so the producers and writers said that discovery will lead into TOS (60's aesthetics and all)...

But Beyond is the good one

 

It's a joke...I do that.

 

Ok. But the other two are better.

 

OMG! Logic! In this thread? We don’t need that kind of filth here!

 

Ship interiors and uniforms can be upgraded.

 

Uniforms can also change. Just read upon US Naval enlisted uniforms which have undergone a significant shift in the past ten years.

 

Trek 2009 is two films?

 

It explains why the ENTERPRISE looks different. It doesn't explain why Epsilon 9, Starfleet HQ or the orbital office complex look so different, let alone the fact that the Enterprise now has multiple small airlock hatches designed to fit a shuttlecraft design we'd never seen before, and the fact that the old shuttlecraft from just three years earlier is no longer in use anywhere in the fleet.

The "refit and redesign" isn't supposed to really explain the stylistic changes, it's mainly just a plot device to represent how completely out of his element Kirk initially is until he admits that he isn't omniscient and needs to rely on his crew to fill in the gaps in his knowledge.

 

That's all we were MEANT to expect. Even the producers basically said as much, and in their case they put a much greater emphasis on characters than story.

 

Because we never saw Epsilon 9 or Starfleet HQ before...? And depending on which representation of TOS you watch, TOS R showed that Starfleet had several different designs for it's space stations. Then again I don't remember any episode of TOS where they visited Epsilon 9 or the orbital HQ. And going back to what I said before, Depending on which version of TMP you watch, in the Director's Edition you see a classic TOS shuttle taking off from the tram station when Kirk arrives. Also if you consider TAS Canon, They showed the Enterprise having a slew of multiple shuttle designs with different uses. Who's to say TOS or TMP didn't?

I don't see why it cannot be both. And I think that's up to the audience to decide for their own interpretation. It's how I explain away the stylistic designs. You may not see it that way but that's my interpretation.

 

So that "explanation" completely falls apart; being set two years after TOS doesn't explain the style changes because theoretically every place we DIDN'T see was already using those styles and thus it has nothing to do with the refit.

Of course, it doesn't explain the shuttlecraft designs with their matching docking ports, the space suits, the phaser props, or the sudden change in the appearance of the Klingons, their uniforms, and the designs of their ships.

It CAN be anything you want it to be. The point is it's not MEANT to be both, and never was.

Which brings us back to the original point: Rodenberry made sweeping changes to the style and technology of the Star Trek universe when TMP finally gave him the budget to do something with staying power. It was NEVER supposed to be any sort of logical progression from what we seen in TOS, mainly because Rodenberry himself wasn't in charge of those technical designs and most of the work he directly supervised for Phase II was shelved by the time the Motion Picture officially became a thing. The majority of the changes made to the Enterprise by Andrew Probert and the set designs for the bridge, transporter room and engineering were meant to add surface detail and lighting effects that wouldn't look tacky on large motion picture screens; the changes were, in other words, necessary from a production standpoint, not a conscious choice that was EVER supposed to make sense in-universe.

And this is exactly what is happening with Discovery. Like TMP before it, the design "changes" if you can even call them that are meant to provide something that looks good on screen and appeals visually to viewers in a way that doesn't look tacky or cheap.

If Discovery's set designs don't look like they fit into the TOS aesthetic, it is, if anything, because they are TOO GOOD.

 

No. But STID is.

 

How does it fall flat? I don't have a problem with the orbital office or Epsilon 9. For all I know, they always looked like that. What's your point about those two places? Phasers, get upgraded, So do space suits and other tech. And I was never bothered by the Klingons anyway. The more alien they look the better.

You can make something that looks good without sacrificing all the details that make the design what it is.I'm sure there are talented artists out there that can take TOS set designs, and give them some twieks to make them look better and modern without completely changing how they look. Discovery's problem isn't that it looks too good, The problem is, It doesn't look like the Era it's supposed to be set in. And I'm not saying the production designers should have gone to a local UPS and made their sets out of cardboard. I was just hoping things would look like TOS without looking cheap. If Dr. Who can remake old dated sets and make them look good and modern, I don't see why Star Trek can't do the same without making it look like something completely different.

 

Because "It was always this way, we just didn't see it" and "It changed because it was two years later" are contradictory premises. The latter would render the discussion about Discovery's changes completely meaningless, and the former is both hard to justify AND fails to explain the non-Starfleet changes.

Yes, and the TMP Enterprise is the perfect example of that. "The details that make the design what it is" were not changed at all, and more details were added to it while others were totally changed.

 

I was talking about the Enterprise. Not the world outside of it.

The Enterprise wasn't changed that drastically. To me it feels like it was feasibly upgraded with newer tech over the course of 2 years. I don't have a problem with how TMP looks in relation to TOS.

 

We haven't seen the Enterprise or any Constitution-Class ship yet on Discovery, so until we do (if we ever do) we can't know how it would compare to the TOS version.

 

So it's option B, then... but since neither the Shenzhou or Discovery are the Enterprise, what's the point again?

Yes, it really was. The proportions of the ship, the hull shape, the outline of the hull, the placement of the windows, all were changed. TMP enterprise has the same general shape as the TOS ship, but beyond that they have almost nothing else in common.

I don't have a problem with it either. I just pretend the Enterprise ALWAYS looked like that, and then I relax and enjoy it.

 

It's barely one.

 

The classic TOS ship is still the better of the two. I don't care how much better the set props and interfaces look.