ST:TMP: Was such a massive refit of the USS Enterprise logical?

Another good example are the Essex class aircraft carriers. The ones with the longest careers and the most rebuilds look considerably different from when they were built during the war.

 

I shall NOT refrain!

The Rebel ships are not necessarily warships, not necessarily from the same eras, and potentially built by a lot of different companies on a lot of different worlds. They were basically whatever the Rebels could get their hands on. They didn't have a set of dedicated worlds upon which to manufacture ships under the supervision of a central ship-building authority. Thus, their ship designs are diverse and occasionally impractical for the purpose they're being used. Rebel beggars can't be choosers.

However, modularity is a good point for the refit. Refitting in the future should be about incremental improvements. Starships should have standardized parts and connection points that allow things like new warp nacelles and deflector dishes to be swapped in with minimal effort every few years. They would be designed with periodic upgrades in mind.

Also, Engineers should be using genetic algorithms to generate thousands of possible configurations which would then be tested in detailed simulations. There should be no situations where massive hull changes are made during a refit because they'd know how extreme the changes were well ahead of time. Logically, they would have either incrementally done half a dozen refits over time to evolve the ship to it's movie configuration, or they would have built a ship from scratch.

So, yeah, I'm on board with the theory that there were political/non-engineering reasons for the extreme refit. Hence the quicker-than-usual decommissioning of the Enterprise A in The Undiscovered Country. It wasn't the original Enterprise, its design was based on the obsolete Constitution class, and it had already experienced heavy damage. Kirk had probably pushed for the refit when he was Admiral, but once he was demoted to Captain, his replacement was more incline to simply move on to the newer Excelsior class.

 

In my head-canon, there was no "refit". The original "Enterprise" was mysteriously replaced (perhaps stolen?) just before the refit, but after the conclusion of the historic 5-year mission. Since the ship was scheduled for a major refit, TPTB officially went with the story that there was nothing odd about such a radical design. Hence, the differences.

Personally, the NCC-1701-A should have been featured in TMP, then the NCC-1701-B in TVH. I know that Nimoy didn't like the design of the Excelsior-class, but...well, I disagree.

 

Up though the Dominion War, the general idea seemd to be that Starfleet was relatively small and often short of ships, especial when a unanticipated emergency arose.

To simply build a new ship the size of the Enterprise, packed full of the latest technoloogy, might have been outside of Starfleet capacity and budget at that time.

Gutting a older (and bordering on the obsolete?) heavy crusier like the Enteprise, would allow them to make use a existing ship that might have been heading for the breakers otherwise. Starfleet gets their test bed, without having to build a new ship filled with cutting edge technology that might not be capable of being integrated with each other.

What works in the "refit" gets incorporate in the rest of the fleet, what doesn't gets dropped.

Eventually, the hodge podge of systems that is the Enteprise get transfer to the Academy, and cadets get to bust their butts trying to keep it operational. Not quite a "no win" task.

 

They needed to update the look IRL, the refit was just a handwave to excuse it. While lots of thought went into the new Enterprise design, I doubt they gave much (if any) to how the old became the new or the plausibility of it.

Imagine if they'd gone with the "Planet of the Titans" look and called it a refit...

 

Not so much a refit as a "Discovery".

Seriously, though, they basically replaced the entire secondary hull and warp engines in The Motion Picture, so using an even more radical secondary hull design wouldn't have made much of a difference from the standpoint of a believable refit. The actual problem is that the general silhouette of the "Planet of the Titans" design is too much of a departure from the original Enterprise for fans to accept.

 

This. I don't understand why "visual reboot" isn't talked about more. Why don't the producers come straight out and say "this is not a reboot, all prime canon will be respected, but it *is* a visual reboot, get over it".

Personally, I'd love someone to have taken NCC1701 and modernised it, I fantasise about those black bridge panels having jelly bean buttons that morph into different configurations depending on user settings - much like some of the more future looking phone manufacturers talk about in terms of haptic, and screens that grow bubbles, but I can understand why modern TV producers want to play with the full toyset. Still, a respectful updating of the TOS design ethos would surely be more like a modern restoration of a classic building or monument, far far more impressive if done sympathetically than a new modern office block!

And for me, I really cannot understand people who think the Connie wouldn't wash for modern audiences. Not if they see Vektor's work which is beautiful. However, given all of that, we'll worry about the new design ethos for the 1st episode, and after that as long as they're writing good, thoughtful, TV stories, I'll be very happy. I don't care if it's Game of Thrones in Space, Mad Men in Space or even The Last Ship in Space, just give me some serialised, decently plotted space drama please!

 

I still consider TMP Enterprise to be a retcon. Just figure the ship ALWAYS looked like that and the only changes were a new engine design and a newer, larger transporter room. The original airing of TNG basically confirmed this for me in "The Naked Now" when the mission logs from "The Naked Time" depicted the TMP refit; interestingly, if you take TSFS's weird FJ graphics as a given, you might conclude that even the COMPUTER things the TOS version and the TMP refit look exactly the same.

Strictly speaking, that's what the bridge designs in TFF and TUC basically were, in asmuch as the TMP design also was in the 1970s.

From a graphic artists' point of view, you could probably make the case for it. But from a filmmaker's point of view, that's quite a different story.

Besides which, as I ask far too often around here: why would we WANT to use the original Constitution design? We're not using any of the original actors, original screenplays, original music, original props, original uniforms, original sound effects, so why us the original model prop for the ship? That wouldn't make any sense.

The Enterprise wasn't the star of Star Trek. William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelly were the stars of that show. Two of those three are dead, and the third is William Shatner, so they're going to have to re-cast the leads anyway. Everything after that is just set and prop design.

 

Agreed! I veered a little away into JJ Trek - and how they could've used it (in my opinion) - but I absolutely take this point:

I remember this being a big question, which i my mind wasn't really answered until "Relics", and when we saw the old bridge, I remember being kind of shocked - "wait, so it was supposed to have *really* looked like that!?!" and that confused me. How times have changed! Now I'm giving out because Discovery doesn't look like the 1960s!

 

Yeah, originally TNG (like TMP) was meant to be a soft reboot of the TOS, so there was no guarantee that the Enterprise of Kirk's time would have really looked like it did in the TV series (from a TNG perspective). Then we got the Bridge in Relics, the corridors in Trials and Tribble-ations and even more in IAMD.
leaving absolutely no doubt that the 2260s really looked like that.

 

...And why should things be any different this time around? TNG, DS9 and ENT all had the means to "reimagine" Kirk's ship inside and especially out. They all chose not to. The movies had even more in the way of means. They all chose to reproduce the 1960s look, too. Fans could buy any change. TPTB just don't feel like selling.

Is it just because using off-the-shelf NCC-1701 toys for in-universe tabletop decoration is cheaper than creating reimagined ones?

Timo Saloniemi

 

Yep, that Mona Lisa sure is looking out of date. Technology has changed in 500 years, we don't have to paint pictures any more. Let's take 'er down and replace her with a photograph of a woman in modern clothes and hairstyle. Don't know how anyone can accept that old shit.

 

"Enterprise" had an impossible mission, when you think about it. They have to make the tech look more advanced than what we have now while not making it look more advanced than TOS, and not make it look retro-futuristic. They were basically set up to fail, when you think about it. Plus some of the Trek historical events that have already not happened, so they have to retcon stuff right off the bat. Eventually, the franchise is going to so heavily paint itself into a corner that only a hard reboot can keep it relevant. I'm not saying we've reached a point-of-no-return yet, but I'm a little surprised a true reboot hasn't happened already.

 

How about instead of rebooting the writers instead apply a bit of imagination and actually invent something new? It would be refreshing to get at least one summer blockbuster movie per decade that isn't a rehash of 1960s TV shows or 1950s comics. Although I'd settle for one per two decades since one'd be due next summer anyway...

Trek has never been relevant in the sense of directly tying into current events. It's always tying indirectly, which is so much easier and less likely to get dated. The same goes for the visuals, really: looking contemporary never gained points for any Trek show or movie.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Wrong. They could have done it like Star Trek Continues. They didn't have the guts to go intentionally retro. If they had, I think the show would have been more successful by virtue of showing such balls of steel. They took the easy road out and then when they needed a rating boost they pulled the TOS Defiant out as fan-service, similar to DS9 with the Tribble episode. The fact is people DO like the retro and only some beancounters in Hollywood haven't gotten the memo.

 

...SW:Rogue One certainly dared do the moustaches and the mullets. Massive bonus points to them for those!

Timo Saloniemi

 

Oh, I'm not saying that retro-futuristic is a bad idea. For instance, the game Alien Isolation did retro exceptionally well. In fact, you could probably set all of Star Trek in an alternative multiverse where where certain modern technologies and trends never happened, thus allowing true consistency across all the series.

However, the more narrowly tailored the premise of the show becomes, the more difficult it becomes for it to remain relevant. One of science fiction's strengths is the ability to take something modern and extrapolate an extreme future version of it, allowing you to explore moral and philosophical implications thereof. Retro sci-fi can't do this as easily, because it would immediately draw attention to the fundamental conceit upon which it's based. That's not to say that a "Transistorpunk" Star Trek series can't be done. It's just that your stories will tend to have more to do with who we were than what we will become.

 

The advent that everything is different, except for the Constitution-class starships.

As to why? Well CBS would likely have access to a licensed living museum in New York that was the Star Trek: New Voyages standing sets.

 

My theory is that Kirk's era was really like this:

Season 1
Season 2 (Season 1)
Season 3 (Season 2)
Season 4 (Season 3)
Season 5

In an episode towards the end of season 4 (which there would be enough space for becasue there are fewer episodes) the Enterprise must jettison the secondary hull (becasue reasons) and it is destroyed. She then gets a replacement at a Starbase. The replacement secondary hull would be pretty similar to the TMP secondary hull.

That way, by the time the refit came around, the main structure of the secondary hull was the same. So not quite as much needed for TMP to be a reasonable refit.

But wait there's more:

It also makes Admiral Morrow's statement about the Enterprise being twenty years old much more realistic. While there may have been a few saucer components that were pushing forty, most of the ship would have been about twenty years old.

But it didn't look that way.

Who says the panels couldn't do that?

 

Exactly - so a modern show should use that conceit - it looks like retro 60s tech, but look closely and you can see it's some bad ass future tech.