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Orville Shuttle Photo
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Following up from his announcement of a delay to The Orville's season 3, Seth MacFarlane has tweeted an image of "The new shuttle" on a film set.

We noticed those vessels in the teaser provided yesterday but the one we see take off in the new intro sequence appeared to be leaving a station and could have been some other type of ship.

Rewatching that new intro sequence closely we see it enter The Orville's shuttle bay.

The new shuttle design is a departure from both the previous model and the typically ultra curvey Union ships.

What it puts us in mind of is the design of Krill shuttles which you can see here in this image made available by one of their CGI artists.

Does this indicate that The Union and the Krill are already sharing technology?

That The Union has repurposed their fleet more towards battle? Their original shuttles were battle capable but appeared designed primarily for transport.

And accordingly possibly a strategic change with The Union now regularly deploying these new shuttles in engagements.

This would also make for a signficant departure from The Orville and it's spiritual predecessaror, Star Trek. Small vessel dogfights had been the purview of properties like Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica.

Destruction of shuttles and death of crew could become a regular occurrence. How very Game of Thrones!

Or we might be over-analysing. In the very best spirit of sci-fi fandom.

Either way, The Orville: New Horizons (aka season 3) premieres on June 2 on SBS Viceland.

[ Main Image: The Orville season 2 CGI model. Credit: Fuzzy Door Productions via Twitter. ]

References

Hesham, Omar (February 14, 2020). The Orville Reel. ArtStation.

IMDb.com. Omar Hesham. (viewed February 7, 2022)

MacFarlane, Seth (February 6, 2022). The new shuttle. Twitter.