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Spoilers Starship Design in Star Trek: Picard

They were never designed to escort carriers. The design for the Iowa class was finalized in 1939 before the shift to carrier warfare became necessary due to the destruction of the pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor.

They were designed with the high speed to counter the Kongo sisters who were capable of 30 knots and other high speed Japanese cruisers.

Incorrect. While the seed of the Iowa was various Japanese surface threats, the project didn't exist in a vacuum. They were developed alongside the designs that eventually became the fast carrier task forces and they were designed to by synerg

That's what frustrates me, I don't understand the value of completely ignoring what has come before.
As far as I'm concerned Fuller was an idiot for going that route.
:scream:

$5 says the Disco Klingons disappear when Disco itself ends its run.

Not my loss. But the TOS ship is as butt-ugly as the rest of them, in absolute terms of "balance" or "proportion". It just happens to have seniority to its side.

Timo Saloniemi

This is factually incorrect. You may not find the end result appealing (as is your right), but proportion isn't just an opinion. It's a term of art encompassing various techniques for honing designs. Matt Jeffries designed the TOS Enterprise using mathematical theorems like the golden ratio. It is, by the philosophy used to construct it, proportional. Every single element is scaled based on how it relates to the other pieces.

https://www.goldennumber.net/uss-enterprise-golden-ratio-design/amp/

JJTrek simply didn't follow this process. It was clearly less formal. There's nothing inherently wrong with going that route, especially if you're going more abstract or fantastical. Sometimes, iterating until you get *that* feeling is the way to go. However, you're at risk of the very problems their designs ended up with.

I think the formal process works better for Trek-ish ships, because actual vehicles are developed with an underlying mathematical logic. Even if you're using fictional logic, that undercurrent shows through the design. It makes it grounded in something other than the artist's whims.

However, like all design rules, there's exceptions. The Borg cube, or the Empress' ship from Disco S1 are meant to be expressions of raw power unconstrained by petty concerns about practicality. Go weird with those.
 
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Umm, what you have to understand is that the article behind that link is false.

There isn't a shred of evidence that Matt Jeffries would have applied the Golden Ratio to his starship project: this is merely the speculation of the writer here. Indeed, it would be unheard-of for an engineer to delve in numerological mumbo-jumbo in designing a functioning piece of machinery, contrary to what the writer implies.

Now, I am not saying that Matt Jeffries threw together a design that best matched whatever random pieces of wood were available at the shop. Nor am I claiming that he would have been constitutionally unable to apply the Golden Ratio, like a composer with a distant deadline might do with his or her music. I just want to point out that there is no evidence in that article, and no good argument for thinking that the evidence might exist.

The reverse process applied by the writer, of drawing the Golden Ratio on top of X and seeing if the lines happen to coincide with the features of X, is not valid proof. Generally, the lines would coincide, for any value of X, if one looked for random features without criteria. Although of course in this particular case, they sadly do not. The exact same results would be achieved by laying a thousand grids over the JJPrise and then selecting the ones that "supported the argument". Although again, having a set of facts in support of an argument is never proof, merely an indication that one is engaged in selecting of facts.

In the end, much of the TOS ship is just eyeballed, unless somehow proven otherwise, and the speculation in the article is not that proof. This is the true skill of an artist, with or without an engineering background. And the end results may vary. What may confuse the issue here is that the TOS ship was the work of one man, while the JJPrise was not, perhaps leading to an underappreciation of the latter skill set. But the modern set of artists has all-new access to tools of proportionality, it being possible to mathematically analyze the construct from arbitrary angles and all, long before the work is completed. No doubt writers of future articles will be able to uncover clever things the computer-assisted designers did with their art - be those true or imagined.

Timo Saloniemi
 
Umm, what you have to understand is that the article behind that link is false.

There isn't a shred of evidence that Matt Jeffries would have applied the Golden Ratio to his starship project: this is merely the speculation of the writer here. Indeed, it would be unheard-of for an engineer to delve in numerological mumbo-jumbo in designing a functioning piece of machinery, contrary to what the writer implies.

Now, I am not saying that Matt Jeffries threw together a design that best matched whatever random pieces of wood were available at the shop. Nor am I claiming that he would have been constitutionally unable to apply the Golden Ratio, like a composer with a distant deadline might do with his or her music. I just want to point out that there is no evidence in that article, and no good argument for thinking that the evidence might exist.

The reverse process applied by the writer, of drawing the Golden Ratio on top of X and seeing if the lines happen to coincide with the features of X, is not valid proof. Generally, the lines would coincide, for any value of X, if one looked for random features without criteria. Although of course in this particular case, they sadly do not. The exact same results would be achieved by laying a thousand grids over the JJPrise and then selecting the ones that "supported the argument". Although again, having a set of facts in support of an argument is never proof, merely an indication that one is engaged in selecting of facts.

In the end, much of the TOS ship is just eyeballed, unless somehow proven otherwise, and the speculation in the article is not that proof. This is the true skill of an artist, with or without an engineering background. And the end results may vary. What may confuse the issue here is that the TOS ship was the work of one man, while the JJPrise was not, perhaps leading to an underappreciation of the latter skill set. But the modern set of artists has all-new access to tools of proportionality, it being possible to mathematically analyze the construct from arbitrary angles and all, long before the work is completed. No doubt writers of future articles will be able to uncover clever things the computer-assisted designers did with their art - be those true or imagined.

Timo Saloniemi

1) Engineers have been using the golden ratio since the Parthenon. It's also in just about every introductory textbook on art written since the Renaissance. The suggestion that Jeffries wouldn't be aware of it is insane.

2) Equally groundless is the assertion it isn't present in the design of the Enterprise. The linked article demonstrates ample evidence of that. Both major elements and minor details conform to it.
 
I am genuinely curious which kinds of Klingons they plan to use (if at all). All types, like with the Romulans (“northerners” and “southerners”), or just TMP to NEM Worf-types?
 
Go for all. Just don't make the Augments look like white actors in blackface makeup. That's all you have to do. Even ENT pulled it off on a fraction of DSC's budget and the Augment Klingons looked just fine.
 
I felt that way well before Discovery, I still feel that way after it. People talk about the Borg being overused, they've got nothing on the Klingons.
The difference, for me, is the Borg got thoroughly depowered as well as overused.
 
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