I would disagree with your reasoning on phaser placement, in that if a ship approaches from Z+10 km, directly above, then only a dorsal phaser bank could hit that ship. A single phaser bank would be like having only 1 gun on a battleship that can only reach 90° forward.
To quote Spock...
"He's intelligent, but not experienced. His pattern indicates ...two-dimensional thinking."
An FTL ship can point in any,
ANY, direction without delay... including straight up, straight down or directly behind. The Phase II Enterprise has a single weapons port that points straight forward (though it does have a targeting lens at the opening), and that is all it needs. If the ship can move faster than light, then no mechanical aiming system on the weapons can aim the weapons faster than just pointing the ship at the target.
As for the term 'modernizing,' I would disagree in that some design choices made in TOS are very '60's', and should be modernized.
Really? Because as I recall, TOS takes place in the '60's... the 2260's, but still the
60's. I haven't lived in the 2260's so I don't know what would be considered
modern. But lets look at some specifics...
The desk monitors could be flat screens,
Originally they were. In WNMHGB and later in
Requiem For Methuselah we see nice flat panel displays that rival anything we have today. On Earth during TOS you might find most people using exactly that type of thing... but the Enterprise isn't on Earth. The Enterprise needs to be self sufficient, which means they can't take their stuff to the Apple store if something goes wrong.
As I pointed out earlier, everything can be made on the Enterprise... but how? If you need a display, the Enterprise computers can print the components, but you'd still need to put them together. For something assembled in a factory super slim is great, but on a starship it is easier to work with slightly more room. The desktop displays aren't CRT based in TOS, but they are easy to repair.
Most of the Enterprise has to be like this. Someone from Earth in the 2260's visiting the Enterprise would most likely comment on how bulky and behind the times the technology seems compared to the commercial products they are used to. But then again, TODAY you might say the same thing if you were taking
a closer look at the brand new Orion spacecraft.
The 2260's are advanced in the Trek universe, but they don't have replicators just yet, so some things seem bulkier than they might be back on Earth.
decor and clothes could be changes along with hair styles.
Why? Again, do we know what the styles are in the 2260's?
In TOS pants are part of the standard uniform for both men and women, but women choose to wear miniskirts then. Why? I don't know. Why are women doing the
free the nipple thing now or bra burning 50 years ago... we don't know what is happening socially on Earth in the 2260's, so we shouldn't judge.
For the ship, the control panels are unlabeled and at least to me would seem more functional if they were labeled, not so 'gel-cap'-looking, had more variety in button type (sliders, switches, on/off indication like in Knight Rider's car, etc).
In 1986 I got my first Porsche... it had the gear pattern on the shift knob. Less than a month later I replaced that knob with a leather one with the Porsche badge on it... because I didn't need to see that pattern.
I'm sure that back at the academy, everything is labeled... and there are versions of those control panels on the Enterprise that are labeled... but if you need the labels, you shouldn't have a bridge assignment.
Here is how smart Uhura is in TOS... she can work ANY station on the bridge. We see her at the communication station, library computer station, navigation station and using the controls on the captain's chair... and she can modify the communications station herself (as Spock said, she is the most qualified person to do it).
Nichelle Nichols should have looked at her character a little closer, because she was AWESOME!
But here is the thing, the stations on the bridge were the department heads. There were other communications officers working under Uhura elsewhere on the ship. In fact most of the people that work directly under the bridge officers are on deck 8... which is where you head if the bridge gets damaged.
The engineering deck seems incredibly spartan; the TMP/TWOK engineering set seems much more functional, and with a bit of color could be better than having a brewery in the hull.
Again, compared to what? We don't know how any of this stuff works, so why would we need to see more than they actually need?
I'm going to pick on someone that deserves to be picked on here... David Merriman.
He is not much of a Trek guy so it was funny to read this quote by him...
Lets look at this
magic crystals part as an example.
What if we take a real life story about a group of people on one of our submarines and gave it to someone a few hundred years ago. How would they react to it?
Even the most advanced scientists of the day might say
there is precious ‘real’ science evidenced by the story with it's underwater ships running on a few pounds of a magic metal.
Honestly, putting too much of
today into science fiction dates it. And TOS actually went backwards moving from the pilots to the series. On the bridge the large areas at the stations were able to display multiple windows of data in
The Cage, but then were reduced to smaller displays that were shaped like TV screens of the day. In the 60's they thought that looked more
modern, but in reality the original design was better.
If I were to change anything, it would be to undo some of the design changes made to the Enterprise during TOS to help audiences better relate to the technology. Jefferies original designs were perfect. Even things like reaction control thrusters hurt the design... why would a control system of the 2260's look like what we are using in the late 20th and early 21st century? Almost anything we would attempt to add to the Enterprise today to
modernize it would be the equivalent to applying steampunk to it.
The eye-level screens should be touch, and the overheads could possibly be Kinect-like in interface using 3D motion for interaction in addition to console-level controls. That way, Spock could brief a few officers on a scientific phenomenon, or Scotty can detail repair efforts on a larger screen.
