Calvin and Hobbes, right? I see your sly reference.With black badges, on a black op in a black forest at midnight?
Dang it, broke my black crayon.
USS Enterprise (eventually) on Discovery?
- Thread starter EJD1984
- Start date
Might be....might be...l
I actually quite like the one that Kirk first comes into the movie with, until he later changes it. If all TMP uniforms were like that, just with colour variations for departments, they probably would've kept them for the other movies. In fact, Into Darkness uses a similar uniform for admiral Markus.
Exactly. The admiral uniform was OK enough to be used on nuPike in 2009.
It's easily the best costume in all of TMP with the exceptions of the Klingon uniforms and the Starfleet thruster suits.
Voyager, certainly. Much has been written about the Enterprise being basically a slightly redesigned Akira class...
Voyager, certainly. Much has been written about the Enterprise being basically a slightly redesigned Akira class...
Pretty sure Prax meant the ships seen in the shows, not just the title ships.
Those are sexy.Closer to this. I messed with them a bit today. Added and undershirt with a collar, a zipper,a belt and both enlisted and Officer ranking. I totally mangled the enlisted ranking there as I got in a hurry, but over all I like the look myself.
Oh boy, that's quite provocative for a pastor.
Prax mentioned "consistency" in their designs, which the ships from Enterprise unquestionably and deliberately lack. Between the Sarajevo and the Arctic Shuttle being basically alien designs painted grey, to the oddly proportioned Intrepid and the Warp Delta, which are consistent with the Enterprise only in that their warp nacelles have the same basic shape. On Voyager, the only thing any of their non-hero designs have in common is pointy, triangular saucer sections and virtually nothing else; this is apparently such a staple of Voyager era design that a completely alien design (Dauntless) could be mistaken for a starfleet ship just by giving it a pointy saucer.
For the hero ships, there's a bit of originality in Voyager's design and some obvious design callbacks to the Galaxy class. But for the Akiraprize??
He was saying that Discovery is the first Trek show to really have a consistency between the ships within it's own show, because of their budget and use of cg models(to contrast with TNG, which used miniatures, and included all the holdovers built for the TOS films, like the various excelsior models, the stargazer, oberth, etc). I'm saying that it's not the case at all. The TNG films, DS9, and Voyager collectively designed a bunch of new ships that all share a consistent look. The Runabout, Defiant, Voyager, Promethius, Akira, the other ships created for First Contact(which I don't know the names of), the Delta Flyer, the Equinox (& that other ship Harry Kim is captain of in Endgame), various other shuttles, and even that ship that the alien Arturis disguised to look like a Starfleet ship to fool the VOY crew.
I'll post pictures. Give me a moment...
Stargazer was a new design, designed to look like it came out of the TMP era, which is exactly the kind of thinking we are now saying doesn’t seem to be in place.
Voyager was worked up from the Runabout to a certain extent, but they are all sternbach based designs...the Nova class was something that was nearly the Defiant, and the pages of the Sternbach authored Technical Manual shows where that line was going. The only big change was the Sovereign style nacelles that we’re worked in after that ships debut...Sternbach engines tended towards the oval and rounded, Voyager being something more in the middle.
The Sovereign is full of Probert design hallmarks overlaid on on a Sternbach base...it has the stepped primary hull in places, like the Miranda, (which was from TWOK, but I do t think was Probert directly. Memory failure.) but the angular shapes on the nacelles are overlaid on the sternbach style...it literally looks like the enterprise D engines are stretching and pushing out of Probert TMP style engines, hence the split bussards and back of the nacelles.
That's not what I'm saying AT ALL.
I'm saying that APPEARANCE of consistency from previous trek productions is a consequence of the fact that the majority of the starships that appeared in those shows were recycled from models of OTHER ships and used most of the same parts. Even the "new" ships that we started to see in TNG were recycled multiple times with slight modifications to differentiate different ship types, to the point that we got used to the idea that there was some kind of "design lineage" between those ships in the way they borrowed each other's architecture.
For example: we've seen the Constitution refit, and we've seen the Reliant model. Then we see USS Stargazer, which is LITERALLY cobbled together from Enterprise-A model kits and pieces of a VF-1 Valkyrie. We see ships like the Bozeman, the Saratoga and the Lantree which are also just modifications of the old Reliant model; we see twenty different incarnations of the Grissom, we see a couple of Galaxy class starships, and we see a few ships that are basically just rearranged Galaxy classes (the Phoenix and the Southerland). We see the Enterprise-C model, and then we see a half dozen ships represented by the same model with a different registry and some cosmetic changes to the hull. And we see a metric fuckton of Excelsior classes, including the Enterprise-B making a comeback as the Lakota.
So it's "consistency" in that they're using and re-using the same models over and over again and whenever something new gets added, it gets reused again and again in much the same way. Voyager was no stranger to this either, it just had fewer opportunities to do this for STARFLEET ships since it was set so far away from Federation space.
The ultimate example of this is, ironically, TOS itself. NO show is more consistent in its depiction of what starships than the original series... after all, they were completely identical. When you're so strapped for cash that you can't even afford to DESIGN a new starship, let alone build models for ships you might have designed, consistency is the likely result.
Because, as I said, they were all using the same parts. The ships from First Contact were really the only ones to break the mold on that tradition, since John Eaves had a larger budget to work with and could really play with new concepts. This is how we got the Norway, the Steamrunner and the Akira classes. Which is interesting, because those three designs look NOTHING like any of the previous kitbashes that were built for TNG. And even Prometheus (which, in all fairness, is probably the most ridiculous thing Star Trek has ever produced) was only made possible thanks to advances in CG modeling.
And now we have the Discovery era, where you can design starships in fifty different ways and make models for every single one of them without having to ever share parts in common. Enterprise had this same feature, but only ever showed us three or four starship designs, most of which looked nothing alike.
And in the real world, that sort of "consistency" isn't really in evidence unless engineers are deliberately copying each other's designs. Look at the designs for aircraft, spacecraft and even naval vessels, you see trends come and from one period to the next, that are only "consistent" in the broadest possible sense.
It's sort of like the way 4th generation aircraft -- interceptors in particular -- all have variations on similar designs. The Mig-29, F-14, F-15. F-18 all have similar shapes but very different execution of those shapes... then you look at something luke the Su-27 and the Chengdu J-11 and realize that the latter is pretty much just a ripoff of the former. Same for the Mitsubishi F2, which is pretty much just a scaled-up F-16.
In spacecraft, there's the Soyuz capsule which the Russians have been using for 50 years, whose basic shape remains totally unchanged despite instrumentation, engines and basic technologies being completely replaced; then there's the Shenzhou capsule, which is based on the Soyuz and has the same shape but is actually 20% larger, has a completely different propulsion system, more internal space for its crew, and can be fitted with a more modern universal docking system. There's the SpaceX CRS Dragon, and the Dragon-II which is based on it and, due to modifications for crewed operations, ends up looking completely different. OTOH, there's Boeing's "Starliner" capsule which is similar in size and shape to the old Apollo capsules but has absolutely nothing in common with it otherwise; same for the Orion capsule, which is larger than Apollo and designed for the same kind of mission and has a similar appearance but has absolutely nothing in common with the old design at all.
And with all of that, you'd be tempted to think that American spacecraft designs have some basic consistency in that they're always cone-shaped capsules with a hatch on the side and some sort of propulsion system attached to the heat shield... except there's one freaking huge exception to that rule in the form of the Space Shuttle program. And the successor to the space shuttle -- if you can even call it that -- is one tenth its size and looks nothing like it.
The sort of "consistency" some of us seem to be expecting is purely a consequence of budget constraints and the limits of model-building up through the 1990s. It is not the result of design choices, but the result of design compromises.
It's sort of like the way 4th generation aircraft -- interceptors in particular -- all have variations on similar designs. The Mig-29, F-14, F-15. F-18 all have similar shapes but very different execution of those shapes... then you look at something luke the Su-27 and the Chengdu J-11 and realize that the latter is pretty much just a ripoff of the former. Same for the Mitsubishi F2, which is pretty much just a scaled-up F-16.
In spacecraft, there's the Soyuz capsule which the Russians have been using for 50 years, whose basic shape remains totally unchanged despite instrumentation, engines and basic technologies being completely replaced; then there's the Shenzhou capsule, which is based on the Soyuz and has the same shape but is actually 20% larger, has a completely different propulsion system, more internal space for its crew, and can be fitted with a more modern universal docking system. There's the SpaceX CRS Dragon, and the Dragon-II which is based on it and, due to modifications for crewed operations, ends up looking completely different. OTOH, there's Boeing's "Starliner" capsule which is similar in size and shape to the old Apollo capsules but has absolutely nothing in common with it otherwise; same for the Orion capsule, which is larger than Apollo and designed for the same kind of mission and has a similar appearance but has absolutely nothing in common with the old design at all.
And with all of that, you'd be tempted to think that American spacecraft designs have some basic consistency in that they're always cone-shaped capsules with a hatch on the side and some sort of propulsion system attached to the heat shield... except there's one freaking huge exception to that rule in the form of the Space Shuttle program. And the successor to the space shuttle -- if you can even call it that -- is one tenth its size and looks nothing like it.
The sort of "consistency" some of us seem to be expecting is purely a consequence of budget constraints and the limits of model-building up through the 1990s. It is not the result of design choices, but the result of design compromises.
Voyager, certainly. Much has been written about the Enterprise being basically a slightly redesigned Akira class...
Doug Drexler would both slightly agree and strongly disagree with the Akira thing.
Except we know the design choices. The Ambassador is designed to look halfway between the excelsior and the Galaxy, but they ignore that in generations and try the same concept by sticking bits onto an excelsior. In both case though there is a conscious effort to make something look like an interstitial design step, with features of both.
The design features and language of 24th century ships is set by Sternbach with the D, and refined in later ships...only the Defiant differs much, and that’s intentional. The Nebula is not a kitbash, despite its reputation, but is in fact designed to look like the Miranda was to the constitution, but to the Galaxy. (The Miranda also is not a kitbash, but a designed ship, intended to resemble the Connie. Again, we have an intended design school and lineage being set up.)
There are basically two planned design eras in Trek, the movie era and the TNG era. We also see other races get design languages...Cardassian is particularly developed, but so are others. You can see it, and you can read interviews and notes showing it.
... but they couldn't pull it off
so they built the Enterprise-C instead.
Like most of the other ships in the TNG era, the Ent-C was a compromise design when they found themselves unable to deliver something more complicated and intricate. The same thing happened with Proberts original shuttlecraft design: they couldn't build a convincing set, so they evenually scrapped it and went with something simpler. In this case, "Something Simpler" is a redress of the Gallileo shuttlecraft from "The Final Frontier," so once again we have a 23rd century design being jazzed up to look like a 24th century one, but also looking completely unlike the design that it replaced, and we call it "consistency" for some reason.
Sternbach didn't design the D. Probert did. Sternbach filled out some of the DETAILS of the ship, and many of those details are all over the place (the aforementioned shuttlecraft problem, and don't even get me started on those little shuttlepods).
Overall point: you're acting like the "design language" of the TNG era is the way it was always intended from the beginning. That is not and has never been the case. The designs from TNG became what they are because of the aggregate of design choices made by artists, set designers and builders, and many of their choices were made not because of what they wanted, but because of what was and wasn't practical to build. The Enterprise-C is an excellent example of this; they managed to build the wall model in the observation lounge to Probert's specifications, but when it came to actually building a filming model for "Yesterday's Enterprise" they did something else entirely.
Yes it is:
The models, built from parts of Galaxy-class AMT Star Trek model kits, No's 6618 and 6619, differed from its later definitive appearance in that they sported two smaller warp nacelles where the sensor pod was to be positioned and that the secondary hull was more elongated. Captain Benjamin Sisko's desk top model (having made two early appearances as desktop model in TNG: "Future Imperfect", "The Wounded"), representing the destroyed Melbourne was retrofitted with the redesigned sensor pod after its first few appearances in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
[...]The design upgrades for the Nebula-class were done by Mike Okuda and Rick Sternbach and the model was built by Greg Jein. In Drexler's blog, Okuda elaborated further: "As so often happens with this kind of project, we didn't give Greg enough time to accomplish this, so we decided to retain the original scale of the Galaxy-class ship saucer. I suggested the original 'AWACS' pod in response to a producer's observation that the ship might otherwise appear unbalanced. Unfortunately, the AWACS pod didn't look as elegant as we had hoped in "The Wounded". Rick Sternbach came to the rescue with the cool triangular pod that we used in later episodes." The time constraints could also explain why the USS Phoenix is not equipped with reaction control thruster assemblies. Fortunately, Jein was indeed able to save some time by using the molds of the recently constructed four-foot Enterprise-D studio model to cast the saucer section and the nacelles, though he was not able to carry over Okuda's original notion of altering details to make it appear as a smaller vessel.
Here, too, we see a design compromise. That the Nebula wound up looking ANYTHING like the Galaxy class, in part or in whole, is owed to the fact that the original design for the ship came from OFF THE SHELF model kits that were spliced together for background shots. When it came time to design a filming model, they didn't even have time to change the SCALE.
Now that's just untrue. Its own production designer says:
Visual Effects Supervisor Kenneth Ralston told Cinefantastique 44, 12 (1982), “The ship takes the best of the Enterprise, rearranges it, and adds a few goodies of its own.”
It doesn't "resemble" the Connie, it IS the Connie, rearranged and embellished.This is the PERFECT example of what I'm talking about.
Because the Cardassians did not have a "design language." The Cardassians had exactly TWO types of starship in their entire fleet, and one of them was just a Galor class with a bunch of shit stuck on its back. What you're calling a "design language" is literally just "The limits of what they could afford to make." You might as well theorize that the Star Trek universe has an "evolutionary language" that explains why all that aliens look just like humans.
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