Do you mean the runabout is as ugly as the defiant is pretty?
USS Enterprise (eventually) on Discovery?
- Thread starter EJD1984
- Start date
I always thought that the designers of the Ent-D and Ent-C did not look very far for their ship design inspiration:
Neither. Both are hideous.
To me, the Defiant aesthetic suggests an embodiment of the principle that function determines form. It's intended to be a bleeding-edge prototype. All of that is communicated perfectly by the model.
Not saying that its embodient is of functionality. I'm just saying that seeing it among TNG era ships doesn't feel like a through line of similar design
Well, IIRC it was just a thrown together testbed, never meant to be put into production and was put into storage with some heavily flaws still in the design. The other pathfinder ships looked more starfleet.
I'm no artist, and this is super-crude, but you get the idea. The DS9 Defiant has always looked to me like a bunch of pieces that don't really go together all that well.
In Slim Pickens' voice from 'Dr Strangelove':
"One Star Wars Millennium Falcon. Two Quark Ferengi ears. One Back to the Future dustbuster. One Norelco floating razor head."
I'm no artist, and this is super-crude, but you get the idea. The DS9 Defiant has always looked to me like a bunch of pieces that don't really go together all that well.
Unpopular opinion among Trekkies, but I honestly really hate the late 24th century ship design trend.
Voyager, Enterprise E, Defiant, Prometheus. They all start to take this weird "aerodynamic" and ultra-aggressive look.
I have never liked Voyager, Prometheus, or any of the designs that make the 'saucer' look like a shovel.
I actually do like the Enterprise-E. To me, it's a vast improvement over the D, which always looked to me like a caricature....huge saucer and the rest is tiny by comparison. Completely unbalanced and out of proportion. Ugh:
It wasn't, and they said as much when it was introduced. For me, it was a welcome and expansive departure from Connie derivatives.
The Enterprise E and Voyager were the only 24th century era ships I liked.
Voyager looks like a shoe from the Payless bargain bin
“In my opinion”
Don’t like any of the next Gen era designs aside from defiant and the prot-Probert Ambassador
The rest look like Xmas ornaments with way too many windows and blue neon like a mid 80’s Spencer’s store
“In my opinion”
Don’t like any of the next Gen era designs aside from defiant and the prot-Probert Ambassador
The rest look like Xmas ornaments with way too many windows and blue neon like a mid 80’s Spencer’s store
I like the Centaur-class starships. They're essentially just Excelsior-class saucer sections and nacelles without the stardrive section but for some reason the look and the overall design work. They're remarkably sleek and memorable and probably the best Excelsior kitbash that the TNG/DS9/VOY-era production designers ever came up with. Of all the 24th century starships that were clearly reuses of parts from other ships the Centaur was probably the one that did it best with the most originality.
I think you mean, 75% USS Kelvin, 15% USS Vengeance, 5%TMP and 5% TOS.
Nah. Kelvin and vengeance barely made an impression, and were derivative of the the TMP era anyway (or Khan Era.) All those brushed steel surfaces? The galley? Owed more to Voyager.
DSC has late TNG era shaped stations in places...the bridge is halfway between the movie era lights out stuff and First Contact layout, but less cramped. Tbh, apart from the JJ Prise, most bridges have so much in common with each other (ignoring the TOS bridge, because there’s a style leap) that I don’t think there’s anything standout on them. Voyager is an outlier too, because of its modular stations and twin command seating. Once you take colour schemes out (because that’s an easy way to differentiate quickly with minimum fuss) and really you are left looking at the shapes being used...with two big styles used again. There is more smooth shapes in 24th century stuff, more people on their feet. Late 23rd, everyone gets a chair, and there’s less freestanding consoles. Shapes are rounded, but not smoothed so much.
I personally think that there’s a commonality underlying every bridge in Trek, and that’s intentional...even if on initial experience they look wildly different, it’s easy to see the common features, and how some small thing that seems new may echo something we have seen before. The JJprise goes way out there though with all it’s red and glass.
I personally think that there’s a commonality underlying every bridge in Trek, and that’s intentional...even if on initial experience they look wildly different, it’s easy to see the common features, and how some small thing that seems new may echo something we have seen before. The JJprise goes way out there though with all it’s red and glass.
Intrepid looks like quite a bit of kitbashing to me.
You'd think Trekkies would be ecstatic at the idea.
Exactly. I think we can say that, if the people who made TOS, TNG and the other shows had unlimited money, we wouldn't be talking about design languages or lineages because the individual ships would all be made from scratch and would probably not look much more like one another than the Enterprise and the Excelsior do.
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