10 Background Star Trek Items More Important Than You Think

When the Enterprise's saucer section was about to crash into the planet Altamid in Star Trek Beyond, Kirk ordered all crew to evacuate aboard what he called 'Kelvin pods'.

They appeared to be very similar to standard Starfleet escape pods that we've seen in Trek many times (First Contact, for example), but their name does actually hint at a deeper history.

The USS Kelvin, Kirk's dad's ship from the beginning of the 2009 film, was attacked by the Narada, and all crew were forced to evacuate. Apparently, the ship had no escape pods, because we saw everyone leaving the ship aboard shuttles instead. Escape pods work better because they are scattered all around a ship, allowing for less crowded space during an evacuation, and they aren't filled with extra unnecessary equipment like shuttles.

While we did see escape pods in Star Trek: Enterprise (which was prior to the timeline's splitting), it can be reasonably assumed that the Kelvin pods were invented as a response to the disaster of the USS Kelvin. The exact differences between the two are rather unclear.

Maybe escape pods fell out of use because they took up so much space and were rarely used, so when Starfleet suddenly decided to integrate them again (after the Kelvin's destruction), they needed a thinner, more compact design, which was exactly what we saw in Beyond.