To be fair, it was only around a long time because the producers of TNG were cheap and didn't build new filming models contemporaneous with the Enterprise-D, choosing instead to reuse the movie models despite them being outdated by TNG's time.
To be fair, it was only around a long time because the producers of TNG were cheap and didn't build new filming models contemporaneous with the Enterprise-D, choosing instead to reuse the movie models despite them being outdated by TNG's time.
The refit Enterprise was the same ship that was captained by April, Pike, Kirk, Spock, and Kirk again, though briefly. She may have been an "almost entirely new Enterprise," but a great deal of her was the ship that is, indeed, the central character in Star Trek.
Sadly, because of a feud between Gene Roddenberry and producer Harve Bennett, the latter decided the Enterprise "had" to be destroyed for the sake of "drama" in The Search For Spock's second act. (Read The Fifty-Year Mission for more).
This remains one of the greatest mistakes in Trek and pop culture history. Eliminating the Enterprise with the mentality that "ah, we'll just get them another one" betrayed the love that Kirk and his crew (and by extension, the viewer) had for the ship. (
Imagine if the Enterprise, which was forty years old (not twenty as stated in TSFS) had survived Khan, was headed for decommissioning, and then survived the destruction of Genesis, took Spock home to be reborn, and then was herself reborn after surviving the events of TVH? Imagine if she'd been pulled from San Francisco Bay and given a loving restoration (a new paint job and bridge would have been enough to sell it) and got to continue on with her crew after their exoneration and fresh start? Instead, she was destroyed by a petty man who had an axe to grind with another petty man and science fiction was robbed of its greatest space vessel.
The same goes for the Enterprise-E. It's not only one of the worst designs in Trek and science fiction history, but the film that introduced established the notion that these mighty ships aren't the central characters of these stories, they're just disposable machines that can be replaced virtually overnight.
The Enterprise-D wasn't treated with any sentimentality either. I think the one character to speak of her in any terms other than sheer utility was probably Bones of all people.
Yeah, I always thought of the sentimental attachment to the Enterprise as more of a Kirk thing than a Picard thing. After all, Picard served on the Stargazer for 22 years and the E-D less than 8 years. Whereas Kirk, we now know, got to know the Enterprise pretty well years before he became its captain.
I understand the sentiment. As much as I like the refit for me it doesn't have the same vibe as the TOS E. As others have stated a lot of that has to do with how much, or how little, time we spent with it. We never had enough time to become as familiar with it though many hours of televised episodes and reruns.
Until Picard season 3, of course. All of the main characters displayed quite a bit of sentimentality for the Enterprise-D there. In TNG, however, Picard even admitted to Scotty that his real love was the Stargazer.
Certainly with the Enterprise E. One of the many things I didn't like about Nemesis. I suppose it didn't matter, since it ended up being the last movie, but still.
I don't like the overall design of the ship, the bridge is my least favorite bridge of any hero ship on any Trek series, and the engineering set looks cartoonishly bad to me.
For me, the Enterprise was always a cast member- one of the most important ones. I feel like Trek lost something important when they began destroying the ship on a regular basis for cheap 'dramatic' effect. Of course, they didn't even realize that when it becomes a common trope, it ceases to have any audience impact at all.
To be fair, I don't think the destruction of the E-D in Generations was done purely for dramatic effect, but so that they could be free to build new sets better suited to the needs of feature films going forward, rather than keep using the sets made for the TV series.
That one I agreed with. Just as TOS got the refit, the TNG needed something new for the films. In my humble opinion. I know not everyone liked it.
That is fair, but the same thing could have been accomplished without destroying the D. A D-refit would have worked just as well as the TMP refit, unless they wanted a completely different exterior look for the ship. New bridge module, revamped sickbay, whatever.
Honestly, I like the Sovereign class design much better than the bloated, top-heavy Galaxy class.
I hated the look of the Galaxy class from the get-go, but that was the ship we got. I'll bet some talented artist could have drawn up a refit Galaxy that looked better than both the original and the Sovereign. Honestly, I thought Excelsior looked like an abortion from the get-go, too.
Everyone has a budget they have to contend with.
In universe, it gave a sense of history.
I agree. I liked seeing the Miranda, Excelsior, and Ambassador class ships in TNG. I understood it was a budget thing, but it added some realism. Even assuming a completely different societal attitude towards wealth and resources, it's hard to image the logistics of building giant ships only intended to serve for a few decades.
That's a perfectly valid way to look at it. However, I tend to look at it a bit different. The example I usually use is that for being on a shoestring budget, classic Doctor Who never once reused a filming model or stock footage of such. They always built new models for whatever episode they were filming that needed one. So if cheap-ass Dr. Who could do it, Paramount could do it.
As for the sense of history, I tend to still side with Probert that by 70 years after the TMP films, Starfleet should be using much more advanced ships than the ones from the 2280's.
The example I usually use is that for being on a shoestring budget, classic Doctor Who never once reused a filming model or stock footage of such. They always built new models for whatever episode they were filming that needed one. So if cheap-ass Dr. Who could do it, Paramount could do it.
Would those models hold up next to the Enterprise?
I'm not saying that every guest starship needed to be as large and as detailed as the Ent-D, but the TNG alien-of-the-week ships absolutely equated to the models built during the Tom Baker-through-Sylvester McCoy era.
I agree that's a pretty solid number for service life, but I assume there would be some holdovers.
Thinking of military aircraft, most workhorse attack/fighter aircraft are platforms that have been in service 40 to 50 years, and are still in production. Updated, certainly, but still that platform. Others have come and gone, but the good ones prove useful for a long time.
If that applies to jets, I'd assume a good starship design could be expected to serve a century, with periodic updates. Apples to oranges, maybe, but it's how I frame it in my mind.
