While I disagree with Mycroft Maxwell's comment about Mr Eaves going senile - a designer can only really design what the people he's designing for want after all - I must concur with a lot of his commentary, harshly toned as it is.
Watching the extras for TWOK it struck me that there was a gentleman in charge of making sure things "looked like Trek" to a degree, that the technology is consistent.
Although it became the standard for movies III-VI and all pre-TNG flashbacks, TWoK's look was a huge departure for Trek at the time. From the colourful pajamas and bright Enterprise of TOS, everyone suddenly wore red military dress uniforms covered in decorations and pins. Photon torpedoes went from being matter/antimatter energy balls (as described in detail in
The Making of Star Trek) to physical missiles which needed to be manually loaded by a team of people (compare this with the shower in TMP, which beamed clothing onto it's occupant!). The communicator was bigger and far bulkier than what was used in the original.
Some fans were not happy with those changes. One of the old
Best of Trek books ran an article postulating a massive war or even an uprising and change of government between TOS/TMP and WoK to try and explain the changes. Letters in
Interstat complained about Executive Producer Harve Bennett's creative choices and insisted he's not the right man to run Trek, that it had become unrecognizable from it's origins. It's only now, looking back over 30 years where the WoK look is the norm for the classic movies that it appears to fit in with the whole of Trek.
Abrams and co might have a similar individual in place now, but they haven't been and aren't trying to be consistent with what has gone before and apart from lip service design elements like the TMP Saucer or the red/blue/gold (suitably altered and in some cases used at what I would describe as a too-early point) and apart from little fanwank details (again, often incorrectly, missing the pointer including a fanwank detail) they have completely changed the look of the thing (and they have: on many levels, even if superficially one can say "they have saucers so they're Trek ships).
Is this any different to what happened between
The Original Series and
The Motion Picture? Nothing looks the same between he series and first movie. How is that change acceptable and this one not? Going back to
The Best of Trek books again, there were fans who refused to believe TMP occurred in the same universe as TOS. Gene Roddenberry himself took the rather extreme measure of dismissing the entirety of TOS as an inaccurate dramatization of the five-year mission in the foreward to his novelization of the first movie.
I honestly belive that's because the individuals running it - Abrams primarily, but also alot of others - don't really care aout Star Trek. They were never fans. Sticking to the aesthetic doesn't seem relevant to them because, why should they care? As long as it's good by their own personal standards. And that's fine, they're obviously doing well out of that, more power to them for choosing to do that. It was, I suppose, invitable.
Fans said the exact same thing about Bennett in '82/'83. See
this thread for more.
All the same, I find myself looking forward to Abrams' Star Wars infinitely more, as I'm certain in that case he will keep the aesthetic of the universe, he will make the designs consistent with what was before, because he loves that fictional universe. He didn't love Star Trek, and that lack of love is to me very obvious in that work.
You think so, considering George Lucas himself made the prequels look so different from the OT?
Maybe I've been spoiled by Doctor Who, whose return was made possible by those who loved the show and didn't want to tamper with the staples: Daleks still looked like Daleks, the police box remained a police box. It was very faithful, while still updating, but more importantly there was love for the program inherent in the revamped version. I can't say I feel the same love from Abrams Star Trek, but I know I'll feel it from Abrams Star Wars. My hope is that one day someone returns to Star Trek who loves it and that one can feel that love.
I've rambled enough on this point. I reiterate in the case of the original question of the thread, that Abrams has changed the fictional rules of Star Trek too much to be ably comparable, and so accurate decision making would be difficult, but I don't see the 23rd century getting that advanced even with reverse engineered scans. At best, I'd say the Vengeance is the equivalent of throwing a first gen Ambassador (an oversized Ambassador, but that's the maximum tech level I can imagine it being at) at a Sovereign, and that wouldn't turn out well at all.
Wheras I say those fictional rules have been changed time and time again (see the videos in my sig for dozens of examples - the warp speed slowdown between TOS and VOY being the biggest game-breaker, IMO), and this is no different.
