Why Is There Weathering On The Enterprise?

My guess would be that Starfleet is continuing the age-old tradition started by NASA of NEVER WASHING THE EXTERIORS OF SPACECRAFT.
I've got this lovely shot as my desktop wallpaper; of the Space Shuttle Endeavour on top of it's 747 transport after arriving in LA prior to it's move to it's final resting place. There's all sorts of weathering in the form of brown and tan streaks and discolored areas. Probably from landings at Edwards dry lake and in New Mexico. Also some discoloration from rocket exhaust from launching. The Atlantis and Discovery were the same way. I saw a video of Atlantis after it arrived at it's permanent home at the Kennedy Space Center Visitors Center. They were power washing it and all of the brown and tan areas were washed away. It looked brand new and had lost some of it's character.
I guess Starfleet doesn't budget for starship washing.

 

(Endeavor never landed at White Sands in New Mexico. Only Columbia did. But back to the discussion....)

 

I think weathering gives a subject a feel of history- what you are looking at now is just one slice of time. New cars in the showroom do not look 'real' to me either, but when I see one in a parking lot with windshield wiper marks and a door ding, THEN it is a real car.

In the show's context we have see in every series plenty of times where the hull is subjected to conditions which could mark it's surface, from descending into atmosphere to a detonation of a nuclear device hidden in debris. A lot of people are frustrated with Voyager being pristine like they wash and wax it continually.

 

When I was younger I wasn't as aware of it either although it was sometime in the '70s when I read of weathering being added to the model. And later better still images of the ship did reveal what wasn't so obvious on old CRT televisions.

That said I do agree the weathering was propbably added to make the ship have an added sense of realism to it.

I think it's a nice touch if not overdone.

 

I like Jein's weathering on the Trials and Tribblelations Enterprise.
Subtle.
He didn't Miarecki the hell out of it.

 

As someone else mentioned, the amount of radiation absorbed by the hull over years without shipyard maintenance could be enough to discolour the metal.

Most alloys, no matter how good, weather or lose luster through exposure to certain light levels. Each plate of the hull is individual, orbiting planets with exotic or larger stars than the sun, stellar clusters, or even just dozens of regular ones one after the other.

That amount of direct high intensity light with wavelengths all the way up to gamma/cosmic ray will have an effect over time. Nebula gas, space dust, random debris, molecular scale dirt passing through asteroid belts, oort clouds, ion clouds. The atmospheric gasses eminating in small amounts from planets.

It could be a combination of abrasion, ionisation, discolouration, molecular scale damage of exotic types all combining over 5 years or more.

 

Still don't care for gridlines. *Sigh*

 

LOL. Me neither!
But nice work all the same.

 

...Or a natural property of the material, a result of the original production process already. There's no need for the ship to ever have looked "pristine".

Timo Saloniemi