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Starship design history in light of Discovery

Tuskin38 said:
It’s because of behind the scenes drama. The original show runner wanted everything to be more distinct. He wanted the Klingons to be a lot more alien, and told the Klingon ship designers to ignore all previous Klingon designs.

For the Federation ships, he mandated no round nacelles, and to use flat profiles. We have no idea why, it’s just what he requested of the designers.

It was too late in production when he left for them to re-design everything so they just kept them, and started somewhat fixing things with season 2 instead. Which is why we got a D7 that actually looks like a D7
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Was that show runner Bryan Fuller then?

Weird, I wonder what his issues where? I never understand - and the goes back to both Enterprise and the first 2 Kelvinverse movies - when somebody says "I want to make a new Star Trek...but I don't want it to be too...you know...Star Trek-y."

Fine, then make something else!
 
Well, to me, ENT seemed very little like a prequel to TOS and much more like Voyager, just with a different ship and a different crew. The different time period seemed irrelevant, as the production values were exactly the same. Nothing in ENT felt in any way “primitive,” as Spock described the era in Balance of Terror.
 
bryce said:
Was that show runner Bryan Fuller then?
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Tuskin38 said:
Yes he was the original show runner and creator
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IIRC, Nick Meyer and Rod Roddenberry were also initially involved, but I think that changed pretty early on. If they stayed and asserted themselves in the project, we may have had a more cohesive series of design decisions than what we got. I was never a big fan of a lot of Fuller's choices, particularly when it came to Klingon design and starship design (for both SF and Klingons). Change for the sake of change without serving the plot in any meaningful way (which is all it really seemed to be) is problematic from square-zero, leading the show runners to try to ret-ret-con everything come season 2, which was an occasional needless distraction.
 
137th Gebirg said:
IIRC, Nick Meyer and Rod Roddenberry were also initially involved, but I think that changed pretty early on. If they stayed and asserted themselves in the project, we may have had a more cohesive series of design decisions than what we got. I was never a big fan of a lot of Fuller's choices, particularly when it came to Klingon design and starship design (for both SF and Klingons). Change for the sake of change without serving the plot in any meaningful way (which is all it really seemed to be) is problematic from square-zero, leading the show runners to try to ret-ret-con everything come season 2, which was an occasional needless distraction.
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I can sort of understand the necessity of changing the Klingon look so drastically in order to hide the fact that one actor was playing dual roles, but the ship designs were just over the top.
 
Tuskin38 said:
told the Klingon ship designers to ignore all previous Klingon designs.
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I don't if fully ignoring was the best choice, but I love the diversity of the design.
Tuskin38 said:
For the Federation ships, he mandated no round nacelles, and to use flat profiles. We have no idea why, it’s just what he requested of the designers.
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I am less a fan of that but can get onboard with many of the ship designs.

Variety is the spice of life.
 
Which I guess would have been fine if the stories made something out of that over-the-topness. Yeah, we did learn that these multiple Houses are competing there, but the Byzantine spectrum of ships could have been used to better portray the Byzantine structure of the Klingon society - with a voice of reason ultimately perhaps emerging and introducing a duller look. Instead, we never even got as much as a direct association between a given ship design and a given House.

Quite the pity: the best-looking and best-fighting of the bunch, the regal Qogh, could easily have been declared a House of Kor design, and with that House falling hard, the design could then disappear and give way to those fairly conventional two-nacellers from House X. And then to their successor the D7, not (yet!) covered in proud Household greeblies...

Timo Saloniemi
 
Dukhat said:
I can sort of understand the necessity of changing the Klingon look so drastically in order to hide the fact that one actor was playing dual roles, but the ship designs were just over the top.
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Agreed, particularly the Daspu class - roughly translated to "The Great Dildo of Kahless".
 
One does not question complimentary shots of Fireball at about 1 in the morning.

And it helps I also had lots of hard cider and food beforehand. I was drunk...but not blind drunk and about to black out.
 
In a way it makes sense. The round nacelle idea isn’t built on much from the TOS era. Even in Enterprise there was a variety of nacelle designs.

Since TOS, the refit has squared nacelles. The Excelsior has squared nacelles. The Oberth has nacelles that are squared and built into the primary hull.

In a post-scarcity universe it would make total sense for there to be more than one type of warp system, starship designers, and building contractors.

As for the Klingon ships, they kind of messed with my head canon that “D7” was just a Starfleet design for a ship type or class that transferred from design to design. But I still kind of hold on to it, too.
 
gerbil said:
In a way it makes sense. The round nacelle idea isn’t built on much from the TOS era. Even in Enterprise there was a variety of nacelle designs.

Since TOS, the refit has squared nacelles. The Excelsior has squared nacelles. The Oberth has nacelles that are squared and built into the primary hull.

In a post-scarcity universe it would make total sense for there to be more than one type of warp system, starship designers, and building contractors.
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The round nacelle idea probably started when the TOS producers glued AMT nacelles on the Tholian ship to make the Aurora model for "The Way to Eden", with the TAS essentially doing similar with the cargo ships in "More Tribbles". However, I think a big influence was probably the Franz Joseph Technical Manual, which just swapped parts around because at it's heart it was intended to let fans make new ships from the existing AMT kit with minimum scratchbuilding.

A lot of the new ships in the era of physical models reused parts of existing ships, presumably because it was more cost effective for the productions to use existing assets (molds and commercially available model kits), once the ships went CGI, almost every ship had custom nacelles and the idea of consistent designs for a particular era kind of went out the window. Except, ironically, for ST2009 which applied the technical manual ethos to the ships of the Vulcan rescue fleet.
 
TNG seemed to have a common nacelle design, but when you get to the movies/DS9, then they start getting unique designs on every new class.
 
Hmm? TNG only had one starship. That, and the three different nacelles inherited from the TOS movies - Oberth, Excelsior and Miranda. And then a fourth added with the E-C.

Unless you count the "BoBW" kitbashes, but those had at least two distinct nacelle designs - the marker pens in addition to the E-D kit bits.

Basically, we could argue each nacelle design is specific to a decade, or to a registry range. Or then we could say Starfleet always chooses at least two suppliers for a given time.

Timo Saloniemi
 
Timo said:
Hmm? TNG only had one starship. That, and the three different nacelles inherited from the TOS movies - Oberth, Excelsior and Miranda. And then a fourth added with the E-C.
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There’s also the Nebula class, but I guess it did start as a BoBW kitbash as well, before becoming a 1701-D 4-foot model mold kitbash.
 
drt said:
The round nacelle idea probably started when the TOS producers glued AMT nacelles on the Tholian ship to make the Aurora model for "The Way to Eden", with the TAS essentially doing similar with the cargo ships in "More Tribbles". However, I think a big influence was probably the Franz Joseph Technical Manual, which just swapped parts around because at it's heart it was intended to let fans make new ships from the existing AMT kit with minimum scratchbuilding.
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And don’t forget that the TOS shuttlecraft has nacelles too, which even now are debatable as to whether they were warp-capable. Nevertheless, they were the exact same design as a Constitution class ship’s (and weren’t the sole property of the Enterprise either, with craft assigned to starbases and deep space stations.)

So it’s not just a matter of the Constitution class ships having round nacelles only in TOS.
 
Here's a shot of the Tug in eaglemoss form
https://twitter.com/BenCSRobinson/status/1200499467105001472

USS Zimmerman is the name Eaglemoss assigned it (with CBS approval) The show model didn't have a name.
I'm guessing this bit

8qOv60v.png


Is this bit here
m4uwSPy.png
 
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Tuskin38 said:
Here's a shot of the Tug in eaglemoss form
https://twitter.com/BenCSRobinson/status/1200499467105001472

USS Zimmerman is the name Eaglemoss assigned it (with CBS approval) The show model didn't have a name.
I'm guessing this bit

8qOv60v.png


Is this bit here
m4uwSPy.png
Click to expand...

From that comparison, I can start seeing the resemblance. Amazed that I could see the Ptolemy so clearly at first. I guess I wanted it to be closer than it really is, but should have known they wouldn't pay royalties for it.
 
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