The Defiant was originally a prototype for what would have been a copy/paste fleet. I guess that ship design in PIC ultimately took its place?
While it is nice to see Riker back it felt cliche to have him say "im in the best most super duper cool ship so ha!". Is that really the best they could come up with? Is it a line that would appeal to an adult audience or a child audience?
I had a long reply, but why have a long post when can you have a short one? And it's this: There's a time and place for everything, and I'm secure enough in being 40 that I don't mind watching a scene like this every now and then. Sometimes you just have to let loose.
If only production technology had moved on in 33 years. The other difference being, the Excelsior class is a beautiful design. The USS Copy Paste is... not. As with most Eaves designs, it might look good from 1 angle maybe, at best. The reason the original 1701 is such a classic is that it looks good from every angle.
I'm cutting them some slack for the copy-and-paste fleet (although it would have been nice to have the Zheng He be its own class ship to differentiate it from the rest, like how Oh's ship was different from the rest of the warbirds.) They didn't have a whole lot of time to come up with it, and they could very easily have used DSC ships for this scene like in "Children of Mars," but they didn't. So I commend them for that. As for Eaves: While I'm not his biggest fan, I'm afraid we're just going to have to get used to him. He's the primary ship designer for PIC, and I don't see that changing unless he gets another job somewhere else. And I'm reasonably sure that the next Enterprise will be designed by him as well.
Yeah the fleet didn't bother me at all, I was too busy trying to identify Riker's ship. Would be nice to get more information about the ships shown, its not exactly a necessity though. Would have been nice to have seen some recognisable classes just for continuity's sake, fair play to them for going to the trouble of making new ones, even if they didn't make it in to the episode in the end. No doubt we will see plenty of that in SNW.
There was only one class of ship shown. Multiplied 200 times. Oh dear. He'll make it ultra futuristic, dark grey obviously, tons of hull cutouts, hard lines everywhere, the whole thing will be over-designed, loads of surface detail, with angular nacelles with 24 different bumps of various shapes and sizes all over them. And it'll look... ok at best, from about 1 angle. Maybe.
Different nacelle caps. That doesn't qualify them as a different class. No I loved the TOS movies and TNG series eras. The Excelsior, Constellation, Consitution Refit, Galaxy, Miranda, Nebula etc were beautiful, classic designs that look good from any angle A million miles better than anything Eaves has done.
It wasn't just the caps. There were two different and unique nacelle designs. But yes, the fact that there were two different engines did not qualify the ships as two different classes.
Actually the caps/Bussard collectors can be different and it still be the same class. Compare the NCC-1701 from "The Cage(TOS)" with the same ship from regular TOS. One had red caps with spikes and the other had translucent Bussard collectors with spinning warp plasma. Both are the same ship and Constitution-class.
Same with the original Excelsior and the Enterprise-B (although one had visible bussards and the other did not.)
I grew up with the Enterprise-E, so naturally I'm more predisposed to that visual aesthetic than the original Matt Jeffries Enterprise.
I wouldn’t go that far. While Eaves is a professional designer, Andrew Probert, Matt Jeffries, Harold Michelson and Rick Sternbach are far better than him, IMHO.
Eaves' E and its shuttles, Phoenix, Son'a ships, Valdore, Kelvin shuttles, OV-165, Xindi Aquatic and Insectoid ships, Sarajevo, and Nimitz class look just as good as (and some even better than) Probert's D, its shuttles, the D'deridex, and Sternbach's Voyager, its shuttles, Negh'var, Nova, Prometheus, Wells, and Aeon.