Empire Magazine pics!

Absolutely correct. Jeffries' design incorporated elements which made sense, and very few gave us the appearance of being "just for style." The 1701 didn't have "fins" but it did have a number of heat-management details, particularly on the engines, which make great technical sense (although to be practical, with currently-existing levels of technology, they'd really need to be much larger!)

Some of you may have built your own computers, and maybe even used some cooling components with "heat pipe" type phase-change heat transfer elements. That's effectively what the 1701's engines had near the aft, and on the inboard face (what FJ eventually referred to as "the control reactor" and the "intercoolers"). He also had simple radiator panels on the pylons, near the aft on either side, and wrapping around the aftmost "exhaust cone" region (I've always assumed that for the series ship, the warp effect was generated in the little spheres at the aft end of the nacelles).

I LOVE those engines. They just make sense from an engineer's perspective. I never cared as much for the TMP-era engines (too "decorative" and not as functional in appearance). The early TNG-era nacelles were a little better (Probert's influence) but fell away into "cool blue and red LED lighting" pretty rapidly. The TOS nacelles are still, by far, my favorite.

What I've seen, so far, of the nacelles in this film (albeit I think we saw the Kelvin's nacelles, not the Enterprises, in the trailer!) seems more "style" and less "substance."

*****

On a slightly different point... I'm not 100% convinced that we're looking at a window on the bridge (though I'll admit it seems likely). There's just as much logic to assuming that we're looking at a holographic display as there is that it's a window. If it is, in fact, a "big freakin' window" that just illustrates, to me, that the set is being designed by folks who are thinking more about "how cool things look" than about "does this make sense?"

If it's a window... how do you change the magnification levels? Or the angle of viewing? Or the "signal processing?" In space travel terms, you're almost never REALLY close enough to see what you're nearby... even with the simple orbital space travel we do today. In interstellar-travel terms... a window really is useless, isn't it? And in real terms, space is generally really really dark... except when it's really, really bright. To have visually useful information, you need to process the information being brought in to better match the range of sensitivity of the human eye (or "vulcan eye?")

So a window may be nice for "casual viewing" purposes but for the operation of a space vessel... not so much.

 

The main viewer itself is also pretty much useless (except for eye-candy).

But, as the pictures show, they very obviously can project displays on that window. So I'd guess they can also project the image the sensors record onto it.
But for the ship's operations the crew would use the monitors and displays on their own stations instead of the main-viewer anyway.

 

I don't know if you've looked at the "how would you redesign the bridge if you started from scratch" thread in Trek Tech... but I've talked about that, so I do agree with you.

The short form... the front of the bridge would be made up of three different main display elements... a holographic "navigation tank" (which would be what would be watched most often), a large ships' status display board (in lieu of any "engineering station" on the bridge!) and a visual display. And the navigation tank and status display would be far more useful than the main visual display under most circumstances.

I'm just sayin' that a display has some uses... a window has almost none, except to "look cool."

Yep, quite true. The images seem to be transparent, but hopefully they'd be able to go fully-opaque. In which case, the functionality of this as a window is pretty much a non-issue. (If they're always transparent... image "ghosting" would make it essentially useless.)

Agreed. Only the helmsman and the captain would really have reason to have their eyes glued to the main display... and the helmsman typically less so than the captain.

But I can see lots of functional purposes for a dedicated visual display, but very few for a big honkin' window.

 

I'm not fully convinced that the fins on the warp engines are purely for style. Maybe they still serve the same function as the pipes(the ones at the end of the warp engines on TOS Enterprise) or the pipes are within the fins for protection.

 

It's plausible. As a PC tech, I've seen some interesting heatsinks in my time.

 

Nah, the fins are for style. Like a '57 Chevy! Pimp my starship! -- RR

 

If the fins really are covering up the pipes then wouldn't that mean that they're just taking Jefferie's original concept of an extremely smooth and simple exterior one step further?

 

To be honest, that's exactly what I see when I'm seeing that sort of detail. Not a "functional mechanical/technological" element, but rather something like the huge fins on old cars. Heck, they even look like that sort of fin.

It's amusing to watch styles go through cycles, isn't it? Like how it's all the rage today to have stainless-steel appliances... something that was also all the rage back in the 1940s.

Anytime you do something just for style, it's inevitably going to look dated in just a few years. Just for example... during the 1970s, you couldn't have done a show with people having short-cropped hair without people thinking that looked anachronistic and goofy... after all, "fluffy, feathered hair" was how "modern" people do it.

 

Hardly surprising, considering how GR sought out the input--both in the form of scripts and background advice--of many litSF luminaries in order to craft a pardigm shifting show that would treat SF not as kiddie adventure but adult drama. It's easy to forget now--the glowing, gambling brains and hissing lizard men can do that--just how revolutionary that was.

Of course, the kids were welcome to watch, too. But, as a kid, I always felt more grown-up for doing so. Certainly, TMP did more for my growing intellect than any of the Star Wars movies did, as much as I liked them--the first two, at least; I knew at age 13 that Jedi was total shit. Abrams himself said how the smart kids liked Trek while he preferred Star Wars for its more "visceral" appeal.

Note, too, how Star Trek took its cue from the most cerebral science fiction film of the previous decade, Forbidden Planet, which put a nakedly Freudian gloss on Shakespeare among the rinky-dink trappings of a fifties monster movie, just as you show TMP taking its cue from 2001. Now we have Abrams--the creator of Felicity--comparing TOS to the amusing but tonally inaccurate show-within-the-movie Galaxy Quest (which even head cheerleader Starship Polaris has said bore more resemblance to late season Buck Rogers in the 25th Century than TOS) and thus, with his superior sophistication, promising to Star Wars it up for us.

We're supposed to think this a good thing?

 

Absolutely Right(TM).

 

Am I supposed to like that you expose Trek as the ripoff it is (with all those 'cues' taken from somewhere and someone else)?

 

God, I think that every time I see this pair.

 

Once again, you astonish me with your ability to deliberately mis-read an argument in order to do... what, exactly? I take it as a compliment, really: when someone refuses to debate the merits and instead resorts to chlidish pseudo-judo, it's almost as good as an outright concession. Thanks, dude.

(Btw: taking inspiration from somewhere does not equal "ripping off." Anyone with a rudimentary grasp of art and entertainment knows that. Thus, it logically follows that you do not.)

 

I was trying to be funny.
But it really is getting annoying and taking all the fun out of Star Trek when it is treated like a religion by far to many here.

 

Hardly. Or at least, hardly what I'm doing. All I'm saying is that I became a Trekkie because TOS did certain things in a certain way and it looks like Abrams doesn't get it, just as Berman and Braga didn't get it. That Orci and Kurtzman are Trekkies doesn't fill me with joy, either; a lot of Trekkies have tastes and talent I find disagreeable. Just as you and your cohort can express enthusiasm based on what you see, I and my cohort can express skepticism based upon the same. Do you really want a board of non-stop "squeeeeeee"?

 

LOL! Of course Trek is a "ripoff" of preexisting literary Space Opera ranging from Lukian of Samosata's 2nd century tale Vera Historia to A.E. van Vogt's 1950 fixup The Voyage of the Space Beagle and Eric Frank Russell's 1955 collection Men, Martians and Machines (featuring the heroic crew - which include chess-obsessed, logical "Martians" - of the starship Marathon encountering, amongst other things, a planet of villainous alien telepaths and another world dominated by intelligent machines whose biological creators have long since become extinct).

Also consider that the Organians - and every other hyper-evolved "energy being" encountered in TOS - can be traced back to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's "Radiant Humanity" and the imprinting of human minds into supercomputers a la The Ultimate Computer was also a major plot element of Frank Herbert's 1966 novel Destination: Void (which was itself an expansion of his August, 1965 Galaxy Magazine novella, Do I Wake or Dream?). Beyond that, the speculation of the Milky Way being "Living Galaxy" for which technological humanoid civilizations serve as a biologically-ordained defense mechanism to defend against extragalactic parasitization in The Immunity Syndrome simply oozes the Milchstraßenorganismus of Robert Nast's 1928 biocosmology monograph Kosmische Hypothesen: Biologie des Weltalls mit Einleitung über die Relativität der Logik, although episode rewriter GR probably got the idea from Olaf Stapledon's 1937 novel Star Maker (which Freeman Dyson suspects was inspired by Nast).

Oh yeah, Sargon's deterministic assertion that all civilizations are condemned to self-destruction after "reproducing" through space colonization in Return to Tomorrow is right out of Dandridge Cole's magnificent 1965 tome, Beyond Tomorrow: The Next 50 Years in Space, which served double duty as the conceptual foundation of George Zebrowski's 1979 novel, Macrolife. Incidentally, Cole also coined the term "Planetoid Colonies" which found its way into the episode Friday's Child. There are many other antecedents I can dredge up, but I think these are sufficient for this particular thread.

So, ultimately, the question comes down to whose ideas are you going to liberate? Gene Roddenberry pilfered concepts from several of the leading hard (or at least firm) LitSF writers and spaceflight theorists of the day while J.J. Abrams appears to be retrofitting the plotline from The Terminator into Star Wars. I know which creative approach I would have preferred.

TGT

 

TGT, I consider myself a master of the genre but you continue to remind me that I'm little more than a neophyte. I'm going to save that post for future reference.

 

Right...If someone had not actually watched TOS they'd think by reading your post that it was the most intellectual, perfect science fiction show with no imperfections whatsoever.

I love TOS but even a retrofitted plotline from Terminator into Star Wars has more to offer than some truly stupid episodes the show produced despite it's rightfully praised creative approach.

And ultimately we know next to nothing about JJ's movie. Just a few photos and bits and pieces of information with no idea of how exactly they will be presented.

Actually watch the movie first, then decide what it really is.

 

Out of 79 episodes, I can think of two dozen or so, produced under tight deadline, that sound more compelling than this movie Paramount has had years to develop. I can think of five writers each with more impressive resumes than Abrams, Orci and Kurtzman combined (Ellison, Sturgeon, Bloch, Matheson, Spinrad; and that's not counting Fontana, Coon, Black, Bixby and even Roddenberry himself); throw in TMP and you have the director of The Andromeda Strain and The Day the Earth Stood Still.

It comes down to this: some of us see Trek as a step down from 2001 and Blade Runner rather than a step up from Lost in Space and The Transformers.