Uhm. ALL the flat panel displays were a mix of touch screen and physical buttons...
Seriously, where are the Klingons??
- Thread starter Roald
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I don’t recall anyone in Enterprise using any of those screens as touch screens. Maybe the PADDs. Even T’Pol’s more advanced Vulcan tricorder had buttons.
The designer of the ship would disagree with you. He put those details in there to make the ship look less advanced than the TOS Connie. He worked backwards from the TOS Connie and Matt Jefferies thought process for designing it.
Clearly visible hull panelling with rivets and all that. Exposed technology on the surface of the ship, Instead being smoothed out and mostly confined within the ship itself like in TOS.
The smooth exterior of the TOS Connie wasn’t because of budget, it was because of Matt Jefferies thoughts on how starships would work in the future, nearly everything you’d work on would be on the inside of the ship, no need to go out on space walks all the time to access the technology to work on it.
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i can’t cite a precise example, but those screens only had something like 6 buttons, hardly enough to input anything meaningful.
The TOS tricorder had only three control knobs, but they were able to do plenty with those.
which is why I totally support the idea they had some other kind of input as well, one that is not obvious to our eyes.
Or maybe we just shouldn't take TV production design too literally as a representation of future technology. It's more impressionistic than precise.
Where exactly is the touch screen? The Connie in Discovery had touchscreens, and is divergent from the continuity set in TOS & The Cage, likely a refit after The Cage and has those updates removed when Kirk took command. The Connie in ENT had buttons and follows continuity set by TOS & The Cage, since its set in proximity to "The Tholian Web".
Continuity is about story and characters, not set and prop design. The makers of TOS would've gladly put in touchscreens if they'd had the budget. Heck, those clipboards that the yeomen kept handing to Kirk were meant to be touchscreens, essentially -- electronic tablets written on with a stylus, approximated using a simple electrostatic sheet like the "Magic Slate" toy.
The makers of TOS did not want us to believe that 23rd-century technology looked like 1960s technology. They wanted us to use our imaginations to go beyond the limitations of what they could achieve and imagine something that was even more futuristic. They would be glad to see that later productions have come closer to achieving for real what they could only roughly suggest.
I’m not saying that; I’ve see fan remakes of the TOS bridge with the TOS cast updated to today using CGI and its awe inspiring. But I was asking where the touch screen was on the Connie in IAMD. It would be nice to verify that that is in fact true.
Well I should have said screen saver. When tpol was at the science station one of the winky blinky panels turned into a viewer. Just like on nx o1 where their winky blinky panels had other functions.. I'm assuming that it had all the same functions of the panel screens on nx 01. At any rate it was a nice uodate in functionality that we never saw on TOS. Most of those panels were just static lights and were never shown in use.
Awe inspiring?
How would you describe it?
Better. But, I recall when that was done and it is impressive in terms of what they did, and showcased the potential within the TOS set. "Awe" is not quite a word I would use, but then I am highly selective with that word
They literally had little paintings to represent computer display screens on TOS.
Every time we saw them huddle around a display on the screens housed on the table at the back of the bridge, for instance.
Because he was using those visual shorthands to communicate the idea of the NX-01 being less-advanced. But those shorthands are just that -- shorthands. It's the production design equivalent of how a soft-focus slow-mo close-up of a character smiling while music plays is a visual shorthand for "falling in love;" in real life, that's not what falling in love looks like, but it's a television convention to communicate the idea quickly that audiences have been conditioned to accept.
Same principle is at play in the design of the NX-01: Doug Drexler intended the the audience would interpret aztecing and rust-colored livery would be understood by the audience to indicate that the NX-01 is less advanced than the 1701. But those are just visual shorthands -- it's not like he there was any way to visually represent how much more advanced the programming language of the 1701's computers were than the programming language of the NX-01's computers. The use of rust-colored livery is particularly unrelated to real-life questions of advancement: It's based on the audience having been conditioned to associate rust-colored metals with 19th Century technology.
Yeah, but then we get visible hull paneling on the Enterprise-E that's supposed to be two hundred years more advanced than the NX-01. And neither of these examples really tells us anything about the sophistication of the computer programming or the warp corp or what-have-you. It just relies on the assumption that the audience will hopefully associate visible hull paneling with the idea of "less advanced" in the example of the NX-01 -- after having previously hoped the audience would react the opposite way to the visual hull paneling of the 1701-E.
Yes yes yes. And either way, this tells us nothing about how "advanced" or "unadvanced" a ship is, it just tells us about Matt Jeffries's hope that a ship could be designed in such a way as to avoid the need for extravehicular activity.
Like I said in another thread, I'd rather them be vague about the Klingons, Dominion, etc. in the 32nd century. Maybe say they joined the UFP at some point (it would be consistent with the Azati Prime timeline), but not how. Let PIC or 25th-26th series deal with them. Romulans/Vulcans worked because there was an expectation unification would happen.
No two starship classes have had the same kind of aztecing, but the fact remains that visible hull paneling has occurred in ships that were supposed to be more advanced than the 1701 and in ships that were supposed to be less advanced than the 1701. Visible hull paneling is just a form of visual shorthand, but it has been used as shorthand for opposite assumptions.
But does that matter? A lot of people here are of the mentality that adherance to canon is far less important than telling a good story. That may be true, but that logic would have to work both ways, and the Affliction storyline was worth doing.
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