The reveal of the starship U.S.S. Discovery NCC-1031 and a title — Star Trek: Discovery — is about all we learned at San Diego Comic-Con 2016.
There’s some other stuff we can extrapolate: the captain may be a black woman, there will be Klingons and the NCC designation promises the series will be set between 2161 and 2293.
But really all we have is a video of the Discovery in its hangar bay, which you can watch above. The first look “Test Flight” video unveils a United Federation of Planets starship with all the swooping shots and eye sugar you’d expect. Star Trek captains have always been enamored of their ship (and Sisko had both the Defiant and DS9 to drool over). Discovery looks like it will continue Trek’s particular reverence for the technological wonders achieved by a socialist human utopia and their alien allies.
But the first look at the U.S.S. Discovery NCC-1031 shared another similarity with Trek programs of recent decades: bad CGI. It’s not a dealbreaker or anything, but the computer graphics model for the Discovery doesn’t look much better than SFX shots from the late 90s.
Don’t worry, it’s far from the final model.
According to Heather Kadin, Star Trek: Discovery’s executive producer, “we had three weeks to throw that together.”
“The concepts of the ship are totally what we’re going for. And they’ll be honed up until, I think, the day we deliver,” Kadin told TrekMovie.
Bryan Fuller, Kadin’s co-executive producer, neglected to mention that the footage was little more than a test during the Star Trek Comic-Con panel.
So don’t worry, Star Trek: Discovery is still on track to be the best thing to ever happen, ever.
