USS Enterprise (eventually) on Discovery?

He didn't miss. He had a different vision based upon the story he wanted to tell. DSC's team had another.

I have no doubt that people will prefer one over the other but I still like them equally, for different reasons.

 

It reminds me a lot of the Judgement Rites/25th Anniversary PC game bridge, especially the displays on the perimeter consoles.

 

Absolutely.

I think that ENT's fourth season is an excellent template for what Star Trek could be: individual stories but which can take up several episodes to properly develop their plots and characters.

 

This.

ENT really hit its stride around the third season. There were a few clunkers, sure, but overall, very good. For DISCO next season, slowing things down just a bit and focusing a few more stories on more crew members, would be a good direction.

Also, less crying please. Everything seems to be moving so fast, it's hard to process it and then seeing a character crying... I don't' quite have that attachment or feelings for it.

 

In "The Apple" (TOS), Kirk orders Scotty: "Tie every ounce of power the ship has into the impulse engines. Discard the warp drive nacelles if you have to, and crack out of there with the main section, but get that ship out of there!"

(That "main section" referred to the saucer can be observed from its description in the writers' guide: "...the ship's main saucer-like section...the portion of the ship in which we will be and which we will use most...contains at the very top the ship's bridge and general operation facilities...also primary ship's departments, living accommodations, recreational facilities, laboratories, and is in fact a completely self-sustaining unit which can detach itself from the galaxy drive units and operate on atomic impulse power for short-range solar system exploration...")

We get another order to "disengage nacelles; jettison if possible" (no saucer sep mentioned this time) in "The Savage Curtain" (TOS).

FWIW, there's also this graphic from "Day Of The Dove" (TOS):



Throughout TOS and TAS, on the internal side, we see engineering modified in its layout, with large chunks of machinery apparently being added and removed, etc. Then in the movie and TNG era we see ships that separate in various ways (TMP warp sled, Enterprise-D saucer sep, Enterprise-E captain's yacht [formerly a torpedo launcher!], Prometheus multi-vector assault mode), ships within the same class seeming to have external components swapped in or out (various Nebula aft pods, Miranda rollbar and mega-cannnnnon thingies, AGT Enterprise-D) and ships that seem to be cobbled together from components of different design lineages and scales (DS9 'Frankenstein fleet' kitbashes).

The runabouts on DS9 were always meant to be modular, too, beyond just the rollbar component we saw:



And of course, while not necessarily applicable to the Prime setting, there's always...






What do you suppose would have happened if the Enterprise's saucer had somehow made it back to Yorktown alone without the secondary hull and nacelles, or vice versa, or another permutation of the preceding constituents? Scrap or rebuild? Could probably go either way, depending on the circumstances.

The Enterprise has been known to get into a scrape or two, after all...

-MMoM

 

So much happier with what the Discovery production designers came up with haha

 

And leave poor Burnham alone. Every piece of her life has been pretty hard on her. Give some drama to other characters!

 

Both are good; surprisingly, the fan artist's incorporates fewer "get a load of this, trekkies!" callbacks to TOS than the STD version. That's got to be a first.

 

One of the various scripts for TMP had the Enterprise being seriously damaged by V'ger and needing to do a separation. Here is Andy Probert's artwork for the scene:



Also, I don't recall having seen this particular Mike Minor Phase II bridge artwork image posted here before:



And....this is a pretty neat shot:

 

That drydock backdrop painting was COLOSSAL. It almost boggles the mind.

 

I like this little tidbit. She really did care about getting some parts of the design right.

 

While I don't think the Discovery team did a bad job (though there are elements I would definitely change), I like the fan version better.

 

The fanart is nice and clean, but it's also "get a load of this, modern audience!" with its big open spaces and generic modern sci-fi look. Ultimately it's bland. Part of why the TOS bridge stands out is that it has character, and part of that is the size. In that article, the DSC designer mentions that the size of the DSC set is approximately the same as the TOS set, excepting the outer hallway etc.

And yet the DSC Big E bridge certainly feels bigger and emptier (though not nearly as big and empty as that fanart bridge or the Discovery bridge), with the perimeter stations seeming far enough away that the captain wouldn't be able to read the overhead screens, which was part of the whole concept: being a utilitarian space for the captain specifically and the command crew generally, which is why it's been copied by real militaries since then. The big open spaces are definitely a feature in modern sci-fi, easier for camera setups and all that jazz, but they no longer look like places that people work together, more like places people shout to each other.

*edited to add* These are observations, not judgments. I get it, it's more cinematic to be bigger.

 

I like this bridge photo from that article. It really feels like the classic Enterprise bridge while at the same time being a modern version of it.

 

That looks great. "Flatter", "less dramatic" lighting with colorful areas makes it look more "classic". But most of all, getting more people in the frame really helps!

 

That‘s exactly what I thought!

 

Nice shot!

 

I've seen this one before. I really wonder what the radar-like circular thing would've looked like on screen.

 

the BTS info makes it sound like the inner area of the bridge is still roughly the same size as the original set.

 

Yes, they said that. Maybe it's lenses or shot angles, but it certainly looked in TOS like Kirk could reach out while standing in the pit and touch the people working the perimeter while in DSC it looks like there's no way in heck that could happen. It looks like an awful lot of floor space between the outer stations and the railing, but maybe that's just because the floor is so reflective, trick of the eye and all that.