Mr. Fergy said:
Agreed.
Some of that crowd might want to bring a bag of valium...it'll be a rough night for them.
ENTERPRISE design in the new film? (How many changes?)
- Thread starter gastrof
- Start date
Some of that crowd might want to bring a bag of valium...it'll be a rough night for them.
Vejur said:
wait a minute i cant be reading this right
OMG this cant be true. C´mon what is next Daedalus class is prettier then NX-01
Did you just channel Vicky Pollard?
Not everyone is suckered in by the "it has extra levels of slapdash armor, lots of big guns and go faster stripes, and so it must be a better and well thought-out design" philosophy that you seem to favour.
[edits out all the reasons for why the E-E was the silliest Trek design since Spacedock accidentally painted the Pasteur in a nice pastel shade of pink. Because that isn't the point of this thread]
The point being, I just hope we don't get another slapdash fanwank "uber kewl" design like the E-E was. Beyond that, simple detail additions (RCS ports, hatches, etc) are IMO perfectly legitimate.
Roddenberry didn't design the Enterprise.
Matt Jefferies, OTOH, did a superb job on the original ship.
That doesn't mean that it's either perfect or untouchable after forty years.
It got touched pretty good in 1979, after all. Fans can protest that this was okay because there was an in-story explanation for it, but the truth is that such a redesign would have been done whether an explanation could be concocted for it or not - it was deemed necessary.
GodThingFormerly
A Different Kind of Asshole
Sure he did. How many iterations of the original NCC-1701 did Matt Jefferies go through on paper before GR finally signed off on the design?
Certainly, but thanks in no small part to the guidance of The Great Bird.
The J. J. Abrams parasite claims to be a "fan" of TOS, doesn't it? What better way to prove that bullshit assertion than by being the director who finally shows us the original Enterprise on the cinema screen in all her transcendent glory?
Again by Matt Jefferies as guided by Roddeberry for Phase II, to say nothing of the subsequent RA&A designers who suffered no shortage of angst acceding to GR's aesthetic demands.
Possibly, but in every script and treatment of every 1970s revival I have ever read the redesign and refitting of the Enterprise was a key plot element. GR would never have pulled the rug out from under us by claiming that the TMP Refit is what the NCC-1701 "always looked like".
TGT
Funny that he was willing to do so with the Klingons (and the fans never accepted it, resulting at long last in the weak as water ENT retcon--lucky us) and telling: Star Trek was the Enterprise so far as Roddenberry was concerned, the Klingons merely a rarely seen adversary.
The 1979 update comes in a completely different context, anyway: we'd only ever seen one Federation starship design and it had grown familiar and dated by association. In order to make the jump in the next decade (or the decade after next), it made sense then to make the design even more futuristic (and kudos to Jefferies and Probert for continuing the smooth-hulled roundedness of the original--accentuating it, even--rather than aping the Star Wars aesthetic), to re-invent it to make it new as well as familiar. Since then, we've had as major classes of starship the Miranda, the Excelsior, the Ambassador, the Galaxy, the Intrepid, the Defiant, the Nebula, the Sovereign and the NX. In addition, we've had innumerable pipsqueak ship classes, like the Oberth, the Akira, the Norway, the Steamrunner. There is absolutely nothing they can do to the Constitution design that will make it seem fresh or stand out in that mob save leaving it the fuck alone. This isn't fan-wank pandering, it's common sense: the original design has become a classic by virtue of the overcrowded field it has spawned--kinda like TOS itself, when you think of it: Once again, the Enterprise is Star Trek.
GodThingFormerly
A Different Kind of Asshole
I must differ slightly with your interpretation regarding what happened to the Klingons on TMP. Robert Wise and Gene Roddenberry definitely wanted something a little more cinematic than stock humans covered in grease paint for the opening sequence, hence the recycling of the Kreeg makeup design from GR's 1974 pilot, Planet Earth. However, there were several behind-the-scenes indications that these new Klingons were intended to be explained away at some point as a distinct subspecies. As a single example permit me to post this paragraph from the interview with costume designer Robert Fletcher printed in the February, 1980 issue of Fantastic Films:
I also have an issue of Starlog with Gene Roddenberry stating pretty much the same thing as Fletcher from approximately the same period, but it has temporarily (I hope) vanished. Needless to say I'll scan and upload the relevant paragrpahs if and when I find the thing. That being said, it is entirely conceivable that the difference between the smoothies and spinies due to genetic engineering may have been noted in a throwaway piece of dialogue during a subsequent movie had GR retained creative control of the Post-TMP film series. On the other hand, considering that STXI is apparently going to be an attempt at a TOS pastiche, why not simply design the Klingons makeup and costumes along the lines of their appearance in the original series?
TGT
Hmmm. All I remember is GR off-handedly joking something along the lines that they always looked that way and we just received faulty transmissions from the 23rd century which made it seem otherwise. That's just it, though: he was joking. In retrospect, it does not surprise me that he would have thought out an explanation even if he never got to use it. (And, pseudo-scientifically at least, I can see how spinal cords which integrate directly with the brain at several points rather than just at the brainstem might result in a warrior with quicker reflexes.)
Anyway, we are in total agreement about how the Klingons should appear in XI should they appear (I'd really rather they didn't--I'm kinda Klingoned out). The hell of it is, showing them as they appeared in TOS would satisfy the post-ENT canon as well.
Anyway, we are in total agreement about how the Klingons should appear in XI should they appear (I'd really rather they didn't--I'm kinda Klingoned out). The hell of it is, showing them as they appeared in TOS would satisfy the post-ENT canon as well.
The original TOS design may be classical, BUT it is also severely dated.
If Abrams wants to do it right, they'd kind of reverse engineer the TMP version a bit. So that the massive difference between the TOS version and the TMP version wouldn't be too drastic.
For example, take the coloring scheme of TMP's (ie. more gray looking) and apply that to a slightly more advanced TOS version.
The whole problem with trying to come up with a 21st Century version of the 1701 is the "canon" established by NX-01. How do you go from that to the highly cylindrical shape of the 1701?
I think we can all agree that there will be a great deal of whining and moaning no matter what J.J. and company do with the Enterprise.
Channeling Richard Arnold, huh?
I'm afraid that turning "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" on drawings that one doesn't even understand constitutes meaningful "guidance" only in an industry that rewards credit hogs at the top.
Jefferies was - like several of the major contributors to TOS - an artist, a designer and a diligent researcher. GR was not.
3D Master
Rear Admiral
No, it isn't. The insides are (non-descript switches, no keyboard and a shitload of no-meaning blinking lights - and that's because we have more advanced now), but the outside is not dated at all. How can something a thousand times more advanced that the best we've got, be dated?
No, if he wants to do it right, he'll keep the outside the same.
There's absolutely no reason that non-color somehow makes something more modern. Look at the E-D and E-E, they have all the red color the TMP doesn't have, and still look more modern.
Seeing as a large, no make that HUGE majority of people out there never watched Enterprise, a large majority of (casual) Star Trek fans never or hardly watched Enteprise, and more than a good chunk, I'd say majority of the Trek fans hate Enterprise with a fiery passion, including all the bullshit continuity, and especially the horrendous Enterprise-design - collective derided as the Akiraprise, no less - AND on top of that the Constitution-class of the 23rd century, that cylindrical thing, is actually IN Enterprise thus even THAT series establishes it as its successor a century removed, the best to do is to completely, utterly, and totally ignore Enterprise the show, and let the Enterprise (NCC-1701) keep it's iconic design!
Hell, that iconic design is in the REAL-SCIENCE oriented Smithsonian National Air en Space Museum for F's sake! Do you think a model of the reimagined Enterprise is going to be hanging there, or that original model and design stays put?
I just hope to see the TOS-era Enterprise on the big screen. No souped-up designs. I was really quite disappointed when ST:TMP came out and I saw that they had changed the Enterprise.
Adding details would be fine but please LiChiu is right, it's a beautiful design. Leave the ship as it is.
Adding details would be fine but please LiChiu is right, it's a beautiful design. Leave the ship as it is.
Agreed. Roddenberry's success, in the case of Trek, was that he surrounded himself with really talented people and (at first) let them do what they did best.
The reason he didn't have as much success later on was that he stopped giving his "subordinates" freedom to do things as they saw, claimed credit for the work of others (Alexander Courage's music being the most overtly obvious bit, but not the only one) and so on. In other words, he basically drove away the talent that he needed.
He got some good talent back for the start of TNG, but once again drove 'em all away. He effectively got kicked off of Star Trek as a result. The studio put "company men" in place instead, to avoid that... which was good in some ways, but which also caused Trek to become what it has. Which led us to where we are today...
My oft-used analogy here is that Roddenberry was Star Trek's overbearing mother figure. Unquestionably responsible for bringing it into the world, but unwilling to let anyone else have any credit for what it's growing into.
Only in the vaguest of terms. Matt Jefferies designed the Enterprise, just as Alexander Courage wrote the "Star Trek" theme. Fortunately, there was no way for GR to add crappy lyrics to the design of the Enterprise and claim creative credit.
Untrue. He drew them on the port side of the Enterprise that we never saw onscreen.Starship Polaris said:
Fortunately, there was no way for GR to add crappy lyrics to the design of the Enterprise and claim creative credit.
Scrawled right next to the notes for "Andromeda," "Gene Roddenberry's Lost Universe," and several novelizations of his movie scripts.
