“So, in the trailer, you see our hero ship of season three,” showrunner Terry Matalas told TrekMovie. “It’s actually a class that’s called, in Starfleet slang, the Neo-Constitution class or Constitution III.” For casual Trek viewers, the name Titan probably means nothing. But longtime fans know the Titan as the ship captained by Picard’s Number One, Will Riker. We’ve seen glimpses of the Titan in new Trek series, namely the finale of Picard season one and the first episodes of Lower Decks season two. But Matalas revealed this to be an upgraded version, the Titan-A. “It’s based on a design by fan Bill Krause,” he said. “Let’s say there are a few fan-designed ships that are canonized this season in the fleet.” For the Titan-A design, Matlas and his crew sought to match the design aesthetic of Picard’s 25th-century setting while honoring the past. Where the Luna class ships, to which the original Titan belonged, “felt like it was more TNG-era than the Picard-era we set up with the new Stargazer,” Matlas and production designers Dave Blass, Doug Drexler, and John Eaves also worried about the aerodynamic look of modern ships. “Oval and arrowheads. All curves, no angles. No proper saucers,” Matlas lamented. “So, we asked ourselves what if Starfleet designers looked backward to some of those old retro designs and updated them?” The Titan-A reflects the needs of Starfleet in the modern era. With wars against the Dominion and the Borg in the past, Starfleet needs ships to focus on humanitarian missions, such as the evacuation of Romulus, and on exploration. According to Matalas, the Titan-A is “a classic exploratory vessel that is a bit of an underdog in the situation that it gets into.” Starfleet designed it not for battle, but as a “long-range workhorse of a ship […] an exploratory vessel with some serious maneuvering capabilities.”
