That's been a work-in-progress for about a decade. I don't think it's coming any time soon. They still haven't released the Enterprise-C!
I'm not sure they still have a license. They haven't said anything about any Star Trek products in quite some time...
They do still have the licence. They brought out a couple of Kelvin Kirk and Spock figures last year, as well as the gold Enterprise-C as a convention exclusive. I think they reissued the Enterprise-A recently as well. DST has always drip-fed this stuff because they struggle to get retailer support. Worth noting that McFarlane brought out a couple of Kirk and Picard figures a while back, and then nothing else followed, despite them making a bit of a fanfare about getting the licence and promising Burnham and Spock next. I think the market for Trek collectibles is just really small these days.
I'm sorry to go on a tangent of my own, but personally I'm not convinced that pinning a thread makes people use it more. The ol' “Can I suggest an Art Contest?” thread is a good example of that. I also really want to avoid having a bunch of pinned threads at the top of the forum which you always have to scroll past to get to the actual threads with new content. It's my thinking that If the demand is there for a thread, it will be used. In this specific case it's just that the conversation naturally drifted to a point where it could have continued in this lounge thread. I don't hold it against anybody if they didn't use the lounge thread. My heads-up earlier was just meant as a friendly reminder.
I totally get not wanting to have a bunch of pinned threads crapping up the top of the forum; I've been there myself in the past. But this thread was definitely "out of sight, out of mind."
Relating to Warped9's speculation about the behavior of a physical model of the "Aqua Shuttle", something that should NOT work as a submersible, but somehow does...
^^ Yep, I’ve seen that. That was kinda cool. I know many years ago I’ve seen firsthand an actual large Seaview model in the water that could cruise, submerge, surface and maneuver. I don’t know if anyone has ever done that with a Flying Sub model—it would be cool to see. There is this.
Unfortunately we will never see that again in a Star Trek production taking place around the TOS era. They've traded Jeffries's simple graceful aesthetic for Eavesian overly-detailed-and-unnecessary-open-spaces aesthetic.
Aw, hell, they went that route when they asked ILM to do the VFX for TWOK. As much as I love the Reliant, the greebles they put on that thing were considerably greater than anything that came before. Then the Excelsior came around with that Byzantine hangar in the secondary hull and the Merchantman’s and BOP’s tubes and pipes everywhere in TSFS, and on and on. Smooth and simple were gone long before Eaves came on the scene. He just continued the trend.
When you compare the K't'inga to the D7, it's pretty obvious that Star Trek had taken a step in the direction of greebling with TMP itself.
Yes, but I'm talking about present-day productions like DSC and SNW which abandon the simple for the greeble in what is supposed to be the same era as the smooth and simple TOS aesthetic.
Roddenberry arguably intended TMP to be a reimagining of TOS, a more fully realized expression of the fantasy brought to theaters near us on more than just a TV budget. The change of the Klingon's anatomical appearance without any need to explain it in-universe is just one example, though arguably the most explicit. In any case, not slavishly staying inside the lines of what was produced in the 1960s has been a part of the franchise at least since then.
Except it hasn’t. With examples throughout the franchise such as TNG’s “Relics,” DS9’s “Trials & Tribble-ations,” and ENT’s “In a Mirror Darkly,” not to mention several callbacks such as TOS models used as set dressing, etc., the TOS era has been shown to be exactly the same as what we saw in 1966-69. There was no Roddenberry TMP-style reimagining of the era until DSC. Mind you, I’m not arguing that there shouldn’t be a reimagining of an era produced over 50 years ago, especially one as dated as TOS. But there comes a point where if the reimagining is quite extreme from the original, it’s probably better to just make your production a reboot rather than a reimagining of the source material.