Designing Star Trek: Picard

Jeff Lombardi, property master in the art department on Star Trek: Picard, takes sfx on an all-access tour of the 24th century

- Darren Scott

GUN FRAMES

That’s a super-early mock-up of the Federation’s phaser rifle, for me to see how the ergonomics were working out. That’s just the raw frame of the gun, essentially. It doesn’t have the main barrel there, or the scope put on yet.

This was the black market Romulan disruptor that Laris and Zhaban have stowed inside of the château. As the Romulan weaponry evolved, I was building it for this military faction that’s on the Borg cube. The idea early on with the writers was that the Romulans are scattered across the galaxy in different factions, and so they’re just claiming whatever old stuff they have. So something that would have been like where it was maybe 15 or 20 years ago. So instead of Zhat Vash weaponry we call this Tal Shiar, the idea being these old Romulan guns are all just sold on the black market now.

REMOTE CONTROL PHASER

None of the creatives wanted to do the “remote control phaser” from The Next Generation. Patrick didn’t want to either. Jonathan Frakes didn’t want to, beyond Alex Kurtzman and Michael Javan. It’s not even just a design thing. It was looking back at how that weapon works – you couldn’t aim it, so there’s a lot of shots of people holding the phaser and yet the shot is beaming in some odd angle. It’s a weird thing, like a boomerang essentially.