didn’t know about this I like the neo constitution as well as this mk2 excelsior a lot.
"EXCELSIOR!!!" - Stan Lee
Real talk, the radiolytic phasers it uses, would make 9 of them = a dominion war galaxy (with phasers alone) but with rapid fire quantum torpedoes, regenerative ablative hull, and stronger shields, better turn rate, and being faster in every way.
The fact this is an entirely new ship, so you can't use any of the Excelsior variant skins with it, rubs me the wrong way. Especially since the only way to do that and get them all is to buy the Ship Bundle with the Legendary Excelsior and Legendary Ambassador. The price tag on that thing is insane, it'd take me _years_ to earn that much even with the Lifetime Subscription, especially with Exchange rates being maximized. I wish Cryptic would add the Legendary ships to the C-store individually so we could buy them individually. Maybe make Legendary Coupons we can earn in events like the T6 Coupons we can get currently.
And we have the real reason this thing exists! Money! 😉
In this case, I wouldn’t say it’s entirely Cryptic’s fault and more on whoever arbitrarily decided it should be larger than the old Excelsior. Because of that, it’s incompatible with old Excelsior skins.
It’s a ship from Picard.
That means two things.
1) It’s a knockoff of a TOS design and 2) it’s bigger for no reason.
Though the latter is more an issue with nuTrek in general.
So no that part isn’t Cryptic’s fault.
What ever happened to Voyager’s stealth and deployable armour technology?
Why did they make a new Excelsior class, build a new Excelsior as part of that class, and not give it the registry number NCC-2000-A?
Awesome video. I’ve always liked the Excelsior Mark II as shown in Picard Season 2 and 3. However it still doesn’t beat the original NX Excelsior design.
Thank you Endevor Gaming
When you look at the Excelsior 2 class outside of Star Trek lore and just in comparison to other Starfleet ships structural designs, it looks a lot stronger than most. Indeed the only point where you could point out any structural weakness is the how thin the warp pylons appear to be in relation to the rest of the ship. However, they are also longer (forward to rear) than many other such designs (allowing for scale) which makes them relatively strong in terms of forward/rear stresses and that makes a lot of sense since in lore it is the nacelles that push the ship along.
Another factor is that the bulky design of the neck and engineering section should allow a pretty good amount of space within the basic hull design and as such allow an increase of modularity in comparison to sleeker designs where the internal hull capacity would be far more limited. The most obvious down side of such a design is that the increased hull area would need a far greater amount of physical resources to build than a smaller design but in the end the Excelsior 2 design could very well out-last two or three generations of sleeker ship designs by virtue of its modularity and ease of upgradability.
I got one with my promo token from this past event campaign and it is the bullocks, I love it.
I think it's incorrect to say that a resource poor fleet would revert to earlier designs. Far more believable to say that the Excelsior had many role-specific features (the cargo bay, black neck, warp pylon arrangement) that had not been rendered obsolete, and so we see this updated version with a Sovereign style saucer and more refined hull.
Consider the real world HMS Victory. For those who don't know, every future wooden ship of the line built in the 1800's by the Royal Navy was basically a Victory, but a bit bigger. Even the massive 120 gun ships of the mid century. Victory worked, so they kept doing it.
However, this does not excuse the Enterprise mark III which remains, to my eyes, silly and stupid. It's like rebuilding a world war 1 coal fired battleship when just a few years earlier you were riding around in a WW2 era ship, and when the last thing you built was a nuclear powered aircraft carrier (which would be the equivalent of a Galaxy or Sovereign). It's a stupid idea forced upon us by bad decisions at the studio. They seriously couldn't find the money to design something better? From a budget that big?
No. For now and forever, no.
But Excelsior II is cool 👍
The thing is, besides a few details and the overall layout the Connie III doesn't really have much in common with the originals. Its much larger, the secondary hull is radically different. The only thing thats the "same" is the forward 2/3 of the primary hull, but if we assume hulls are determined bybtheir operating conditions like they are for ocean-going ships then its simply a case that the ships were designed with similar conditions in mind.
@@DrewLSsix the first thing I noticed about the mark III was the concave saucer and the "cadillac" nacelles. Looking at designs that came later, we can presume these features were obsolete, remaining only on in-service ships like the Mirandas because if it ain't broke, why pay to fix it?
If it wasn't just a quick reuse of the strange new worlds model, it's reasonable to assume we'd have seen a continuation of the blended hull designs that Voyager started, and a convex saucer, not a retrograde concave one from a less advanced era.
Good title, great title, pure perfection. No notes
Its become my absolute favourite ship of all time it's beautiful 👌🏽❤🖖
Elegant AF. Hope to see it more in the future.
You've got to imagine some hilarious defense procurement political story behind this
Love the _Excelsior_-II. I recently saw a fan theory that it's so narrow with an elliptical saucer to keep it the same width as the original _Excelsior_ so it can use the same docks.
I don't call it paranoia Rick I call it adapting to conditions. Upgrading a ship of that type in giving it that kind of stuff makes sense. The way the excelsior 2 is to me if she is a jack of all trades
I clicked on your video because of the title. Well done. You're only missing a "Part 2" or "Chapter 2" at the end. lol
Great video with what little information is available!
Even a short range transwarp drive would be a huge logistical boost, as ships could get to any trouble spot within Federation borders quickly and thus in numbers.
That means less ships are needed to patrol a region as backup can arrive _fast._
Just a few minutes of transwarp can make a big difference within or adjacent to your own territory.
As well it would be assumed that transwarp technology would improve over time, so having the ships hull designed to accommodate it and withstand the stress makes sense from a longevity perspective.
It's not going to have a century long service life if within the next decade or two if stable transwarp becomes a standard feature on new ships.... and can't be retrofitted to this one.
Honestly, I personally consider it the Excelsior IV. Because we've had the original Excelsior, the Enterprise-B variant, the Obena and now this one. Seems like an organic progression.
I really like the design. It's sleek but at the same time doesn't come off as an aggressive design.
This incarnation of Excelsior is the embodiment of if it ain't broke don't fix it. I like it it is a natural progression that adds to the strengths of an already proven design
I hate it when ships go in for refit and come out all Sovereigny looking.
-Captain Freeman (paraphrased)
I wonder why the canon Ex 2's had such low NCC numbers, with the known ones being in the range of older TNG-era (mostly Excelsior) ships but without any A's, B's, etc. It seems like they 1:1 rechristened the new ships from existing and decommissioned Ex's treating them like they were the same ship.
At this point i have to imagine the in universe registry system is a convoluted mess, probably consisting of several registry schemes working in parallel trying not to confuse one another.
Thay said, the Excelsior here wouldn't be the A or B because it didnt inherit the originals 2000 refistry number, there's several cases in canon of ships using older names without the matching registry and without the suffix, and there are arguably ships running legacy registry numbers but apparently not the associated names because of the lack of suffix.
By the 25th century i imagine they were looking at the long and indistince registry numbers of later ships and wondering when they should change things, when would a registration number become an unwieldy serial number wrapping around the entire ship??
Magnificent!
Like this design better than the original.
Couldn't it be considered just a _minor refit_ of the Excelsior.
I really like the ship and it's design personally, though I could be biased since Excelsior is one of my favorite designs. And out-of-universe, it's clearly a nostalgia craft through and through, much like the USS Titan.
That being said, I'm not a fan of the in-universe reasons for it's existence. It doesn't make any sense to build this ship when Starfleet already has a 24th~25th Century "Excelsior".....it's the Sovereign. It serves all the roles the Excelsior is meant to, has clearly been produced in large numbers by the 25th Century, indicating relative ease of construction, and has much the same capabilities as this new Excelsior II. The new Excelsior type isn't exactly a smaller, leaner ship like the Constitution III that has it's own fleet role, it's quite contemporary to the Sovereign.
The Sovereign is clearly a reliable design Starfleet continues to use as a workhorse, just as Starfleet did with the Excelsior in the early 24th century, even as they continue to build even bigger and more capable ships, namely the Odyssey Class. So this isn't about a classic design being more reliable or something along those lines compared to the Sovereign, both are battle- and time-tested designs.
It would be a different matter if these new Excelsior IIs were built from refitted Excelsiors. But this is a new design, a much larger ship. Realistically, Starfleet should just be building even more Sovereigns in this type and weight class.
From what we saw we in the Picard series and seeing the dings Starfleet took to build new ship classes, it would be fair to say the Excelsior class probably went through a refit program to the Excelsior 2. The same could be said the Nebula and Miranda classes as we saw the updated Sutherland and Reliant classes.
When I was a kid I never liked the Excelsior over the Connie. As an adult I love it!
Excelsior class was Starfleet's most produced/successful vessel, even more so than the Miranda, after its time as top of the line cutting edge was behind it, it became the true workhorse of the fleet. Why you ask? because it is incredibly versatile, incredibly tough, very reliable, incredibly agile, and incredibly loved. :) Long may its legacy continue. I like the new one very much, but the original always takes top spot of the class.
I like it very good commentary, nice ship, pretty hefty. It looks like it can kick some ass
My biggest issue with this design (aside from the class name and known registries), is that they essentially scaled up a 2270s-2280s hull design. Warp field theory and thus hull design advanced a lot since then, and should have a visual impact on things (which is also why I don't like the Reliant, Gagarin, most other STO borrowed designs, or "Constitution III" designs either; Ross is fine, Sutherland if scaled down closer to Nebula in size is fine). And I highly doubt they lost so many ship design personnel that they'd need a crutch of "use this general hull design and scale/modify it as needed to add what we need."
Also, the known registries would put this class as predating the Nebula-class, much less the Galaxy-class, which would mean we'd have Excelsiors and "Excelsior IIs" in service at the same time (I mean, USS Hood has a higher registry than all known Excelsior II registries...). We can't go with "it got rebuilt like the Enterprise" when the rebuilding at a minimum adds ~120m to the length vs 16m length increase on the Constitution.
It's not a terrible looking design, no. I just don't think it fits ship design "evolution" continuity.
I have this ship in STO, it’s my main ship. I just love the design so much.
I adore the original Excelsior and its refit... but this just feels uninspired. They pretty much just stretched that sumbich out, slapped some different nacelles on it (that honestly don't match the ship that well), and called it a day.
Even the fact that the black area of the neck doesn't extend all the way back feels somewhat slap-dash... almost as if someone said, "Oh no! They're gonna see that we just stretched out the 3D model for the normal Excelsior. Quick, make the back part of the neck slightly different!"
It just feels like a wholly unnecessary ship.
i was about to write a very similar comment myself (bit less ranty maybe 😅); i don't hate the ship, but those are pretty much my issues with it too: it feels like someone just took an excelsior, squished it and stretched it; it's not an awful looking ship by any means, but from the side the saucer looks too thin and from the front it looks fat. To its credit tho, it does look way better than the Resolute (the T6 Excelsior).
The one ship i really hate tho is the Titan-A and don't get me started on it.
@@ROBERTO-in2iq well yeah the excelsior is a hard ship to make look ugly and it being a ship design that in some form reappears is ironically smart. Excacution however could use work. Also why I dont hate the Resolute from STO...yeah only certain ships work with the odyssey's oringal look
@@ROBERTO-in2iq agreed on all counts. And if I had to choose between this and the Titan-A, I'd chose the Excelsior 2 in a heartbeat
Need kitbash option for this sucker.
i think this design is implying Starfleet after such a era of massive leaps in both ship design and technology due to encounters with the Borg and Dominion is finally heading into a time of stagnation and trying to keep it's public image by going back to the golden age of the Federations exploration as a lot of people seem to be disillusioned or outright hostile to Starfleet.
Kirks starfleet was about adventure and facing the unknown, the TNG was quality of life and diplomacy, DS9 was protecting freedom and fighting for the Federation but by the end of Picard Starfleet is the ' We get stuck with the crap jobs you don't want to do now and you hate us for it anyway '
John Eaves and Doug Drexler. No wonder it's so good looking.
It's because navies have always done that throughout hundreds of years Rick. And despite the howling complaints from some of the people on your video it is not a bad design. Is Starfleet gave me a ship like this as a captain I would not complain one bit.
I clicked because of the title 😂. Way to go.
I came here to see whether or not there would be someone who caught the reference of this awesome title to one of the titles made by Team Four Star for their Cooler movie. So far, somewhat disappointed.
The saddest part...we will never have an Eagle Moss mini of this beauty :(
This is like the current age F-15EX. While we have had the F-22 and F-35, both way more advanced planes, the EX was designed to bring a capability into the modern age, that of the missile truck. I could see Starfleet looking back to what was arguably the most successful ship ever designed, and making a new one.
This should have been the Enterprise G. And then be a home for a new exploration focused show.
Nice. Any idea of the size compared to the NX-2000/ NCC-1701B
Oooh! Now I want to see a "Centaur" variant of the Exelsior II.
congratulations from venezuela sir another awesome video for sure!
Her having a _very_ boaty hull is great.
I love these new ship designs as well. One thing I very much dislike, is CBSParamount's propensity to destroy them on a whim. Long gone are the days where we can come to love a ship over the period of several years, many seasons with two dozen or so episodes of one-per-week storytelling. Now we hardly get a good glimpse of a ship before we lose her. I'm talking to you, Stargazer-II. Tragic. The Enterprise-F, we saw her on screen only to be abused and tossed aside. Sure, the nod to gaming communities is great but they are providing "real" trek with "real" money. So give them more than a nod. The quality of fan-made trek material is becoming obscenely good, and I am here for it.
I had a stroke trying to read that title and died.
It exists for the same reason as the T-70 X-Wing: brand recognition. Star Trek isn’t about progress and seeking out new things anymore, it’s about nostalgia.
Starfleet revisiting older style designs could be said to be a political move, something comfortably familiar, focusing people on the golden age between TOS and TNG where things were pretty stable from day to day. With improvements in health care, humans are regularly living to 150 while maintaining good mental faculty. Picard starts 115 years after the Excelsior first went into service and the Constitution class remained in service for decades after that, pretty much any human middle age and up is going to remember them and the regular stability of day to day life, might help calm people down as the politicians reassure everyone that things are returning to normal....
Visually and in universe, the lower cut out of the secondary hull by the bottom shuttle bay should have been instead extended all the way back to the rear of the engineering hull, to provide a lot more internal space.
It could be used to explain having a lot of shuttles and runabouts, and cargo space etc.
It's what you need in a workhorse.
That is a gorgeous ship.
Beautiful starship
11:07 There are windows all the way to nearly the very aft of the vessel; imagine being the officers/crewmen whose quarters were that far back and away from everything!
After a thought, those are likely guest/transient passenger quarters, if anything.
Some of the renderings make me think it's designed to have a saucer separation ability. Any info on that?
8:17 Treaty of Algeron was still being upheld as of 2399 by the Romulan Free State according to on screen dialogue in PIC Season 1
This is the same show that said androids were banned by “galactic treaty”.
Nothing about politics in this show should be taken seriously.
If anyone plays Star Trek Online and gets their hands on this ship (you can get it for free too), I highly recommend the Odyssey material skin. It brightens up the hull to a nice clean cinematic look, and the soft azure glow of the nacelles and deflector dish are very easy on the eyes. Plus, it gets rid of those weird oversized spaghetti noodle windows you see throughout this video (John Eaves really messed up adding those, imo). On mine, I added teal patterns on the livery to make it look as close to a next-generation Lakota as possible.
Not related to this video, but will you all make a video about why the 32nd century still only has basic warp? When we know for a fact Star Fleet had the tech in the 25th century for multiple different types of trans warp engines. I imagine it'll take some work to communicate with the actual directors of Discovery (are we using STD for Discovery? Or is this a Voyager acronym situation?).
Thanks!
In general, I think reusing old designs wholesale is a bit cheap...but the Excelsion is such a beautiful ship, with a preestablished history as a long-term workhorse, that I'm willing to forgive it.
Somewhere, Stan Lee is screaming... "Excelsior!"
The Problem with Star Fleet Ships was that they were like Luxury Ships instead of Navy Ships made for Attack and Defence of Star Fleet, the Dominion had the right idea of Function over form and luxury and they could build more ships than Star Fleet Ship yards
Such nicer looking nacelles than the ones thrown on the Connie-III, Duder, and Sagan. Wish it was possible to throw them on those other classes in STO. Very similar style, just less obnoxious.