Star Trek Just Showed Us A Completely New Type Of Starship
In episode 8 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 2, things open with a throwaway scene in which Captain Pike tells us via his log voiceover that the Enterprise is rendezvousing with a ship called the Kelcie Mae in the Prospero system. The show’s brilliant FX artists went through the trouble and expense to show us the ship, and it’s like no Starfleet ship we’ve ever seen before.
Here it is…
Why does the ship look so different? While it does have one standard warp nacelle (we’ve seen single nacelle vessels before) and it has the old school type deflector we’ve seen on other ships in Strange New Worlds (the USS Farragut for instance), the primary hull is a total departure from normal Starfleet design.
The pointed and sloped front half of the ship almost looks more like something the Romulans would come up with. Additionally, while we’ve seen single nacelle ships before, they aren’t common. It’s often theorized that single nacelle vessels, while potentially speedy, may suffer from an inability to turn or maneuver in warp.
When we see strangely designed ships like this in the Star Trek universe, it’s usually because that ship has been designed for one specific purpose.
Judging from the size of the windows on the Kelcie Mae, we can tell it’s not very big. Not nearly as big as the Enterprise. This ship is likely only 5 or 6 decks in total.
So what exactly is the Kelcie Mae?
When we see strangely designed ships like this in the Star Trek universe, it’s usually because that ship has been designed for one specific purpose. For instance, in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “All Good Things”, Beverly Crusher commands a dedicated medical ship with a ball for a primary hull rather than a saucer.
Even the USS Defiant fits into this since it also looks nothing like a normal Starfleet ship. And the Defiant, like these other ships, is a ship built for one specific purpose. In the case of the Defiant, it’s Starfleet’s only dedicated warship. She’s built for battle and not much else.
All of this suggests the Kelcie Mae is a specialized ship designed to move swiftly straight from point A to point B. And since the Enterprise is meeting it to pick up a passenger, it seems likely this is a courier ship.
Exactly what class of ship the Kelcie Mae is, for now, unknown. Maybe we’ll see her or another like her again somewhere else in the Star Trek universe.
