I like the surface treatment in the "test footage" better than that of the final design as we've seen glimpses of it in promotional images so far.
John Eaves just posted his directive on his Facebook page, in response to angry comments on this photo: Ok angry people, just suppose you work in the trek art department. Your boss says we want a new ship based on the McQuarrie-Adams designs from the 70's and we want to see long non circular nacelles on it.. ok then what would you do? Looks to me like he did exactly what he was told.
The ship is growing on me. I still wish it retained the trench in the saucer instead of those gaps, but otherwise it's a lovely design.
So that's where the missing sections of the primary hull went; to lengthen the nacelles. Makes perfect sense.
Why duck when your statement is 100% accurate....[Dons Flameproof suit]. [I am serious though as I've NEVER like the 1980ies modern art disaster\piece that was/is the Galaxy Class. YMMV.]
Oh that is lovely. And yes, the Galaxy is a fugly design. Its top heavy, has too many windows and only looks good at set angles.
The model looks like a decent representation of what we suspected the final design will look like. Although it still has the more bronze/golden look from the first trailers instead of the more blue-ish/grey look it now has. That doesn't change the fact that: 1) It is sad our first, official look at the finished design (not a concept art) that we have of the main ship of our new series comes from a toy, and not some official images or promos... 2) It's still an f-ugly design. That means the desingers didn't do their job properly. Even it it's not the designers fault. The problem of the DIS-design is neither the long nacelles, nor the Quarrie-design. It's that those don't fit together. The first draft was an overly brutalistic approach, with thick lines and thick nacelles. That was not the best design, but at least it was coherent. Then they added the thin cut-outs and the super filigrane nacelles. But they added those without adapting the rest of the ship. If they suddenly wanted "thin", "graceful", then they should have massively redesigned the original shape of the ship. A more pointy delta-wing for example, not those super-thick, brute connections to the tiny nacelles. Bigger, more pronounced cut-outs, instead of those super-small, narrow cut-outs with a brute, thick neck-connection. This whole, overall design is a mess of different aesthetics. I suspect the reason is that it didn't start out on paper, but instead someone created an original CGI-model, and then they started fiddling with it. This doesn't mean the art department didn't do their best, and commited valuable man-hours in it. But in this case, it probably would have been much better to give these notes ("Adams-design with long nacelles") to ONE designer to come up with a coherent design on paper, and then built that into a new CG-model from scratch, instead of trying to salvage a clearly failed attempt. The Shenzhou is not the most unique designed starship. But it has one, single desing-language, and all the parts fit together, which makes it a successfull design. The final result of the Discovery is a kit-bash of the different design-stages the ship went through. Not a coherent design. Which makes this another major missstep of Fuller, after his directive to completely re-design the klingons without hair and robbing them all of their Trek history and design lineage. And his questionable idea to use his one-season-prequel-arc of his anthology idea for a full series. Major props for him though for making it prime (hopefully...), and his casting choices.
i think it's pretty bronze-y but agreed that it's frustrating our best look at the ship is basically accidental. i think you might be jumping the gun on judging the discovery as fugly tho. i definitely think shenzhou is a more attractive design from what we've seen, but we've seen so little of the discovery it's hard to make that call. in any case, this might just be shock. i was not into the kelvin timeline enterprise when they first released photos of it. in fact nobody really liked it because of those huge hot rod nacelles (again, the nacelles). but seeing the ship in action sort of mitigated that for a lot of people, myself included. now most people are cool with the design and were a little jarred by the redesign in star trek beyond. i appreciate that in that case and in the case of discovery they're taking a risk and trying to do something different. we'll see, i guess.
Why is a Star Trek ship model collection "Fully approved by DC comics"? Me thinks they copypasted a template for something else and didn't finish updating it.