I'm in the camp that the ship could have been MUCH closer to the TOS ship and still been made to look "modern".
But I'm totally on your side in this.
Spoilers Canon, Continuity, and Pike's Accident
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I'm in the camp that the ship could have been MUCH closer to the TOS ship and still been made to look "modern".
But I'm totally on your side in this.
It's similar to watching a show set on a battleship during World War II, except everyone's using touchscreens. You could still get into the drama but it's clearly not set in our past, even if the only difference is visual.
Except Star Trek is not history.
We know how WW2 looks because we have all that history to unpack. Hell, even a show like MASH I can go through an unpack all the flaws, wrong dates and anachronisms, and that show happened only 20 years post that event!
Star Trek doesn't have that reference material. It's not history, it's not something I can research the same way. It's an imagined future, which means as we understand technology and develop and try to engage the audience in an entertaining way, not an historical recreation.
No, it's not. Not even close.
No it's not. Every year that goes by when you watch a show or a movie set on a WWII Battleship the tech becomes more ancient. It is farther disconnected from the present day and less capable than what we have now.
At no point the history before WWII did they have touchscreens. Presumably in the history of 1966 Star Trek people had touchscreens. Unless we're inventing a history for Star Trek so divergent from our own that people didn't invent fancy computer displays that matched ours until the 2360s.
At no point should Star Trek be intentionally more limited than what we have at the time the show is made. If it looks like it is then there should be a reason why those looks are deceiving. (You don't know what those gumdrop buttons were able to do on TOS.)
But if you're making a Star Trek III era bridge you should not be using Commodore 64s or Atari 800s to do the graphics because that's "period appropriate". (WHY did computer display tech take such a step backwards between early 2285 and later?)
Fortunately most of Star Trek is still magic. We can't build a 1000 foot long starship. (So I don't know why a 2000 foot starship is so much more impressive, really.) We don't have vehicles the size of a minivan or even an 18 wheeler that can break orbit by themselves. Our computers now look pretty much just like what's on the bridge but they can't do nearly as much. Your flip phone cannot communicate with a spaceship. Our iPads cannot "detect life signs" whatever that even means.
Even the Thermians improved on the Historical Documents.
No it's not. Star Trek is not a a historical documentary, it's fiction.
Exterior wise, I think Hunter's is my favourite, followed by the DSC/SNW design.
Corbomite Maneuver by Hunter-56 on DeviantArt
www.deviantart.com
It's up there. Certainly a lot closer to what I would have liked.
Agreed.
But I'm trying to explain why "a visual update is such a hard pill for some fans to swallow." If a World War II battleship drama looks dramatically different to our past, then its visual update would pull some viewers out of it. Even if it's just a visual update and nothing else changed. It's contradicting our previous understanding of that reality.
So when a spaceship from a fictional future looks dramatically different, it can be just as jarring to certain people (ie. me). Any out of universe explanations for it are completely irrelevant, they don't matter inside of the fiction.
No one here has to feel the same way, I'm just trying to explain it.
So, Star Trek should be treated as a history piece, and not a dramatic work of fiction from this perspective?
Because I'm struggling a bit, and more than that, I'm not seeing any tech contradicting previous understanding.
And if is refitted, will you be disappointed?
Even if it doesn't, I don't think I'll personally scream, maybe just assume it is done off-screen. Or perhaps I won't care anymore?
After all, everyday is a new day, and this page will be long buried by then.
Star Trek works better if you treat it as a period piece. What restrictions that classification should entail are a matter of debate.
Which is part of my problem. I didn't treat it as a period piece, and restrictions that were imposed from knowledge of tech in the 60s/80s/etc. don't always flow intuitively because it's so future focused. So, even if you put that restriction on it what does that look like?
Is the goal to create a uniform rule set that makes Trek this fantasy world separated from our history?
Thank you for trying. I think I get where you're coming from. IDIC
The overarching goal is "don't break suspension of disbelief". But what we have here are people who have opposite things that break it, so we are at an impasse. One says, if it doesn't look more futuristic than our present, then I don't believe it. The other says, if it looks more futuristic than other episodes that take place at the same tine, then I don't believe it. Both sides would object to Kirk pulling out an iPhone and calling the ship. I can get past the visual discontinuity, it's the early 21st century language/slang that gets to me.
"In a pig's eye."
Nope. It works best as an extrapolation of our future from the point of view of our present. (when ever that is). It's not about view screen sizes, nacelle caps or one off data points.
Everybody who objects to "inconsistency" and wants to talk about Trek as "history" seems to fixate on dramatic recreations of the recent past, such as movies about World War II.
This is really silly and misleading, with respect to what audiences have reasonably expected of historical films in the past.
A more appropriate and instructive genre to compare Star Trek to, IMO, would be the Hollywood Western genre that dominated American entertainment for close to a century (and from which Trek derived many of its tics and tropes as well as aspects of its format).
Despite taking place during a still-relatively recent period of history (Western movies were being made at one time about living or recently-deceased real-life figures like Wyatt Earp, initially by people who had themselves lived in and remembered the 19th century), the Western has always been at most a malleable, inconsistent and self-contradicting melange of historical fact, myth and convenient dramatic fabrication. Not only have Westerns changed over time, films made almost simultaneously have presented contradictions in visual design as well as narrative accuracy. The audience not only accepted this, they embraced the genre and made it one of the most widely successful expressions of American popular culture - okay, the most - in the 20th century.
This is really silly and misleading, with respect to what audiences have reasonably expected of historical films in the past.
A more appropriate and instructive genre to compare Star Trek to, IMO, would be the Hollywood Western genre that dominated American entertainment for close to a century (and from which Trek derived many of its tics and tropes as well as aspects of its format).
Despite taking place during a still-relatively recent period of history (Western movies were being made at one time about living or recently-deceased real-life figures like Wyatt Earp, initially by people who had themselves lived in and remembered the 19th century), the Western has always been at most a malleable, inconsistent and self-contradicting melange of historical fact, myth and convenient dramatic fabrication. Not only have Westerns changed over time, films made almost simultaneously have presented contradictions in visual design as well as narrative accuracy. The audience not only accepted this, they embraced the genre and made it one of the most widely successful expressions of American popular culture - okay, the most - in the 20th century.
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In all that time they have never reimagined the horse or the handgun.
Those are real things. Starships and phasers, not so much.
No, just anachronistic ones.
See, they change things as they see fit to adjust for the story told.
An article discussing inaccurate firearms, and how common that is in Westerns
https://gunmagwarehouse.com/blog/guns-of-the-wild-bunch-the-classic-revisionist-western/Similar threads
