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...and I started thinking like a quizmaster writing a trivia question. Maybe ask my fellow geeks the easy question of which alien race flies this type of vessel, and add the slightly less easy bonus point: What alien race was originally going to use this vessel?
Even a lot of non-Star Trek fans will get that this was a Klingon vessel, one that's shown up all over Star Trek -- by my quick count, at least five films and three TV series -- but fewer people know of this might-have-been: it was originally going to be a Romulan vessel. Producer Harve Bennett, when he was writing Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and trying to formulate a plausible-enough way to bring Spock back from the dead --
-- more trivia: Leonard Nimoy had kept not wanting to return to the role, had been written out of the aborted 1970s Star Trek: Phase II TV series, almost had his character leave this plane of existence in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, finally got to have Spock die in The Wrath of Khan, and then realized that he was having fun with the character again, and thus surprised cast and crew when at the end of Khan's production, said "I'm looking forward to Star Trek III" --
-- Bennett originally wrote in Romulans as the film's villains. My hunch (I don't know for certain) is that the filmmakers decided it was better to use the better-known race. Conveniently, this made sense per Star Trek backstory, which included that Klingons had at times used Romulan technology (and vice versa: cf. Original Series episode "The Enterprise Incident"). So it could be a Klingon ship with Romulan technology, most importantly the cloaking device that makes the Bird of Prey a stealth vessel.
I could go on about this stuff. On this stuff, I know my stuff. These trivia question-generating thoughts can go on forever, but the result is a reasonably easy pair of questions. Not all of them have to be hard. Cort and Fatboy, in Geek Trivia (happening tonight) get a good balance of easy and difficult. I'm developing that skill, too, just not for Geek Trivia anymore.
Correct me if I'm wrong about any of the above. I like being closer to right.