Re: Is The NuTrek Universe A Changed Timeline From The Star Trek Unive
^This! Well stated, urbandefault.
(NOTE for previous stuff....At M'Sharak's kind invitation, I accept....and will go one step further in a positive direction, be the bigger man, and apologize.

. )
Back to the current sub-discussion seeming to regard the timed/dated looks of Trek tech, well, as we all have pretty much experienced, the vision of the far future changes from decade to decade.
The far future (or just the vision if advanced tech in a fictional setting) as envisioned in the fifties is different from what we saw in the sixties, and the fic-tech just keeps changing with each decade. So, it's not surprising, the quandry a furturist art director finds him/herself in when trying to conceive a look for a show/franchise that has endured for decades. How do we make the NX-01 look more advanced than what we have now, yet seem primitive when compared to a ship that came along in the fictional history some 100 years later, and yet, by today's production standards, looks retro-futuristic?
We've all heard the case before that we now have cell phones that look far cooler (and have even more functionality...it would seem) than ShatKirk's era of communicators.
One of the things I liked about the Abrams Star Trek communicators was that they were more like futuristic successors to today's cell phones. When Pike's communicator beeps as he's talking to Kirk in STID, he doesn't answer it.....he reads a text. Also, communicators of that era seem to have recording apps, as Kirk demonstrated in Trek '09 as he cites his (then) current situation on Delta Vega. They still had the same basic look as ShatKirk's communicators (that is to say, not exactly the same, but the idea was still the same, a flip grid commo device), but they had more functionality.
However, the one thing that cannot be denied is that the original Trek was rather visionary when it came to future tech depiction back in the 60's and even into the 90's. Cell phones (from communicators), floppy disks (from the data cards), thumb drives (from the ODN chips). We have medical beds that are inspired by the 60's Trek. The military has considered the typical starfleet bridge as a basis for command center layouts.
Stuff from way back when might not
look good by today's production standards, but the practical tech they've inspired endures and continues to evolve.
