The saucer and the entire TOS design was striking, and even startling back then. I like what was said above about the seeming fragility implying mysterious unseen power. We need the saucer but far greater variations on it than we see. We shouldn't be getting slightly tweaked versions of the original. That's cowardly. When Next Gen's D was replaced with an E that was much more similar to TOS, I was very disappointed.
It's kind of a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too design as it sports a singular "saucer" shape overall but you can also make out the "nacelles" partially embedded within the saucer so - at first glance it's only a saucer but yeah as you said, they've squished the nacelles and deflector all in there. It's a strange ship but I love it. Probably the most unconventional design Trek has ever suggested for the Federation, who have to always look like "the familiar" when compared side by side to alien ships. The Search Part I aired September 26, 1994 and features the first appearance of DS9's Defiant. I've been trying to locate some authentic reactions from fans at the time to its design - IRC chat rooms or something - but haven't dug anything up. I think it would be interesting to see what fans reactions were to the design way back when. Interesting observation. I felt the TOS era Constitution looked at it's most powerful when it was destroying everything in In a Mirror Darkly Part II! When I first saw the Sovereign class starship, it struck me how badass it looked in action. After First Contact had been out for months I found myself thinking - did they seriously just take the movie refit Constitution and give it a boob job? *shrugs* Whatever works. Saucers are totally overused in Federation designs, but they have to be for the benefit of the audience. Maybe Discovery will shake that tradition with some as of yet unseen ships - but I think there's a deliberate tactic on the part of the IP owners to let viewers know who's who before hailing frequencies open.
Each state also tries to establish an identity amongst neighbors, and part of that is visual. They design ships not just for practicality but also for aesthetics and cultural identity. In space, a basic ship design would be like a flag. Or a uniform. Who wants to have to rely on just transmitted information or what's in your own ship's memory banks about who has what ship designs, when you encounter a ship? You want to say "Damn it, Klingons!" right away.
No I don't think so. That's a rationalization for it and I could counter with a diametrical reason for the opposite, but my point is more about incongruity and...cheesiness. Going back to what I said upthread: The Franklin is basically a saucer and nacelles -- sails and cannons. It's like we're late enough into a popular tv series where they stop trying and just plug in the punchlines. This is doable in Trek from a technical perspective because all the tech is fake, and if you're just casually watching a show, you don't really care beyond the fact that you're getting a cool design. (After all, where IS the deflector on the Reliant?) The Franklin, the NX, others, they're too early to be near Defiant level streamlined. Whatever sense TOS Enterprise made, I feel newer producers and designers consider/produce less of it, more interested in whatever they're generally working on and plugging in Trek visual punchlines. This is disappointing as a fan of the original and of all the work put into it, the Refit, the D, and lots of others. This is entropy.
I feel that forks and spoons are overused designs helping people consume their meals. Lazy and uninspired.
Well, video production is a visual medium, meaning that producers are going to use visual shortcuts to tell the audience who is who.
Lenticular vehicles were seriously looked at early on: http://www.astronautix.com/l/lenticularvehicles.html Here is a nuclear attack saucer https://fantastic-plastic.com/lenticular-re-entry-vehicle-lrv-by-fantastic-plastic.html The largest saucer shape vehicle was a huge rocket--the so-called Bono-Saucer: http://www.astronautix.com/b/bonosaucer.html This saucer was to be 108 meters across--that's 354 feet wide--wider than the TOS Enterprise saucer http://img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb...01_finalized_plan_views_by_Matt_Jefferies.jpg Now--this design was highly notional--the chart really a way of pointing out just how effective a simple rocket shape is compared to winged designs. Why saucers matter Kehlet argued that a lenticular vehicle, as a manned spacecraft launched into orbit by a conventional booster, had clear advantages over ballistic, lifting body, and winged designs. At hypersonic re-entry speeds it would undergo lower heating and require less shielding. At the same time it was more maneuverable at subsonic speeds than a winged design, and could land at sea or on land without undercarriage. The symmetrical shape meant it would integrate easily into conventional booster designs, without creating excessive drag or asymmetric loads during ascent to orbit. Smaller https://books.google.com/books?id=MxXlKb9wIe0C&pg=PA66&dq=November+2000+Popular+mechanics++Air+Forces+Nuclear+Flying+saucer&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj8pvP5z97TAhXLSyYKHWo6DqYQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=November 2000 Popular mechanics Air Forces Nuclear Flying saucer&f=false aircraft http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a8699/declassified-americas-secret-flying-saucer-15075926/ Now lozenge shaped craft have also been looked at--shades of the craft in ARRIVAL: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/aircraft/pde.htm http://www.styleofspeed.com/space/engine/hypersonicwanderingflame/index.htm http://www.styleofspeed.com/images/space/flyingpumpkinseed/active_hypersonic-upper_side.jpg Airships too https://www.reddit.com/r/RetroFuturism/comments/5baho1/near_neutral_buoyancy_airship_concept_1980s/ http://orig09.deviantart.net/09c2/f/2015/038/f/0/ustp_01_03_by_scott_lowther-d8h2fa9.jpg Odd designs http://www.hitechweb.genezis.eu/liftingbodies2.files/image015.jpg http://www.fantastic-plastic.com/rockwell-c-1057-breadbox-space-shuttle-by-fantastic-plastic.html https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/3.27208?journalCode=jsr
A lot (too many) Trekkies were livid over the design of Discovery, and that fits the traditional structure of Starfleet ships. I shudder to think what the reaction would have been had they gone with an unconventional design we'd not seen before.
The idea of perpetuating the saucer design made perfect sense due to the modular nature of all starships within a particular generation, from the micro up to the macro. This applies to other components like warp nacelles, support pylons and the like. Mass production usually drives industry, and it's easier and more cost/resource-effective to manufacture things that all look and assemble in the same fashion. This philosophy was clearly followed into the 24th, with the Galaxy and Nebula classes being close analogues to their Constitution and Miranda predecessors. All having nearly identical overall hull structures, but being able to change out smaller modular components to fit certain mission profiles (bridge modules, roll bar pods, etc.) No real mystery behind it at all, IMO.
Here's what an Enterprise looks like without a saucer From the unmade Star Trek: Final Frontier animated project
The issue is with the OVERuse of saucers. Look at the proportions of the saucer to stardrive on the original E. Okay, by TNG's time, the tech's more sophisticated, the engines/engineering are smaller (bigger, but smaller in proportion to the overall ship) and the living space (saucer) is larger. Voyager's engines are smaller still, though the saucer/stardrive proportion is closer, as Voyager isn't designed to be away for as long. Still, very robust stardrive section. Go EARLIER in Federation history, and you shouldn't have saucers at all -- Daedalus. Yet the execs (Berman and Braga) want to have their cake and eat it too. Not as future-y a series (23rd century+) but with a 24th century ship. (The designer of the NX noted the Akira inspiration and all the details (the slope of the saucer, nacelle colors, glowing dish, etc) look way more TNG-era than TOS. There's a patina of TOS elements to suggest it, but put the ships side by side and it's obvious which one is not like the others.) This time the execs get rid of the engineering hull entirely. It's all fake tech anyway, so why not? The Franklin has less engineering still. Again, it's all fake tech, and the fans just like the saucers, so Ent-J-it. Why not? I think in the next movie we'll see Zephram Cochran's experimental Warp .5 ship, and it'll only be a saucer with red and blue lights on the side. I suspect their/my issue had more to do with the cheesiness of it than the saucer. It looked like a low-polygon/steampunk/1970's I don't know what. If it's a large Starfleet ship of exploration near Kirk's era, the saucer makes sense. If it were a ship of a different purpose (medical, transport, science, etc), also it wouldn't need to have a saucer, but it could. I think if the design is awesome enough fans will roll with it. They certainly roll with designs that don't make sense for other reasons (no deflector, no pylons). Modularity isn't the issue. It's an idea, and one that makes some sense, but Starfleet appears to be the only power in that uses it. We've never seen aliens use it the same extent (Galaxy and Nebula, Constitution and Miranda, use near identical parts) or use modular separation. They're all too cool, I guess. More, again, it isn't the use of saucers alone that's the problem. But note where earlier they were the habitat crown of the ship, nowadays they're the whole thing. So, why ever have secondary hulls at all?
When most people today think of Romulans, they think warbird, not bird-of-prey. If the design is awesome enough, if it has the Starfleet delta or coloring or just enough to recognize it for what it is...or if EVERYONE REFERS TO IT AS STARFLEET...they'll get it. And love it for adding something awesome and new to [thier] Star Trek.
If this isn't the USS Mjolnir, I'll be very disappointed. That's the thing though-an "awesome" design is very subjective and can't be changed on a whim. It's a visual shorthand for the different powers in a visual medium, and the design process needs to respect that fact, or, it will be regarded as change for change sake, and considered out of line with what has come before.
Well, the Cardassians show very little difference between the Galor and Keldon classes, with the baseline hull designs being largely the same between the two and the latter having more superstructure, armor and weapons. There is also a similarity in style between the Klingons' Vor'Cha and Negh'Var designs, which are natural progressions from the K'T'inga (of which the Kronos One is, of course, a subset), which evolved from the D-7, which evolved from the D-4. It was the Bird of Prey designs that were outliers in the Klingon Fleet, and that's only because the design in question was originally supposed to be Romulan, but a similar design lineage was created for it in Enterprise in the form of the 22nd century BOP and D-5 (which could be seen as a hybrid between the two). And even ships in the JJ Abrams alternate universe share and preserve similar design aesthetics from organization to organization - all Federation ships and Klingon "Warbird", for example. The Hirogen Hunter and Dreadnaught use seemingly identical components, and damn near ALL the Vulcan ships shown in Enterprise (pre-Federation) shared the same general design layout with the ring-shaped warp engines and color palette (indicating the same kind of metal used for hull construction). And those were just the ones I was able to quickly find off the top of my head - I'm sure there are more. So it's hardly just a Federation trait. Now, if you want to talk about the ridiculous overuse of something, the ubiquitous and limited naming of Klingon and Romulan ships in the form of "Warbid" and "Bird of Prey" has always frustrated the hell out of me. Klingons do not have the same reverence of birds that Romulans do, at all. There's no reason to call Klingon ships these same names, despite any sharing of technology they may have had over the years. Hell, Enterprise showed that the Romulans started off at Vulcan "marching under the banner of the Raptor's wings", or something like that. That was their thing, not the Klingons. They even also made a Klingon "Raptor" at one point, too. Feh! That, to me, is a far more idiotic example of overuse than design layouts and palettes. The former is lazy and muddied writing - the latter has its roots in real-world ship design and modern construction principles. And, to be a bit meta, Star Trek is about Federation crews. For this fact alone it stands to reason we would always see more Federation ships with the same design sensibilities than aliens of the week.
Maybe it shows that the Klingons and Romulans have been allied in the past, or that the Klingons were more technology thieves centuries ago and stole Romulan stylings and kept the names.