The Original 1701 Design

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Absolutely, Lucas wanted to present the glory days of the republic where ships were not so industrialized but something more shinier and sleek. That is Star Trek or what I mean is, that WAS Star Trek.

Star Trek's Original Connie is kind of it's own style IMO.

It started a trend of it's own that others before didn't really do.

Lucas team had their own Industrial Space design filled with Greeblies and many hard edges

Matt Jefferies take on the TOS Connie was a more elegant design IMO

 

[fireproof78]

Well, it was still slicked back surfaces and UFOs at the time with scifi.

 

[STEPhon IT]

More that was Flash Gordon.

Very true, but Lucas was borrowing from many creators.

 

[fireproof78]

Very true, but Lucas was borrowing from many creators.

Yes, but I don't think Star Trek was one of them.

I think Star Trek and the PT happened to look at similar inspiration for their concepts, i.e. earlier science fiction works that involved sleek and metallic looking rockets and shiny surfaces.

And really it's only the Naboo who have that look. The Republic and the Trade Federation still have that very industrial style look, even in concept art:

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

And really it's only the Naboo who have that look. The Republic and the Trade Federation still have that very industrial style look, even in concept art:

Design Director Doug Chiang Shares His Thoughts About Working on Star Wars: Episode I & II

Oh boy… There are quite a few! I always consider George my main mentor in terms of film and design because I didn’t go to art school. On a big scale, one of my greatest achievements was becoming a better designer through working on the movie and with George. Individually, it’s all about the specific design of the Trade Barons in the Federation, coming up with the aesthetic for the droids, and coming up with the aesthetic for Naboo.

There are two vehicles that stand out for me: the Naboo Starfighter and the Queen’s ship. They are both in the same vein, but that was a very bold design statement to me. George said to create something that was super elegant: a chrome ship. At the time, I thought Star Wars meant World War II aesthetics that included flat textures that are dirty and gritty. But here, he wanted to make a different statement. When I first heard about this idea, I got excited but I was also terrified because I thought, ‘Would this actually fit in the Star Wars universe?’

Did the design fit into the new universe?

It actually did, because what we were constructing at that time was a design history of the Star Wars universe. If you look at Episodes IV, V and VI as the peak of the industrial revolution design in terms of manufacturing – where everything was stamped out for mass quantity – we were now going back to the craftsman era where everything was hand crafted. Every vehicle and design was a piece of art. That was the approach that I took for the Naboo Starfighter and also the Queen’s ship.

Naboo design was all about artistic hand made craftsman level design, and George Lucas wanted a Chrome ship. So Doug Chiang gave him what he wanted.

Well, it was still slicked back surfaces and UFOs at the time with scifi.

Designing the First Enterprise

As art director, Walter Matthew “Matt” Jefferies was assigned to design the Starship Enterprise. “In my approach to Star Trek, I wanted to be as practical as possible,” he told Star Trek: The Magazine in an interview that was published in 2000. “I could tell Gene was serious enough, but I really didn’t know where to start. I knew the Enterprise was going to be on the cutting edge of the future, but essentially he gave me the job of finding a shape and I didn’t know what the shape looked like.”


Although Roddenberry knew a lot about his ship, he had never visualized it. His only guidelines were a list of what he did not want to see — no rockets, no jets, no firestreams. The starship was not to look like a vintage science-fiction rocketship, but neither could it resemble anything that would too quickly date the design.


Gene described the 100-150 man crew, outer space, fantastic, unheard of speed and that we didn’t have to worry about gravity. He had emphasized that there were to be no fins, no wings, no smoke trails, no flames, no rocket.

Somewhere between the cartoons of the past and the reality of the present, Matt Jefferies had to get at a design of the future.

In the 1960s, the benchmark for dramatic science fiction was Lost in Space and the popular image of futuristic space travel was the flying saucer. Jefferies’ early sketches reflect this. But Roddenberry wanted something that could host a larger crew, a ship that could travel at incredible speeds, so he told Jefferies to go back to the drawing board.


His next proposal was the now familiar “ringship”, which appeared on display in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. (See The Ringship Enterprise Mystery Solved.) Roddenberry rejected this too.

Extremely powerful

The theory that space could be warped was first proposed by Albert Einstein in 1905 and first demonstrated, according to Star Trek, by Zefram Cochrane in 2063, proving that objects could travel faster than the speed of light.


Warp drive is a delicately balanced, intricate web of chemistry, physics, mathematics and mystery. “I was concerned about the design of ship that Gene told me would have warp drive,” Jefferies remembered.


I thought, ‘What the hell is warp drive?’ But I gathered that this ship had to have powerful engines — extremely powerful. To me, that meant that they had to be designed away from the body. Boy, I tried a lot of ideas. I wanted to stay away from the flying saucer shape. The ball or sphere, as you’ll see in some of the sketches, was my idea, but I ended up with the saucer after all. Gene would come in to look over what I was doing and say, ‘I don’t like this,’ or, ‘This looks good.’ If Gene liked it, he’d ask the boss [Herbert Solow] and if the boss liked it, then I’d work on that idea for a while.


For the hull, I didn’t really want a saucer because of the term flying saucer and the best pressure vessel of course is a ball, so I started playing with that. But the bulk got in the way and the ball just didn’t work. I flattened it out and I guess we wound up with a saucer! I did it in color on a black matt board, and by the time I finished I thought we really had something.


It worked. “It looked better than the other sketches and Gene said, ‘That one looks good!’ They — and Bobby Justman too when he came aboard later — were a dream to work with.”

Smooth surface
Although they now had a shape, it was not the end of Jefferies’ efforts. He theorized that since space was such a dangerous place, starship engineers would not put any important machinery on the outside of the vessel. This meant that, logically, the hull should be smooth.

Not everyone agreed and Jefferies had to fight his corner. “I constantly had to fight anyone who wanted to put surface details on the thing,” he says.

Another advantage of the smooth design was that it would reflect light, and at this point it was not a foregone conclusion that the ship would be white.

I thought the atmosphere or lack of it out there in space might produce different colors, and this gave us a chance to be able to play light and to throw color on it.

Registry number
Jefferies was also responsible for the Enterprise‘s famous registry number.

I wanted a very simple number that could be spotted quickly. You’d have to eliminate 3, 6, 8 and 9, so I just went for 1701, which incidentally and coincidentally, happens to be very close to the license number on my airplane — NC-17740. But I have never really stepped out and squashed the rumor that the number on the Enterprise came off my airplane.

After the number had been decided, Jefferies would explain that the Enterprise was Starfleet’s seventeenth starship design and that it was the first in its series, hence the number “1701.”

Matt Jefferies did try to get away from the saucer aesthetic, but in the end, he couldn't.
Matt Jefferies really wanted to go with the Sphere.

 

[publiusr]

The Mon Cal ships are most like TMP…along with the Trade Federation.

 

[Ithekro]

Several Seperatist ships are Quarren designs. Same planet as the Mon Cal, so that tracks.

 

[aridas sofia]

I am confused and trying to understand what is taken away when the original remains?

What I was asking about had to do with my curiosity why people making Star Trek made the decisions they did. At a broad level, we can be sure their decisions were strongly influenced by what they thought the audience wanted. Or, by what they thought the audience would accept once they saw it. In Star Wars, the calculation has been that nothing can change. Don’t recast, meticulously follow the 1977 models, interiors, designs, etc. Rogue One literally dovetails into the original Star Wars seamlessly. Star Trek has been the opposite, despite being separated by Star Wars by only eight years.

So, it isn’t about whether the original still exists. It’s about why, when making new content showing the same ship, costume, etc, as what was shown almost fifty years ago, Star Trek goes a different direction, while Star Wars keeps things the same. I pointed out that there is less deviation in the costuming than in the ship designs. Why? Why do they think Matt Jefferies’ work doesn’t hold up?

Jefferies himself told us why he wanted the designs to look the way he did - in universe, so the ship could be worked on from the inside instead of putting people into the harsh environment of space to do repairs. From a production perspective, to allow weird lighting to play off of large swaths of smooth hull. The only time this last technique was really employed was in TMP, where they took things two steps further by also having the hull iridescent and having the ship partly illuminate itself. But after that, ILM dulled the finish and purposely took away some of the model’s ability to look this way, in part because they did not film FX in a way that could take advantage of it.

Trumbull built a popup FX house around an aesthetic, while ILM ditched the aesthetic because it did not fit their FX house.

I think my answer lies in the visuals of Star Trek not being seen as a vehicle to do art, but rather only being seen as a means to convey a story. I think Jefferies’ design, and the TMP revision to it, were done the way they were done to tell stories artistically. They are smooth without interrupting details to let lights play off the surfaces of the models. But I don’t know, and that’s why I am taking advantage of the groupthink abilities of this BBS to solicit opinions.

Sure, the models still exist. The episodes still exist. But arguably, nobody ever did what Jefferies thought could be done with that original model. And despite supposedly being set on that ship, these new treks, funded by much bigger budgets, haven’t even tried.

 

[fireproof78]

So, it isn’t about whether the original still exists. It’s about why, when making new content showing the same ship, costume, etc, as what was shown almost fifty years ago, Star Trek goes a different direction, while Star Wars keeps things the same. I pointed out that there is less deviation in the costuming than in the ship designs. Why? Why do they think Matt Jefferies’ work doesn’t hold up?

I would ask the same about TMP. Why did they update the Enterprise from an artistic perspective? To me, that change is larger than a lot of changes that have come later (save for some the Kelvin, for obvious reasons) and also sets an interesting precedent of how the Enterprise can be updated.

STAR WARS is not really the same. It is a fantasy series, which means the vehicles are as much like horses to a fantasy. They are a part of the texture, and give that visual appeal, but largely are static because the galaxy is largely static, with the characters being our movers and shakers.

STAR TREK has always been about our future of our humanity, in some form, so with technological understanding comes the tendency to update and add more to it. A product of the times, just like TOS is the 60s, TMP the 70s, TNG the 80s, etc. It flows that way because humanity goes that way.

The other side, at least from the artists I have known and worked with, has been the desire to take a familiar design and give their touch to it. To explore it in a way that appeals to the artist rather than worry about the audience.

 

[STEPhon IT]

Yes, but I don't think Star Trek was one of them.

I think Star Trek and the PT happened to look at similar inspiration for their concepts, i.e. earlier science fiction works that involved sleek and metallic looking rockets and shiny surfaces.

And really it's only the Naboo who have that look. The Republic and the Trade Federation still have that very industrial style look, even in concept art:

Yes, the Naboo was what I was talking about. I like that a lot, there's a beauty to it which I value from TOS. We've all seen Donny's 3D of the Enterprise, to me, its an amazing rendition of Matt Jefferies work. Has so much weight and wonder of such; I would love to see this version appears again in future Star Trek television.

 

[drt]

STAR WARS is not really the same. It is a fantasy series, which means the vehicles are as much like horses to a fantasy. They are a part of the texture, and give that visual appeal, but largely are static because the galaxy is largely static, with the characters being our movers and shakers.

STAR TREK has always been about our future of our humanity, in some form, so with technological understanding comes the tendency to update and add more to it. A product of the times, just like TOS is the 60s, TMP the 70s, TNG the 80s, etc. It flows that way because humanity goes that way.

I concur that the different fantasy/our future settings go a long way to explaining the difference between the Wars/Trek approaches. However, I think that another big element is that Star Wars being part of the visual effects revolution of the 70s, was better futureproofed with regard to modern audience expectations. Do we really think that if Star Wars had been released in 1966 the design language of future productions would have remained as static?

It also probably doesn't help that Roddenberry himself changed the entire look of the Trek universe for TMP, essentially granting leeway to future productions to do something similar. If Phase II, with its it's slightly updated but much closer to TOS aesthetic, had been the next Trek production, I'm curious if there would have been more pressure to keep things more static.

 

[fireproof78]

It also probably doesn't help that Roddenberry himself changed the entire look of the Trek universe for TMP, essentially granting leeway to future productions to do something similar.

Agreed. This is my biggest point is that the set up was always that the Enterprise could be updated as times allowed for. While the Enterprise is timeless in one sense, there was already the set up for it to be updated for the times.

 

[aridas sofia]

Updated is different than what is going on in SNW, where the ship is not only different, but rescaled to be 50% bigger. TMP had the refit as an integral part of the story. The design met the needs of the script. We can debate the extent to which it was updated, but I defer to the judgement of the people making the film that a different level of detail was needed to translate a design made for a TV into one for a movie screen. Plus, within the context of the TMP story, it is possible to imagine that ship is not complete, and that after trials it would be “painted” and subtly altered to look even more like its TOS predecessor.

“STAR WARS is not really the same.”

It is when you confine the discussion to artistic decisions. That’s what I’ve largely been doing. I agree that Star Wars is a fantasy, but honestly, the way Star Trek treats science is not like hard science fiction. It’s a mix of science and fantasy at best. Both are on a spectrum, with Star Wars tipping the balance towards fantasy, and Star Trek towards science.

 

[fireproof78]

It is when you confine the discussion to artistic decisions. That’s what I’ve largely been doing. I agree that Star Wars is a fantasy, but honestly, the way Star Trek treats science is not like hard science fiction. It’s a mix of science and fantasy at best. Both are on a spectrum, with Star Wars tipping the balance towards fantasy, and Star Trek towards science.

But the approach was completely different. One was fantasy with things being entrenched, like vehicle styles, while Star Trek said "we can update at any point."

The design met the needs of the script. We can debate the extent to which it was updated, but I defer to the judgement of the people making the film that a different level of detail was needed to translate a design made for a TV into one for a movie screen.

Ok.

I defer to artistic choice the desire to update a design again for a series made now.

Feel the rules apply the same.

 

[publiusr]

The start of the 70's (late-60s) to the end of the 1980s felt longer than a century to me...and not just because I was younger.

Psychically (not as in psionics) it was more than 8 years between Trek and Wars.

The Moon landing and 2001 gave us a future positive environment that made TOS.

Vietnam, hot rod culture, even the F-4...along with Lucas' love for WWII films... flipped the script.

Space Seed...the good guys were in the clean, spotless ship---the villains in the gungy, lived in DY-100. Enterprise as Memphis Bell. Heroes.

Star Wars:
Anti-heroes and heroes are in lived-in hot rod shops with hoods off the car so you can see the engine.

The clean ships had the space-nazis.

What spelled the difference between Trek and Wars? The generation gap and Nam'.

The Enterprise was the clean PT-109...Kirk was JFK.

The Star Destroyer was a spearhead supertanker wearing a stahl-helm... it's Captain was Nixon, the TIE fighter police cars whose B-pillar was made to crack your head open.

Star Trek--like the 60's--died at Altamont

 

[Shaw]

Well, I'd say the original design surpasses pretty much anything that has followed... at least through to the mid 2010s. We are too close to the Discovery/SNW Enterprise to make a good comparison of its reception against the original, but it has already far exceeded the version from the Kelvin movies (where even the people making the films didn't seem to care for the design, and fans seem to like the designs for the Kelvin and Franklin more than the Enterprise).

The reason for the success of the original design is that it isn't an example of a 1960s design, but it is a good example of a utilitarian design. And this arose from both Roddenberry's instructions of what not to include and Jefferies' own design sensibilities. Jefferies was willing to apply what most people since haven't... essentially, less is more.

The original design wasn't of a time in that it wasn't meant to look cool. If we were to use a real world comparison, imagine asking someone of the late 1970s which design of aircraft, a 737 or a Concorde, would still be in use in the 2020s. Remember, these are people who thought we'd have flying cars by the 2010s. The idea that general aircraft design wouldn't change much in 50+ years was unimaginable back then and, lets face it, the Concorde looks cool. If you were to bring someone from the 1970s forward in time to an airport today, they would be very disappointed by how little things have changed.

There are other similar examples. I grew up around the Navy (I lived in Coronado, I worked out on the same beach where the characters in the recent Top Gun movie played football). From 1946 to 1986 the Blue Angels used 7 different types of aircraft for their demonstrations... since then they've been using versions of the F/A-18. Remember that the first Top Gun movie came out in 1986, and the F/A-18 was already in wide use by that time. Would audiences of that first movie, if told of a 2022 sequel, believe that the hero aircraft would be a version of an F/A-18?

I mean think about it... could a movie like The Final Countdown (1980) work today? Would a current aircraft carrier sent back 39 years (to 1984) provide the striking visual and technological differences that made that movie work? The aircraft carrier from that movie (the USS Nimitz) is still in use today.

The point is that when you hit on an optimal design, it becomes harder to improve on it. The biggest visual change in commercial aircraft since the 1960s is the replacement of jet engines with turbofan engines and the addition of winglets (both of which help with the efficiency). It isn't that we liked the 1960s style of aircraft more than the Concorde's (1970s) look, because the design wasn't based on style to begin with.

But getting back to the Enterprise, I'd say that almost every update to the design since the original has been a step backward. The original design worked because we aren't supposed to know how it worked. By setting the show so far off in the future, any ideas you have as to how something works is (by definition) wrong... because we live today.

Lets go back to our Navy for an example of how this works. Lets say that stories of our Navy are sent back to around 1800. The stories of a metal ship the size of a small city that travels faster than almost anything of the time powered for decades by a few pounds of a magic element would be considered impossible by the science at that time. Maybe the stories included pictures of our ships and submarines, and fans of the stories (wanting to make them real) start altering the designs with the technology of their period... you know, basically steam punk versions of our stuff.

Our submarines of today aren't very visually interesting, so people start adding stuff to them. Soon you start to have submarines that look more like those of the 1930s as updates to our current designs.

The TMP Enterprise is exactly that compared to the original.

We don't know how the original Enterprise maneuvered. Then again, we aren't supposed to know. But the designers of the TMP Enterprise decided to add 1970s tech to the design with maneuvering thrusters all over the ship. By the Kelvin movie version you have literal rockets all over the ship... exactly the type of thing Roddenberry expressly asked Jefferies to exclude from the original Enterprise's design.

And it is not just things like warp drive we aren't supposed to understand, the impulse engines are meant to be just as much a mystery. If you think you know how they work, how does the Enterprise go in reverse using the impulse engines?

The thing is, the original design was also intended to omit style. Roddenberry wanted to avoid anything that would tie it to a time period (and used designs from the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serial as examples of what to avoid). Of the designs shown to Roddenberry in the summer of 1964, the final design was the least stylish. Add to that Jefferies' thinking that everything would be inside, and you end up with a very plain (and streamlined) design.

As to why people have found the need to change the Enterprise since the original design... it is actually quite understandable. To many artists, the original Enterprise looks like a blank canvas. Think about some of the early Trek book cover art were the artists felt the need to add additional details to the Enterprise. To a lot of people the original design lacks panache, which is also why so many people redesign it in the art forum. But that is also what makes the original design elegant and timeless.

The Enterprise was designed in the 1960s, but it is not a design of the 1960s. An example of a design that is of the 1960s would be the Seaview from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. It has the same style/feel of the 1960s Corvette Stingray. The exact type of thing the Enterprise design was lacking (but, oddly enough, the Klingon Battlecruiser does include).

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

The original design wasn't of a time in that it wasn't meant to look cool. If we were to use a real world comparison, imagine asking someone of the late 1970s which design of aircraft, a 737 or a Concorde, would still be in use in the 2020s. Remember, these are people who thought we'd have flying cars by the 2010s. The idea that general aircraft design wouldn't change much in 50+ years was unimaginable back then and, lets face it, the Concorde looks cool. If you were to bring someone from the 1970s forward in time to an airport today, they would be very disappointed by how little things have changed.

If you want a "Futuristic Looking" Concorde Replacement, it's coming.
It just took 60+ years to get there.

Concordes replacement from Boom Technology Inc.:

Spoiler: Boom's new "Overture" design for Commercial Supersonic Passenger Flight

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As for Next-Gen Sub-Sonic Civilian Air Transportation:

There's the Boeing TTBW (Transonic Truss-Braced Wing)
This has the best chance of replacing a good chunk of the 737 small Single-Aisle Medium-Haul Airliner market, which is the vast majority of aircraft in the civilian passenger airline fleet.

Spoiler: NASA's X-66A is the Boeing TTBW (Transonic Truss Braced Wing)

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Between the Boeing 737 & Airbus A320, both occupy a HUGE chunk of the Passenger Airliner market fleet.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

747's still take the skies and never has the aviation community thought the design needed to be altered.

Wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747#Variants

 

[UssGlenn]

There's the Boeing TTBW (Transonic Truss-Braced Wing)
This has the best chance of replacing a good chunk of the 737 small Single-Aisle Medium-Haul Airliner market, which is the vast majority of aircraft in the civilian passenger airline fleet.

The high wing and engine placement reminds me of a Ford Trimotor (minus one engine)

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

The high wing and engine placement reminds me of a Ford Trimotor (minus one engine)

What's old is new again, with some modifications of course.