Actually it seems to me that the newer design is alot more fuctional that the original.
The cowling over the front portion of the nacelles looks like it could actually house the Bussard collectors that are Supposed to be at the front of the nacellels.
Well, think about what a Bussard Ramscoop really is... it's a gas intact for collecting hydrogen (intended to be used to drive a self-sustaining fusion-reaction thrust system, according to Dr. Bussard who came up with the idea).
Now, you can do that with a massive physical scoop... which is far more plausible, of course... or you can take the "Treknology" approach and assume that the thing projects some sort of electromagnetic field which helps to "funnel" the desired gas into the intake while not grabbing onto the other "junk" you don't want.
So, in the classic Trek version, you have a coil behind the intake... exactly what you'd expect to see if you were generating a powerful magnetic field. And the scoop is perfectly circular... as well as is the coil... which is always (basic physics here!) the most efficient configuration from a 2-D perspective in terms of energy.
I fail to see any advantages to giving the nacelle a "foreskin"... never saw it in Gabe's design, still don't see it here. This certainly provides no help from the standpoint of a magnetically-driven Bussard ramscoop design. The only potential "advantage" would be if there were mandatory "driving hardware" that was being stored in those external regions... but there's no real logic to putting it in the "rounded blobby" configuration we see here... an enlarged concentric ring would've made a lot more sense from a technical standpoint.
There are now visible docking ports on the ship instead of having to shuttle or beam everything over to the Enterprise you can now connect a docking tube from a frieghter for faster resupplies as then you could use every method to transport goods and cargo.
Well, there's nothing to prevent the addition of similar docking ports to the TOS design... it wouldn't constitute changing the design, but rather (as I've said many times) it would constitute an "additional level of polish" on the original design.
Who's to say that the TOS ship didn't have a number of similar docking ports, but perhaps hidden behind slide-back panels?
On the other hand... the "round docking port" idea, while very common in Trekkian circles, isn't anything remotely like a "universal constant," is it? The TMP circular docking port is just one potential design out of an infinite number of potential alternatives... and is just the one that Starfleet had settled on at that time. Perhaps prior to TMP, starfleet ships hadn't used any "standardized" docking port form.
I agree it's nice to have a "quick-dock" capability... I've always been partial to the idea of "conformal, pressurized enclosed slinkies" stretched from one ship to another, though, with magnetic grapples and a big, soft squishy pad to allow some semblance of an airtight seal against the exterior of any available ship. You actually see something very much like that in "Enterprise," on top of every shuttlepod... a remarkably well-thought-out implementation of a real-world design concept.
The neck of the ship now looks like it's sturdy enough to support the stresses caused by the ships movement in space.
Well, from an engineer's standpoint, I find it hard to argue against this one change... though I'd have preferred that the change were simply a matter of beefing up the existing configuration. I see very little to be gained by adding the "kewl layered rib" effect in there, other than to render internal volumes less usable. Remember... notches and so forth are what are referred to as "stress concentrators." A smooth shape is always stronger than a notched one, usually by many orders of magnitude. So what you see there is actually both beefed up and WEAKENED, simultaneously... and the element which weakens it provides no apparent functional role other than "looking kewl."
I'd be willing to swallow a beefing up of the dorsal, but not in the way it's been done. (FYI, the TMP ship beefed it up, and in a much more acceptable fashion, in my opinion.)
You now have a deffinate idea of where the weaponry is on the ship, instead of having to guess (You know like how real navel vessels have batteries and the large guns on battleships)
Except, of course, that if you look at a submarine (for example) that's not true at all. With submarines, all weapons are stowed internally and are only exposed when in-use (including deck-gunnery, AA systems, etc, not just missiles). The reason for this is that weapons require maintenance, and a submarine (in times when it's most likely to be using those weapons) is likely to be operating in a hostile environment (aka "underwater") where you can't just send crew members outside to do the work without it being unnecessarily inconvenient and risky.
Having weapons internal, and only exposed when in-use, makes far more sense for submarines, and orders of magnitude more sense when talking about spacecraft which essentially spend their entire operational lives in the cold vacuum of deep space.
Still, there's no reason that "exposed weapons" can't be present on the TOS ship without changing the design. There are numerous examples of "updated versions" of the TOS ship that do just this (starting with Franz Joseph's stuff back in the 1970s). I doubt anyone would have been offended by making visible weapon emplacements on the TOS design. It would have still been the TOS design.
The nacelle pylons look big enough to support the nacelles under stress.
Actually, the nacelle pylons look like utter and complete crap. Unless they're FAR thicker than they look in the couple of "front views" we can extract from the trailer, they are many orders of magnitude weaker than the TOS version would have been.
They are thinner than the TOS version, though longer... in that respect they resemble the TMP ones. But where the TMP version was still a reasonable load-bearing member, the new version is FREAKIN' CURVED! Unless it's intended to be a bouncy leaf-spring rather than a rigid mount, this is utter and complete NONSENSE. The "curved" pylons are, for any given technology, far, far weaker than any straight pylon would be made with that same technology.
This wasn't done this way for a good technical reason but just to make a change, it seems. Any engineer... from any mechanically-oriented discipline... could have told them this and would have, in the process, read the guys the freakin' RIOT ACT over doing something so unimaginably moronic.
I'm sorry Abrams ship looks far superior in functionality than the original does.
Small correction... it looks that way to your perception. But it does not look that way to mine.
I know you won't see it because you think it was done for the "ooh it looks so cool" well I can see the functionality in the new design and like I said to me it looks more functional than a bare bones ship which is what the TOS Ship looks like "Bare bones just get the job done styling".
(must... control... desire to correct bad grammar... must... not... give... in...)
I think perhaps you're misunderstanding where I'm coming from here. You're confusing cause with effect when you interpret my motivation here.
I'm a technical guy... I do this sort of stuff for a living, and am pretty successful in my line of work. I deal with real-world technical matters (as well as the desire to make things "look cool" at the same time) every day.
There's a lot of detail on the TOS ship... it's not nearly as "bare bones" as you seem to think it is. But the overwhelming majority of the detail on there is done in "naval style" and there is a definite lack of exposed "nerny detail" on the ship. This does not "date" the ship, however... look at the history of Sci-fi designs going back to the earliest Flash Gordon serials and you'll see that "exposed hardware" has always been considered the standard. Reality, on the other hand... as defined by "how we really build things based upon our experience and what knowledge we have developed so far" means that aircraft have far less exposed hardware today than they did in the past, that surface naval vessels are far cleaner and have less exposed hardware... that submarine vessels are perfectly smooth in every possible way, with all systems requiring external access behind flush-mounted hull panels. Heck, look at automobile design... cars today are far smoother and cleaner today than they've ever been in the past (though they're starting to lose some of their grace these days, sadly!)
"Lots of detail" is typically a cheat used in special effects/visual effects work to fool the eye... reality is seldom nearly as "cluttered" as what we've learned to expect from watching decades worth of cheesy sci-fi shows.
"Star Trek," far from being "dated" by the use of the "smooth-skin" design, was different from everything else seen up til that point and different, by and large, than what we've seen since.
And, for the record, the new ship is still very "smooth" overall. The problem isn't with the level of detail in the model, but rather with the overall shapes of the various components (including the incredibly dorky-looking, to me, "1950s fender details" on the nacelle shrouds, and the "ribbed for Uhura's pleasure" neck)
The new design has a simple elegance and grace that the original lacked, in my opinion, because the original lacked any type of streamlining it lacked curves and beauty, it was a plain vanilla design, and that was all due to the design budget and the medium they were working in and not because of Jefferies.
First off... your opinion is fine, I'm not saying your opinion is wrong... but I do think everything else there was wrong.
The new design has a sense of "grace," insofar as it keeps some of the basic "sailing vessel" proportions of the classic design, but I absolutely disagree that it has more than the original. It looks, to me, clunky and "kludged together" without any sense of uniformity or any clear functional logic to it.
"Streamlining" is nonsensical when discussing a space vessel, of course. Especially one which has "force fields" which prevent anything from coming into contact with the hull anyway (if you need "streamlining" you'd have to accomplish that with the forcefields, not the hull shape).
On the other hand, the classic design does not lack curves. It has them... but only in places where they make sense. And it's VERY graceful... 40+ years of fan opinion, with millions of fans who feel that way... not my just my personal opinion. You may not feel it yourself, but you can't say it's not there if so many people (who came into this in large part BECAUSE of their love for that design) feel so dramatically differently.
You can say that you think the new is more graceful... but not that the classic doesn't have grace. At best, you can say you don't see it yourself, that's all. But that's fair enough.
As for the original design being "plain vanilla," well, I'm sorry, that's just not true. You clearly have a personal bias (which is fine) but I'm sure you can recognize that there's NOTHING in the Ryan Church/JJ Abrams version that could not have been envisioned in 1964-1966, nor any feature which could not have been built during that timeframe. The only challenging part would have been to get the curvature of the two nacelle pylons to match sufficiently well for TV-quality work. Obviously, it would have been a physical model rather than a CGI one... but this isn't nearly as "archaic" of a time as you might think it was... the ship's structure wasn't just whittled out of balsa wood and 2x4s, after all. The primary hull, for example, is a structural framework with a heavy thermoformed skin, just like was done to make the 1701(r) and 1701-D miniatures.
And, of course, "simple" shapes are eminently more suitable as pressure-vessels (which all space vessels are, after all). Real spacecraft will almost certainly focus on spheres as their primary element as we move forward... but disks and cylinders work reasonably well too. Odd, curvy-blobby shapes, on the other hand, are inevitably under constant stress from the disproportionately-distributed internal pressure forces... everything TRIES to achieve the lowest-possible energy state shape, the sphere.
If given more time and a higher budget, would Jefferies and the Anderson company have created something different than what we saw on TOS? Almost certainly it would have seen some "tweaks," but I doubt we'd have seen anything dramatically different.
Remember... Jefferies didn't "have to settle" on the narrow neck, or the pylon design he came up with, or the saucer shape, or the secondary hull shape... he had other ideas and he moved TO those. He could have had far more robust elements throughout, but he made a conscious decision to do otherwise, because he was going for a sense of grace... a "tall ship with masts" feel... and he succeeded, as many fans for many decades have believed, beyond anything anyone else has ever done in the field.
(The only other Sci-fi design which has anything remotely like the same level of emotional attachment from people is the Space 1999 Eagle. While the show itself was... blah... the Eagle design has tons of dedicated fans to this day.)
Jeffieries was a competent designer and is one of the reason the TOS design became the Archetype for Trek ships (Because realistically they could have changed the ship design alot more drasticly when TMP or TNG came about, but they stayed with Jefferies basic ship design (until the unveiling of the Defiant in DS9).
Well, I'd say "competent" is an example of damning with faint praise... I think he was a very smart guy with a terrific sense of design and "reality." But your mileage may vary.
Roddenberry, on the other hand, never quite "got it" regarding the Enterprise... which is why he actively sought out the "Star Destroyer Enterprise" concept for "Planet of the Titans" and was always looking to tweak the design (including the technically-terrific but stylistically, to me, rather "blah" 1701-D, which reminds me of a blimp or a cruise ship far more than of anything visually exciting). He didn't get it. But he was lucky that Jefferies was on his team. Jefferies gave us a ship design that people loved, and still love, and don't want to see replaced with anything else. Hence this entire conversation...
It not only looks cool, but it looks much more sophisticated and well thought out. Not like something that was drawn originally on a paper napkin in a greasy spoon.
Once again, "damning with faint praise."
C'mon... do you really think that Jefferies was sitting at a "greasy spoon" doing his sketches on napkins? Do you think the concept phase of a design, in 1964, was in any way different than it is today?
It's not. The guy does sketches... presents them... gets feedback... makes changes... lather, rinse, repeat... until he gets buy-in from the people who make the real decisions.
The sketches are still as likely to be colored-pencil-on-paper today as they were in 1964. The only real difference is that once construction has begun on a CGI model, you can still make changes in mid-stream without tossing hundreds of thousands of dollars down the drain, while with a physical model you're pretty much locked in once construction is underway.
In the "real world" design arena, we all have white-boards in our offices where we do sketches with markers to work through ideas. Nothing has really changed in that regard for hundreds of years... it used to be chalk, now its markers, but otherwise, it's all the same.
And the picture shows that is does match the sillouhette of the original, which was what I was saying all along.
It is, as you say, similar enough to be recognizable as being "sort of the same." I agree.
A person who has only ever seen fleeting glances of the original show will be shown this ship compared to the other and would say that one looks like a mondernized version of the other.
Doubtful. A person who has seen fleeting glimpses of the original show won't notice ANYTHING different, most likely. They won't see the changes at all. And they'd walk out of the theater having had the exact same experience if they'd been shown the TOS design, or the TMP design for that matter, or anything remotely similar, and wouldn't know or care.
The only people who will see a "modernized" version are the people who are fans... who know enough about the original ship to care about the details in the first place.
And among those people... the reaction is nearly 50/50 split between "like it" (mostly from TNG-era fans, it seems, though with exceptions) and "hate it (mostly from TOS-era fans, though again with exceptions).
For the non-fans... they don't know and don't care, either way.
That doesn't mean I don't love the original design, it is in fact because I have a love for the original that I see so much of it in this new interpretation. I can see where the artist took what worked from the old design and added to it to make it look more believable. I'm sorry you disagree, but that's my opinion. I know I've been overly snarky lately but I won't get too snarky with you because you've actually been more than intelligent with your replies Cary.
I appreciate the polite (or rather, "conversational?") tone of your response... this is how discussion should be. We can disagree but we can do so without being harsh against other people (and only being harsh on POINTS when it's appropriate).
You love the new design... and that's cool. If I understand you, you'd have been unhappy with the TOS design (even in any of the "superdetailed" iterations we've seen around here lately... like the oft-referenced version Vektor did, but including many others as well). I definitely disagree, and I HOPE that someday we can finally see the classic design given the big-screen treatment. I think that if it were given that treatment... the classic design presented on the big screen with modern production values... it would take everyone's breath away.
