The truth about Discovery and the Prime universe.

[Captain of the USS Averof]

You can't go from iPhones that can do pretty much anything to tricorders with CRT screens and breadbox computers.

Why? What kind of screens and computers will be around in 300 or 400 years? Point is that we don't know and we can't guess either. Whatever contemporary you use/think of will be dated in a few years anyway.

Star Wars profits from the fact they aren't depicting the future of this planet.

Star Trek isn't a depiction of the future of this planet either.

 

[Myko]

Why? What kind of screens and computers will be around in 300 or 400 years? Point is that we don't know and we can't guess either. Whatever contemporary you use/think of will be dated in a few years anyway.

You're correct that we cannot guess, but it most certainly wont be technology we've already surpassed. And while it might be possible that technology will appear to look less advanced while simultaneously being more advanced, it is not instinctively plausible to the vast majority of viewers.

 

[cultcross]

You may not think so but a show set in the 23rd century on a planet called earth, about humans who quote Shakespeare and constantly reference contemporary America will appear to the vast majority of viewers as being the future of our dear planet. And the future that we see is not computers capable of running a starship replying "working..." when asked a simple database query.

 

[Mudd]

It doesn't matter what tech will be in the 23rd century (I'm guessing a lot of animal labor, among other things...) - it matters what audiences will find plausible and appealiing this year.

Star Trek is intended to depict "our future." There's never been a chance that the next several centuries will go down as a TV show depicts them.

 

[Grayh]

Don't forget in the Star Trek universe the Eugenics wars would have slowed technological progress in the early 1990's, Captain Kirks ancestors never had an iPhone!

 

[KennyB]

Man all this "truth" is making my head hurt.

 

[Grayh]

i agree, Star Trek is far too complicated now! Maybe the TV execs could come up with a new idea

 

[Captain of the USS Averof]

I'm guessing then that Discovery's crew will spend a lot of time using social media because that's what the vast majority of viewers find plausible and appealing. #FutureThatWeSee

 

[aridas sofia]

Plausibility does not necessarily equal surfaces filled with lots of touch panels and/or switches and buttons. That may provide a certain sort of visual interest, but not one that is stylistically in keeping with the original Star Trek, which employed reflected and colored light instead of busy-ness. To be plausible, make it look magic, but to the characters, as ordinary as the transporter did to Kirk and Spock. There are so many ways the exact same design for sets from the 1960s, built with materials suited to HD and 3D presentation, could be made to look mind-blowingly magical.

- Have the buttons shift using "Terminator-esque" liquid metal technology.
- Have all the viewscreens not only be capable of holography, but touch holography.
- The hard, sharp-edged surfaces? Show how they are made of smart materials that soften when suddenly impacted and then instantly re-harden.
- The chairs could float off their pedestals and shape themselves to the person's body.
- Cognitive interfaces.
- Uniforms as soft as velour but tough as canvas and as warm or cool as need be.
Etc etc.

On the surface, it would look the same as 1966, but once you let it work, it would be seen to be something else entirely. The challenge is how to portray this stuff in a dramatic context. Ordinary, functional, magical, pertinent, simple, DISTINCTIVE. Not a rehash of every SF show or movie since Star Wars, but a reimagining of the original Trek within the strict boundaries of the original Trek.

That is what I mean by yet another lost opportunity.

 

[a thousand-yard stare]

Way, w-w-waay back in 2015, while the question was being argued "would there ever be another 'Star Trek' TV show, CBS decided against 'green screen' sets (this method was being proposed to them as a way of cost-cutting ( ?? ) ).
As I understood it, they did not set their face against a halfway house of digitally 'matting in' (or whatever they call it now) the displays and instruments onto rudimentary props.

Whether this is changed, was never entertained as a concept or has indeed gone the way of the Giant Moa, I merely throw it into the discussion to annoy people...

 

[BillJ]

i agree, Star Trek is far too complicated now! Maybe the TV execs could come up with a new idea

I'd honestly like to see the franchise rebooted. There comes a time when things become too cluttered and need to be re-examined.

 

[Myko]

I'd honestly like to see the franchise rebooted. There comes a time when things become too cluttered and need to be re-examined.

Same, and while it looks like in practice we will get that with Discovery, it would be nice if this was a stated goal from the producers.

 

[Jedman67]

Same, and while it looks like in practice we will get that with Discovery, it would be nice if this was a stated goal from the producers.

That's pretty much exactly what was said....

 

[BillJ]

Same, and while it looks like in practice we will get that with Discovery, it would be nice if this was a stated goal from the producers.

Then you would've had the last year with the hard core using social media to run down the show. That ended up being damaging to the Abrams films.

 

[Kemaiku]

Star Wars (and, similarly, Alien and Blade Runner) is the lucky beneficiary of the late 1970s/early 1980s military surplus sci-fi look aging remarkably well. The aesthetics of the '50s, '60s, and late '80s have dated far worse. Even the look of the mid to late '90s are showing their age-- all those boxes filled with LEDs!

I get that Trek fans want the old Trek aesthetic preserved the way Wars has --- it doesn't seem fair, does it? -- but life isn't fair and the older Trek stuff looks kinda dumb.

Scifi has very obvious eras of a particular look.

You have the 20's to 60's rocket ship and metallic apparel with rockets and saucers, huge clunky robots and humans in moustaches as villains.

Sort of a late 50's to late 70's explosion of colourful cowboys in space scifi series rather than serials. Ships took on a very different look with much bigger scale and purpose. Uniforms became all the rage and ray guns got an upate to all sorts of iconic weapons.

Then comes the 80's to early 2000's synth/video/early CGI era which like you said, is as obvious as the two before it, but for some reason just looks and feels the most dated already.

We're in the fourth major era of scifi, the modern HD productions but all of them going for shorter serials with more action again.

 

[Jedman67]

Most of those assets are still owned by CBS, and have already been pulled for Trek projects recently...the Starships Collection for instance, and various DVD menus. Trek has a history of pulling its old assets or even using fan-made assets when it's cheaper and easier to do so (see Relics for a famous example with the bridge set.) Basically...it's been done before, it will be done again if needed.

AFAIK, Star Trek 2009 didn't use any preexisting vfx assets; everything was created new and 'filmed' by ILM (although the R2D2 tossed into the explosion probably wasn't new). Enterprise used very little 'old' material. Even the films from FC and after used mostly new material* (*GEN recycled a lot from earlier vfx libraries).
DSC has the budget to do everything new from scratch, unless they decide to run a nostalgia episode.

 

[KennyB]

There will be merchandise. And we're all going to buy one.

Ohhhhhhhh yes!

 

[Mudd]

AFAIK, Star Trek 2009 didn't use any preexisting vfx assets; everything was created new and 'filmed' by ILM (although the R2D2 tossed into the explosion probably wasn't new). Enterprise used very little 'old' material. Even the films from FC and after used mostly new material* (*GEN recycled a lot from earlier vfx libraries).
DSC has the budget to do everything new from scratch, unless they decide to run a nostalgia episode.

Exactly so.

 

[jaime]

AFAIK, Star Trek 2009 didn't use any preexisting vfx assets; everything was created new and 'filmed' by ILM (although the R2D2 tossed into the explosion probably wasn't new). Enterprise used very little 'old' material. Even the films from FC and after used mostly new material* (*GEN recycled a lot from earlier vfx libraries).
DSC has the budget to do everything new from scratch, unless they decide to run a nostalgia episode.

Neither of those shows could use previous assets...they were set before the recent shows. Even then, ENT does reuse assets, during the future flash segment featuring the enterprise j (which is given a nice explanation in STO) and actually allegedly reused assets from Babylon 5 (under the xindi aquatic ship is the white star mesh apparently.) The Tng movies also had no cause to reuse assets after the battle in FC, but their stuff was then available for use over on the TV shows (refugees from FC battle end up in the Dominion war shots, I am not sure if Voyager reused anything for things like endgame.)

 

[jaime]

Don't forget in the Star Trek universe the Eugenics wars would have slowed technological progress in the early 1990's, Captain Kirks ancestors never had an iPhone!

Even if they had, you have to throw in WWIII, the post atomic horror, and take into account that maybe they just don't make Tech the way we do anymore for various environmental reasons. For all we know, PADDs are made out of paper. (Colour e ink is still mostly not a thing) . Then throw in something looking less advanced than it really is (you can get wood panelled laptops.) and data compression, throw in the vast interstellar distances information is travelling over, throw in the idea that stuff on ship is also basically a rugged version for daily use and shouldn't be compared to consumer tech, and suddenly, Trek Tech is not dated at all. All we had to do is think about it.