Take cars for instance they took the old VW Beetle design and remodeled it and made it more up to date.
More like they built an all-new car with all-new aesthetics and gave it a recycled name.
Why recycle old aesthetics? In cars, it might make some sense for marketability reasons. But in
starships? The telltale similarities between NX-01 and
Akira, such as the "raised hood", the bow notch, and the "turbocharger caps" on the booms, do not even seem to serve the same function in the two designs.
The NX-01 hood is higher at the center than forward or aft, making it impractical as a headroom-increasing trick; the
Akira one is flat and more plausibly improves the habitability of the top deck.
The NX-01 bow notch features a sensor or deflector dish with blue backlighting; the
Akira one has three identical openings that may be launch tubes of some sort.
The NX-01 turbocharger caps fire phase cannon beams; the
Akira ones do not look the slightest bit like other
Akira-era beam weapons.
Okay, so perhaps the same choices are defensible on both ships for different reasons. But why are they not seen on other types of ship? As long as they are unique to these two near-identical designs, they look like purely aesthetical choices rather than functional ones.
Timo Saloniemi