I find it very unlikely that Eaves was consulted for what ship design went on this Diploma. The artist most likely just grabbed a ship they had on hand. Though that does probably mean Eaves resubmitted it for Picard if they had it on file. Unless CBS has all the concept art for the original Star Trek Online. Also I disagree with everything else you said in that post, none of the DSC designs would fit in the FC+ era. But this isn’t the thread to argue that.
The "game" wasn't "aborted", it became Star Trek Online. (the original company went belly up though) CRYPTIC bought all of those assets and did use some of them early on in the game.
Yeah, sorry... for some reason lately my REPLY button has been connecting to the wrong posts. Or it could just be I'm getting more senile.
My issue with the DSC Starfleet ships that he designed for BATBS is that they all seem to be a hodgepodge of different eras. The Shenzhou and the Engle classes look like they derived from the NX-01; the Hoover, Malachowski and Nimitz classes look like they'd fit right in post-TUC; and the Cardenas class looks like a miniature Sovereign class saucer with four nacelles. On the other hand, the very idea for the plaque could've come from Eaves, given his aviation kick.
The whole idea of a "lightspeed club" strikes me as ridiculous. Surely in Trek's world, warp speed is as commonplace as taking a car journey? JLP gets an award for "flying level" at warp speed in a Federation starship?
We've always assumed that the differences in ship designs across different eras represented progress over time, but is that necessarily so? We hardly ever saw any Starfleet ships in TOS, and the ones we saw were all Constitution-class (plus a couple of others in TAS and TOS-R). So who's to say those other design styles didn't exist contemporaneously all along? Just because we saw them introduced in a certain order, that doesn't mean they had to exist in that same order in-universe. After all, TNG and DS9 established that many ship designs from the 2280s-90s were still in use in the 2360s-70s, which already undermined the assumption of a linear temporal progression. Fundamentally, though, we should keep in mind that this is fiction and art, not reality. If a dozen different artists are given the same subject, they'll depict it in a dozen different ways. The difference between TOS designs, movie designs, DSC designs, etc. can be chalked up to individual artistic expression, and if we can accept that Kirstie Alley and Robin Curtis are the same fictitious character interpreted by different performers, we should be able to accept that Matt Jefferies and John Eaves starships are the same fictitious technology interpreted by different designers, and that the difference in "modernity" reflects the passage of time and the changes in taste and technology in the real world.
The quick and dirty answer to that question is, no, it's not necessarily so due to the lack of info about the era. But... That's the thing, though: this is fiction, which means (to me, anyway), that if those dozens of different artists are going to play in this fictional playground, the least they could do (in my opinion) is to do their homework in regards to what there is to know about the era in question. As a Star Trek novel writer, you yourself do tons of research into the story you plan to write so you can be as accurate as possible to the source material. You don't write a story that completely contradicts the fictional universe of the show you're writing about. So if I was given the job, say, to design a ship for the show Firefly (a franchise that I know nothing about), I'm not going to just make some generic design based on a very basic description of what ships in that show look like. I'm going to actually watch the show, read supplementary material, and talk to other people who do know the show better than I do in order to design the most accurate ship I can.
The US armed forces give you an award for serving in comfortable places like Germany, or Italy. The US Navy gives you an award just for serving on a boat... We will live in an era where you get an award for everything, guess it is still the case in the future.
I hope he would get more than a participation award. Data had racked up a bunch of prestigious medals and awards in TNG. Maybe he outdid his captain.
That means getting the broad strokes, understanding the story and the important stuff. It does NOT mean that you're forbidden to introduce your own artistic variations. Compare all the various Andorian designs over the decades. They all get the basics right -- blue skin, white hair, antennae. But each makeup designer has brought their own individual artistic interpretation to that design, just as every comic-book artist who's drawn Peter Parker or Wonder Woman has rendered the character's face in their own individual style rather than exactly copying what their predecessors did. Yes, but I still write it in my own style. I don't try to copy anyone else's approach, and my way of writing Trek is different from others', in that I take a more hard-SF approach, for one thing. The books I write are in my own individual style and voice. They're not generic Star Trek books, they're Christopher L. Bennett books that happen to be about Star Trek. And hell, I change a lot of the source material. I stay true to the literal text, but I've often substantially reinterpreted the underlying meaning of a thing from what was claimed in the episode, or revealed that it was actually something different from what it appeared to be. I take the raw material and make it my own. Ultimately, this is about being creative. It's not just about facts or details. It's not about getting the right answer on a test or something. It's about people using their imagination and talent to create interesting things, to bring their own personal style to their work. The details are just the raw material we use to create with. They're the start of the process, not the end goal. It is ludicrous hyperbole to say that changing a few superficial details constitutes "complete contradiction." If it has a saucer and nacelles, if it has warp drive and transporters, then it's a Starfleet design, regardless of the exact shape of the nacelles or whatever.
I'm not implying that anyone is beholden to copy what came before and not be able to introduce their own spin on things. I'm saying that if your show is advertised as taking place in a specific era that has been seen before, then try to emulate that era as best you can and then extrapolate from there, not make something completely different and then use the "visual reboot" excuse to justify it. Where did I say that you copied anyone's writing style? I said that your Trek stories have to be confined to the show's canon. (i.e. you can't write that Earth's first contact with aliens was with the Venkaterians, because that's not what happened in the show.) So you see no problem whatsoever that Eaves used a design he made as a contemporary to the Sovereign class for a ship from the 2320's or even earlier?
Again that "completely different" nonsense. You really need to look up the word "complete" in the dictionary. The point is that being faithful does not preclude bringing your own distinct style. Different artists have their own design styles just as different authors have their own writing styles, and that means the same artists rendering the same thing will render it differently. It is misunderstanding creativity to mistake differences in artistic interpretation for in-universe contradictions. John Romita, Jr.'s Peter Parker looks very different from John Romita, Sr.'s Peter Parker, but that doesn't mean he got plastic surgery. In-story, he looks the same, but it's filtered through different designers' aesthetics. And it is wrong to claim that canon applies to anything as trivial as the shape of a nacelle or the kind of texture a hull has. If you can recast an actor, you can redesign a ship. A canon is a story, and any story can be told in more than one way. Like I said, we've just assumed their differences in design represented a chronological progression, but we have no proof of that. We have to be willing to update our assumptions to fit new data. Besides, again, this is creativity. None of this actually exists; it's all just ideas being expressed by artists. As long as John Eaves is the one designing for the show, then it's his right to make those decisions, as much as it's my right to make the decisions about my own work. That's the way this works. Art is personal, and that means different people will make different choices. That's what makes it worthwhile. Star Trek wouldn't exist if Gene Roddenberry and his colleagues hadn't wanted to do something different from what other SFTV creators had done. None of the starship designs you're so protective of would exist if Roddenberry and Jefferies hadn't wanted to do something different from all the flying-saucer and rocketship spacecraft that preceded TOS. They defied past assumptions rather than being constrained by them, and that's what made their creation work.
Please someone tell me what this the Measure of a Man thing regarding Picard's service history is. I don't recall such line and I probably haven't seen the extended version.
Sorry, submitting an old artwork that was originally made for something else is pretty much an opposite of creativity.
There is a line that mentions that Picard served on a ship called Reliant with Admiral Nakamura in the extended version of Measure of a Man on the Blu-Ray release of the season. Did you read the rest of the post? It was intelligent. That's not what Christopher was talking about, but ok. I doubt that very much. His role on the shows are strictly concept art, he doesn't get very many story details. When he was designing the DSC fed ships, he wasn't even told why the nacelles couldn't be round, so his head canon was that they were related to the new form of space travel that the show would have, that was the limit of his knowledge, he didn't even know it was a spore drive.
Oh, on the contrary -- we creative people recycle our unused ideas all the time. We always come up with tons of stuff that doesn't end up getting used, and naturally we look for opportunities to use it elsewhere, because it would be wasteful not to. Every writer or artist had a drawer full of unsold or abandoned ideas waiting to be reused or reinvented. Heck, Gene Roddenberry did plenty of that. He turned his rejected Assignment: Earth pitch into a Trek episode/backdoor pilot, and when that didn't sell, he revamped it as The Questor Tapes. Then he recycled characters from Star Trek Phase II and Questor into TNG, and cribbed the "Post-Atomic Horror" stuff from Genesis II/Planet Earth. Similarly, a lot of George Lucas's early, unused ideas and character/planet names that fell by the wayside in the development of Star Wars ended up getting repurposed in later movies. If you put the work into creating something in the first place, then it doesn't matter whether you use it immediately or 20 years later -- it's still the fruit of your labors, and its first use is still its first use. There's no sense in throwing it away and letting that work go to waste.
And yet in all those examples you mention, the base concept was drastically altered to fit in the new context. This was not the case with this ship. It would have been one thing if the base shape had been retained, and the details altered to fit the era, but that's not what happened. I have worked as professional illustrator, and I sure as hell have never submitted some old work I just happened to have lying around. If you're commissioned to make an artwork for something, then you absolutely need to familiarise yourself with the context and create something appropriate.