Well to be honest that's the way I see it and after talking with some friends a few years ago about it they tended to accept what I was saying! And they were Kirk, Spock and McCoy fans too!
JB
JB
Age of the Federation....
- Thread starter Warped9
- Start date
No, it was not. They had no deflector shields, no force fields, no tractor beams. Their warp drive could barely reach warp 5. The transporter was less reliable and its range was shorter. Their translator software was slower and relied more on human intervention. Their computer didn't have a voice interface. Their shuttlepods couldn't travel at warp. They started out with low-yield "spatial torpedoes" before upgrading to "photonic." There were handholds all over the bridge, corridors and elsewhere, indicating that the gravity plating was unreliable. The consoles had visible cooling fans, meaning they ran hotter and less efficiently than TOS consoles. There were many ways in which the technology was written and depicted to be less advanced than TOS.
Sure, it looked more advanced in superficial ways, but that's because it was made with 2000s technology rather than 1960s technology, and with a considerably higher budget to boot. You're mistaking a real-world difference in sophistication for an in-universe one. Obviously the makers of TOS did not intend 23rd-century technology to look like it was made in the 1960s; what we saw was just the best approximation of futuristic tech that they were capable of with the limited resources and budget at their disposal. The people making a TV series four decades later were naturally able to approximate that futuristic look somewhat better.
What shows were you watching? No shields. No photon torpedoes at first. Transporter for cargo only. Warp 5 was the upper limit. The UT was new and required a skilled linguist. Phase weapons limited to two settings. The only thing more advanced were the FX technology used in producing the show.
Last edited:
The hull design of the NX-01 felt very TNG to me. Also the use of the stripe on the uniforms invoked the shoulder "yokes" seen in TNG.
Well, naturally, because the shows had the same costume designer and most of the same art department staffers. Naturally things from the same creators will have stylistic similarities. Plus they were working from a design legacy that's been accumulating for decades. Again, it's a sign of time passing in reality, not in-universe.
But there are countless nods to Matt Jefferies's Enterprise in Doug Drexler's NX-01. The saucer has curved plates around the red and green running lights like Pike's Enterprise had. The text on the hull is in the same font used in TOS. I believe the deflector dish is a squashed version of the TOS dish. The nacelles are very TOS-inspired, with red domes and intercooler "handles" very much like the original's. And those are just the ones I can think of offhand. Doug is a huge, huge TOS fan, and he threw as many TOS Easter eggs into the design as he could get away with. (Despite the fact that Rick Berman insisted that the design be based on the Akira class.)
Actually I think TOS technology looks more advanced than ENT tech in a lot of ways, if you look past the '60s-ish switches and knobs and lights that are best not taken literally. TOS-era tech is smoother, simpler, less detailed. That generally suggests a more advanced technology -- consider how much more minimalist the design of a modern smartphone is compared to an '80s cell phone. It's also more fanciful, with fewer familiar components (like the cooling fans in the NX-01 bridge), and that implies a technology based on principles more removed from us, whether alien or futuristic in origin.
Not to mention the rank pips.
At least the pips were square. I would have liked a return to the sleeve stripes.
^ The dress uniform (or whatever it was) that Archer wore for his speech had stripes at the cuffs, but it didn't actually seem to correspond to his rank. (And the regular pips were still there... actually there were two sets, rather than just the one from the duty uniform.)
Image from TrekCore
ETA: Although I believe the flag officer's uniforms had both pips (two sets here, too!) and sleeve stripes from the beginning of the series. So maybe Archer's are supposed to represent his rank, too? Not sure.
Admiral Forrest in "Broken Bow"
Commodore Forrest in "First Flight"
Image from TrekCore
ETA: Although I believe the flag officer's uniforms had both pips (two sets here, too!) and sleeve stripes from the beginning of the series. So maybe Archer's are supposed to represent his rank, too? Not sure.
Admiral Forrest in "Broken Bow"
Commodore Forrest in "First Flight"
Last edited:
I imagine it was a progression from those dress uniforms to the TOS era standard uniforms and then Starfleet tried something different from the late 2270s to 2350s before deciding to "go back to their roots" with the old fashioned Earth rank pins of the mid-22nd century.
Well that's the way I saw it at the time. I've never rewatched any of them as I'm not a fan but it did seem to me that they were trying to show TOS as a blip in the series history rather than a monument!
JB
My apologies. That's what I meant to say was 'it looked' superior! Obviously it wasn't as like you say the ship wasn't able to travel beyond warp five! The only real enjoyment I got out of the show was my wife telling me each week that the Captain was Henry Winkler from Happy Days! After a while I started to believe her too!
As it happens, I just learned a relevant factoid from the infotext on the DVD of Doctor Who: "The War Games." Apparently the British Army in the First World War stopped using prominent sleeve stripes to denote rank and switched to small collar pins because that made it harder for enemy snipers to identify and target officers. It's perhaps worth noting that Starfleet's transition from rank stripes to rank pins happened sometime between TMP and TWOK, and that Starfleet as a whole seemed to become more militaristic in that interval. Maybe that ties into the evident heightening of tensions with the Klingons in the movie era.
On the other hand, I think the small rank pips in the TNG era were favored by Roddenberry because he wanted to de-emphasize the military, hierarchical aspect of Starfleet. The ENT-era Starfleet was also a less military, more scientific organization. So maybe it's not about enemy snipers, just about the importance placed on rank and hierarchy in a given era.
Bakula looks likes Winkler? Never noticed that.My wife telling me each week that the Captain was Henry Winkler from Happy Days! After a while I started to believe her too!
In what way? They brought back the TOS division colors. They featured two TOS races prominently. Other TOS races were featured and mentioned as well. Christopher mentioned all the TOS nods in the ship's design. Other TOS nods were incorporated into the art direction and prop design.
I've never done a complete rewatch of Enterprise since the show ended, just an episode here and there. Most of this was quite noticable on my first watch.
TV shows are a visual experience as well as narrative, and years of watching TOS, especially for people whose imaginations were engaged by the world of that show, can create some kind of aesthetic preconceptions or expectations. For spaceships, Rick Sternbach had one pre-TOS vision, and Masao Okazaki another, both of which more closely matched what I would imagine for pre-TOS design than what I saw in Enterprise. It's just personal taste, but I get what johnnybear is saying: Despite whatever cues they slipped in, to me the overall ENT visual design looked more like it evolved from TNG than into TOS.
Sure, but if someone today did a Marvel comic that were a prequel to, say, Fantastic Four #1, it would be drawn in a modern, highly detailed, digitally colored style rather than the simpler drawing style and cruder printing used in the '60s. Of course it evolved forward because it is made later in the real world. It makes no sense to expect the makers of something modern to lower their standards to those used half a century ago just because the work of fiction they're creating is set earlier. After all, it is fiction. It isn't really coming from an earlier time. Even a prequel is still a followup, and it's going to be created with the entire history of the franchise in mind rather than pretending ignorance of all that came before it. That's as true of artistic design as it is of storytelling choices.
Similar threads
- Poll
