Well, it's not as if Tom Sutton and Ricardo Villagran were ever particularly consistent in the way they drew technology. You just sort of had to get used to it as part of their style. It wasn't like today where everyone has tons of Internet reference and DVDs at their beck and call. Photo references were fewer and farther between, and often the artists just chose to go from memory or imagination instead. It also took more time for art to be delivered (since it was physically mailed rather than e-mailed, and Villagran lives in Argentina), so there would've been less opportunity to make corrections. And the Surak showed up infrequently enough that it could kind of get lost in the clutter. In many of those issues I cited, it only appears in a few panels. (For instance, issue 26 is a Surak-focus story, but there are only two panels showing the ship's exterior, with all the rest of the story being set inside the ship or on the planet it's orbiting.)
And frankly, in the later DC issues that did become more dependent on photo reference, the result often looked stiff and collage-like. For all its inconsistencies, Sutton & Villagran's art had more energy and life to it.
Working on Star Trek and multiple other DC titles besides. Which is a lot of work. And ST probably wasn't anywhere near being DC's biggest seller, so Bob Greenberger (who edited all the listed issues except #16, which was co-edited by Mike Barr and Marv Wolfman) probably had to devote the bulk of his time and attention to other titles.
