...Star Trek on the other hand has consistently been the future of our world, even altering its own past to fit when advancing reality overwrites its speculation. It is the 'vision of the future', our future.
I disagree. Trek is a vision of
a future, but it's never been
our future. That much was obvious as far back as TOS's "Assignment: Earth." I've never thought otherwise, nor even been tempted to.
If Trek doesn't move with the times it just becomes a show about what the 60s thought the future would be like. I'm not saying you couldn't have a show like that, but it wouldn't be Star Trek.
Except yes, it would be, because that's precisely what Star Trek
is and always has been. Its very foundation, the soil from which it grows, is an optimistic 1960s vision of the future. To try to tear it up by the roots and transplant it into today's fundamentally, socially and technologically
different sense of the future (which will doubtless still be wrong, of course) is to turn it into something substantively different. Indeed it's also to give up on the very
possibility of any coherent future history in the Trek universe, as it would need to be constantly retconning itself, endlessly chasing its own tail, just like certain comic-book universes. That's nothing but a recipe for frustration.
[Khan] wasn't in Future's End either - Trek happily rewrites its past to stay in our universe. Undoubtedly once we pass the 2060s without Vulcans, a future Trek series will retcon that.
"Future's End" was a godawful story (par for the course with VOY) with absymally contradictory time-travel logic, but there's no reason to suppose it "rewrote" anything about Trek's past. The Eugenics Wars were still in the 1990s. From everything we know about them, though, there's no reason we should have expected them to impact southern California, so there's really no contradiction there.
There's nothing to be "familiar with" because there is no such thing as a "23rd century aesthetic." ... [and] this is not the first time John Eaves has had to develop starship designs for the 23rd century, seeing how he was already involved with the modifications to the Enterprise-B. So again, we've entered the era of the John Eaves style of starship design. You could say you don't like John Eaves' style -- which is fine, lots of people don't -- but don't pretend like you actually know how 23rd century starships SHOULD look.
Of course there's a 23rd-century aesthetic. If we're talking about real-life designers, then it was designed by Matt Jefferies (both for TOS and for Phase II), and everyone who came after was just playing variations on his themes. If we're talking about the look of things in-universe (as I was), we know what it looks like because we've
seen it.
(And not just in TOS itself. It's not hard to recapture. For example: pick up a copy of the first
ST: Vanguard novel and take a look at the titular space station, both the cover art and the fold-out diagram. (Or just look
here and
here.) It captures the aesthetic of that period beautifully, while still being plausible in terms of both design and functionality for the story being told.)
Edited to add: as for Eaves, as I've said before: no, I don't like his style. In a word, it's over-designed. (And the
Ent-B is very much at the tail end of the lineage of 23rd-century ships, and out of keeping with them design-wise, as was IMHO pretty much intended from the moment the design was first introduced as the
Excelsior.)
And I'm saying the reason this is obvious for the Discovery Enterprise is because the original design is a pre-ASO design where the normal definitions of what made a detailed, realistic spacecraft design were tremendously different (and that's not even accounting for the three-legged half-dead piggybank that was Desilu's effects budget). They updated the design for Discovery for exactly the same reason they updated it for Phase-II/TMP.
To repeat what's already been mentioned many times in these threads... first, TOS actually had a very substantial budget for its time, especially in its first season, and it received Emmy nominations for its visual effects every year it was on the air. Second,
designs and the
effects used to realize them are not the same thing.
Take another look at that
Vanguard art. There's nothing about it, station or ships, that looks in any way un-detailed, un-realistic, or un-futuristic.
...you evidently don't know enough about the design of a Star Destroyer to notice all the things they changed in "Rogue One" and just assumed it was identical to the original version. In fact, you don't seem to know enough about Star Wars lore to recognize when the hero ship from one of its TV properties shows up in a cameo with a completely redone surface mesh. So, odds are pretty good that you would be equally agnostic about the new Enterprise design if you weren't deeply enamored with the TOS design.
I'll cop to that. I'm not particularly a Star Wars fan, and never have been. I didn't even know Star Wars
had a TV property on the air. (The latest movie blew my suspension of disbelief in the first ten minutes when it had ships dropping gravity bombs
in space, and then
sinking when they were shot!... and for all that it was still better than most other SW films.) I'm here talking about Star Trek designs because I
am a fan of Trek, and I care about this stuff.
And, what of it? I'm not the one who said the SW design changes weren't noticeable, you were! Anyhow, there is a clear and important difference between doing a new surface mesh for a ship (again, that's a matter of effects) and changing its actual
design.
