Star Trek: Picard Showrunner Details Season 3's New "Hero Ship"

Star Trek fans, meet the USS Titan-A, the new ship at the center of Star Trek: Picard's third and final season. The Titan-A debuted in the Star Trek: Picard Season 3 trailer released on Star Trek Day, with Seven of Nine aboard as commander, having finally joined Starfleet. But the USS Titan-A is not the same Titan that Will Riker left the Enterprise to command in Star Trek: Nemesis, though they do share a connection and some parts. Star Trek: Picard Season 3 showrunner Terry Matalas explained the connection between the two Titan ships in a new interview with TrekMovie. 

"It is the Titan-A, yes," Matalas says of the vessel seen in the Star Trek: Picard Season 3 trailer. "You'll see in the season, that in the observation room we honor the previous Titans that have come before. You'll see a gold model of the Luna class USS Titan as seen in Lower Decks, which was designed by Sean Tourangeau. And we even see a previous incarnation from the TOS movie era. We'll see that there was a Titan that was a bit of a Constitution class as well, the original Shangri-La class [designed by Bill Krause]. So, the idea was that after the Luna class's legacy run with Riker, that ship was damaged and retired. Some of the systems were refit and put into this new Titan, the Titan-A."

As for the Titan-A's purpose in the fleet, Matalas says the Titan-A harkens back to the golden age of Starfleet as an exploratory institution, before the Dominion War and the imminent Borg threat. "It is a classic exploratory vessel that is a bit of an underdog in the situation that it gets into," he says. "So we really wanted to take a moment here and think about where Starfleet is at and how it would see advantages in the diversification of ship designs including purpose-built ships that were designed for specific types of missions. The new Titan is more of a long-range workhorse of a ship. Harkening back to the Constitution class that was designed for the long 5-year missions. It is an exploratory vessel with some serious maneuvering capabilities. Have you seen those impulse engines? Phew!"

Matalas describes the Titan-A as Star Trek: Picard Season 3's "hero ship," suggesting it'll be the vessel that takes the reunited Star Trek: The Next Generation cast on their next mission. We'll see when Star Trek: Picard Season 3 premieres on Paramount+ on February 16th.