USS Enterprise (eventually) on Discovery?
- Thread starter EJD1984
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I'd edit my previous post if I had the permissions but in addition to what I wrote in that, I've been trying to get my brother-in-law to at least catch up on DS9 because he's enjoyed DSC. Can't get into it because it isn't in HD. I know a lot of folks will consider that a shallow cop out but when it comes to expanding the fanbase to new casual fans (I'm lifelong, he's new. Both early 30s), its just the reality. This franchise has life but like any other visual media, it has to evolve.
When it comes to DSC's Connie, it's much closer to the TOS ship than I anticipated. I became a fan as a young kid in the late 80s/early 90s. My parents were O.G. viewers. I adore the original 1701 but this ship needed an update to fit into the visual language of DSC but from what we've seen, if you replace the nacelles, impulse drive and slap on a thick paint job and it's the TOS Enterprise. Love what they did.
Reductio ad absurdum. Something from the pulp era with cigar-shaped rockets and spinning saucers is a whole different level of "not advanced." The original TOS designs were intentionally and specifically crafted to be more realistic than that sort of thing.
(That said, IMHO the DSC uniforms wouldn't look out of place in a space opera from the 1930s...)
Thank you. This is actually a thoughtful and constructive answer.
Probably unsurprisingly, I think it still oversimplifies things a bit. As I've posted elsewhere, for instance, you can take a selection of big-budget SF movies from the last few years — say, Prometheus, Interstellar, Arrival, and Guardians of the Galazy — and find very different spaceship designs and aesthetics. (Include more down-to-earth, non-ship-based movies like, say, District 9, Pacific Rim, Her, or Ex Machina, and you get an even broader range of looks.)
Still, most of those films do use designs that fit (most of) the criteria on your list in one fashion or another. However, it's important to note that the list includes two different kinds of criteria. The first four items are basically about design itself. Items five and six are more about how the design is realized on screen. (Put item seven on a shelf for a moment.)
The design criteria mostly have to do with the implications of materials and fabrication technology, and the general assumption that what we can do now we'll do at least as well in the future. What we can tell about such things by eyeballing them is sometimes deceptive, but it's a heuristic. By those criteria, though, I would say that the TOS Enterprise does have layering of complex shapes, and compound curves... just look at the detailing around the deflector dish, or the way the neck meets the undercut of the saucer section. (Both of which are pretty similar in the DSC update, as well.) I'll agree that it lacks chamfering at the joins, and has some iffy components — notably, the nacelle struts always looked a bit implausible, and IMHO were the part that most invited an update (and got an excellent one in TMP). As for small details, it had more than enough to be visible at the broadcast resolution it was designed for, and to establish the scale of the ship — from windows to lights to deflector gridlines to tiny bits of text.
When it comes to how the design is depicted, I agree that more realistic paintwork, weathering, texturing, and the like (and I would add, lighting) do improve how "realistic" a design looks on screen (though not necessarily how "modern" or "advanced"). Those things, however, are largely independent of the underlying design, and can be applied to almost any kind of design. It's not as if such contemporary techniques can't be retrofitted to an original-style Constitution-class ship... we've seen it done. They've certainly been applied to successfully to pretty much every version of the Enterprise since then. For my money, I think the kind of pearlescent, subtle surface textures and lighting used on the movie era ships from TMP forward — including the revised designs in the Abrams films! — look just fine on that front, and have for nearly 40 years now.
(Meanwhile, the surface texturing and lighting in DSC frankly looks amateurish, garish, and unrealistic. It's overdone, harsh, shadowy, needlessly blue-tinted, and perhaps most importantly, not convincingly realistic. Despite the show's budget, it looks like CGI. And that applies to all the ships, not just the Enterprise. Why they do it that way, I can't imagine.)
That leaves your final criterion. More details! More greebles! More! MOre!
This one, I simply can't agree with. It's a matter of personal taste, and of the actual purpose of the ship (or other designed artifact) and the narrative context within which it's expected to operate. The ship in Arrival certainly didn't follow this principle, for instance, but it still looked awfully advanced. I think this sort of aesthetic preference is too often a throwback to Star Wars... for which a lot of the original designs were (literally) kitbashes, and which IMHO tend toward the ugly side, with needless visual clutter that serves no apparent purpose. YMMV, of course... but there's no disputing that it's always been a very different design vernacular from Trek's.Bottom line, had I been "redesigning" the Enterprise, I'd probably have replaced the nacelle struts with something that looked more structurally sound (and probably slightly backswept, for style points)... maybe added the slight vertical brace at the bottom of the neck, just as the redesign did... and otherwise pretty much left the ship alone. Sure, show the surface and the minor details at a higher level of resolution, but otherwise don't try to fix what ain't broken... and do it with the kind of elegant, complimentary lighting that almost every previous iteration of Trek has used, rather than DSC's harsh look.
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Um, if they'v never seen Star Trek before, to them it's not fanwank. In the end all these folks will care about is "Is it entertaining?..." and for the most part a majority of the episodes were.
Space is not well lit
We'll have to agree to disagree on this one then. TOS designs look just one step above cigar-shape rockets and spinning saucers to me. Almost equally outdated in my eyes.
Take a look at that wireframe again. It has a *lot* in common with the Big E. Nacelles are a match. Secondary hull is spot on. Saucer has those cutouts but otherwise looks the same. You're just left with the pylons...which yeah...maybe a rejected concept?
I have been trying to explain to to people forever. I simply can not understand how they do not see it.
I'm really not seeing it. Gene asked Matt Jefferies to design something that wasn't a rocketship or a flying saucer and he made something unlike anything seen before. It's not of its time at all.
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Nostalgia. Warm feelings when viewing the object. I FUCKING LOVE TOS, but I also recognize it's aesthetic severely outsdated by 2018.
It may also be because I work "in the biz" I'm more attuned to modern design trends that are accepted by audiences, but really anyone who watches modern TV shows and movies should have their sense of "futuristic" tuned along with the decades.
Actuallly, to be honest, the Enterprise is a flying saucer connected to three cigar-shped rockets.
Given Roddenberry's explicit directions, I always found that pretty funny.
People just have different tastes in things. No harm, no foul.
Of course it's of its time. Jeffries' design faired pretty well to most of its peers and predecessors, but it's still a object of the 60's whether or not you're aware of it. The ultimate question "knowing what I know now, would they do it the same again" is what gives it away: even the earliest Planet of the Titans (which turned out *really* 70's) and Phase II (far less so) concept art featured considerable revamp to the 1701. Even the people that came up with the design realized that they could have done it better.
That, and all of the 50's sci-fi details woven into the Jeffries 1701, which was amped up to 11 on the Ryan Church 1701 (a literal muscle car in space) though diluted every time the JJprise was tweaked.
Being dated isn't a bad thing anyway. It just makes it less appropriate for a show set in our future.
That is precisely what the producers said happened "in universe". What I meant is that I think the Defiant started off as one of many (probably John Eaves) concepts for the 1701, but got rejected in favor of something else, but was salvaged as the 1764 when the script called for a graphic.
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It's just a primitive shape is all. Note that I'm not saying it's a bad design, no, not at all. It was revolutionary, but compared to modern design aesthetics for TV/film, it's dated. Star Wars is not an apt comparison, because some of those designs are still timeless, at least for now. TIE fighters for example. X-wings look kinda 70ish, and the Falcon also kinda sorta, but no Star Wars design comes remotely close to looking as dated as the TOS Enterprise.
If I have to point to specifics, there are 6 things that date the TOS Enterprise.
1. The deflector dish is the biggest offender. Hilariously outdated, and I scoffed that they actually left it pretty much untouched on the DSC version...lol. It screams 60s pop scifi.
2. The saucer shape. Hard to describe this one, but the general shape of the saucer, the curves it has, reminds of 60s furniture and sculpture.
3. Along those lines, the teardrop shaped bridge superstructure is overly simple and calls back to flying saucer simpleness in other 40s/50s scifi.
4. The neck is just odd. it's larger at the top and skinnier at the bottom which just makes a weird visual angle. It's also a crazy simplistic rectangle with no interesting shapes. Same for the nacelle pylons.
5. No surface detail. I get the Jefferies thought a sleek hull denoted advanced tech, and to a point I agree. But even smooth hulls need some kind of panel break up to convey scale and just to have visual interest.
6. The Christmas lights in the bussards with fans in front of them look just like what they are. Not future engine tech.
Clearly the Enterprise designers on TMP agreed, because this is pretty much what they changed. Heh.
This is true! But what makes Jeffries' design "advanced" from a 60s POV? The secondary hull. Remove that and you have (to a non-fan) a flying saucer with with two rocket-like engines on each side - and that's fine! We have to contextualize these designs. In the late 1960s, it was cutting edge but they were still playing to an audience that was watching real-life space exploration in realtime. It had to relate to what they could plausibly believe a future spacecraft would look like.
If DSC was a true reboot it would pull from current theoretical science, "warp theory," and popular culture. Ironically, it would probably look like a ring-ship: https://gizmodo.com/holy-crap-nasas-interstellar-spaceship-concept-is-amaz-1589006359
You asked.
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