Star Trek: 10 Secrets Of The La Sirena

During the development of Star Trek: Picard's pilot episode, several sequences depicting different capabilities of the La Sirena were conceptualized but ultimately abandoned, leading the ship to be designed with specific functions that went unseen in season one.

Among these unseen capabilities is the La Sirena's ability to land. In a scene that was visualized but ultimately not filmed, retired Admiral Jean-Luc Picard would have met Captain Cris Rios at a spaceport on Earth and boarded the La Sirena from a gangway beneath cockpit. The sequence also would've depicted the ship being loaded with cargo through pair of large doors on the aft section while the ship itself stood on four articulated landing legs. At this point, La Sirena hadn't yet gained her striking red paint scheme and was instead colored metallic gray, intended to resemble a giant F-14 fighter or stealth bomber.

According to the ship's designer Mark Yang:

We were hoping the we'd have a shot where Picard walked up to a ship after all these years of not spacefaring and saw that this is a new thing. It's something that should be familiar but it's still new. I wanted to get little bit of scale.

Ironically, the La Sirena would touch down on the surface of Ghulion IV aka Coppelius in the episode "Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 1", though that was more of a giant space orchid-related crash than a controlled landing, those landing gears proving useless.