If you altered the TOS design as much as the original ISD was, what would you get?
1) Phaser banks and torpedo launchers are actually visible on the hull
2) Interiors modeled behind the windows, slight change in the design of the windows
3) Windows on the bridge
4) Visible tractor beams and RCS thrusters
5) Redesigned hangar bay.
6) Revised color and lighting
It actually seems to me that if you painted the discovery version bluish-white and and made it the same COLOR as the TOS version, the differences would be considerably less obvious (much as the difference between the original Star Destroyer and the Empire Strikes Back version are completely lost on 99% of the people who watch Star Wars).
Kind of a good example... how many of us demanded an in-universe explanation for why the Galaxy class starship suddenly looked so weird in half of its effects shots?
I can agree with most of this, but I think you're actually still overstating the case with that list of comparable changes. In particular, the Star Destroyer has always been chock-full of exterior hull greebles, so adding more weapons banks and such is a negligible change (i.e., invisible to 99% of viewers), whereas the Enterprise has always had a much "cleaner" design, so such things would stand out as incongruous. Likewise 3: we already know where the bridge is, and the interior set has no window, so adding one on the outside would make no sense. That basically leaves 2 and 4: model interior "window boxes," and update the color and lighting. Those are changes to effects, not design, and I'd have no quarrel at all with the
Enterprise being updated that way.
That is not what I said. What I said was they may not be able to explian why it seems dated. If ypu look at an 80's jacket and it seems dated, you might not be able to clearily pinpoint just why. You know its dated, but you might not be able to understand its a combo of stitching, material and some set design elements.
...
If ypu shpw up to work dressed in cloths from the 1980s, your fashion is gonna look super dated. Even though it was on style when it was designed. Until it comes back into style, its gonna look old.
I know fuck-all about fashion design, but if I see an '80s jacket, I can still explain why it looks dated to me. It's because I've seen '80s fashions
in real life, and can recognize the similarities, and know what decade they belong to.
(Although this works best if we're talking about women's clothes, or (for men) specifically casual wear, as these change more quickly. Where men's professional attire is concerned, I think it's safe to say there are plenty of guys on this very forum who still own business suits purchased in the 1980s that they could easily wear today without drawing any attention. And heck, even 1960s suits could probably pass unnoticed, in the aftermath of
Mad Men-inspired retro fashion trends.)
At any rate, this analogy fails when we're talking about starships, for two reasons. One: they don't exist in real life, so people have no personal experience with which to contextualize them. If one sees the original
Enterprise, the only "period" one is going to associate it with is the 2260s (or if one is a "casual viewer," the "Kirk/Spock era"). Which is, of course, exactly what it's
supposed to evoke. Two: they're not being used out of place (like a 1980s outfit on the street today). If a TOS-era ship showed up on screen in a story set in the TNG era, I'd agree that it looked incongruous. But that's not what we're talking about. For a show that's
set in the TOS era, you want ship designs that fit that era, every bit as much as you want 1960s fashions in
Mad Men.
I'll give it a shot. But you must look at it objectively and not as a fan.
1:The TOS ship is in the "Atomic Age/Space Age" design style. Commonly called "retro", "60's retro" and "Retro future". This is not an attack, its simply a fact. For sci-fi of the 1960s it was the style, it looked sci-fi, it looked future. At that time.
2: The design elemets, look overly simplistic and primative. Once more, not a slam, simply a fact. It does not read as sleek, but simple. Like a 1920s roadsters, sleek at the time. But with a modern eye it lacks detail, it reads as primative and simplstiv in shape and function.
3: The NX is a deign of the post Star Wars, modern style. It us "busy" and has detail, everywhere. The shapes read as more robust and complex. Its like a 1940s car vs the 20s roadsters.
Bottom line, all you're actually arguing here is that TOS ships come from one design "period" and ENT ships come from another period. I could argue (and have) about the degree to which TOS actually fits the "space age" design language, but that's beside the point here, because the basic fact remains: they
do come from different design periods,
in universe just as much as IRL.
The thing you can't seem to grasp is, there's nothing wrong with that. You keep refusing to admit how much of this is not "objective" at all, but a matter of your personal taste. When you use terms like "simplistic and primitive" or "robust and complex," those aren't objective facts describing the design periods in question, they're subjective, value-laden indicators of your own aesthetic preferences. You clearly consider the post-Star Wars style to be superior in some way, more pleasing to look at. Other people have different preferences.
Star Trek is not Star Wars, so I
do not want to see ships in Trek, especially TOS-era Trek, with surfaces that are "'busy' and have detail everywhere." It's wrong, for the period being depicted and for the aesthetic of the show overall. I want enough detail to establish scale and functionality (a level of detail, to be clear, that the TOS
Enterprise has always had), and beyond that I want them to be sleek and elegant. That means they don't need saucer cut-outs. They don't need outboard weapons turrets. They don't need extra layers of hull layering. They don't need meaningless greebles. Take the
Kelvin in ST09: that was deliberately designed to evoke a (pre-)TOS design style, and it pretty much worked. Moving forward in time, I can readily accept the TMP-style refit as an evolution of the original
Enterprise look ("art deco" nacelles or no; after all, design trends come and go, as you yourself have noted), and it has plenty of detail itself, but not to a level that's extraneous or superfluous or visually "busy." And that's as it should be. Ships like the
Enterprise-E or the
Shenzou, on the other hand, are just over-designed... and in the
Shenzou's case, very much incongruous with the period it's set in.
But they do. Lets be honest here, no none fan is ever gonna put the TOS ship or TMP ship as new.
I think you're wrong about this (or at least, it's only true for audiences that are already steeped in screen SF), but regardless, who gives a damn? We're talking about an assortment of fictional future eras that are decades apart from one another.
There is no "new." Something that looks like it was designed in 2018 is no less "dated" in Trek's universe than something that looks like it was designed in 1965. So why do you think a design looking "new" (which is to say, looking like everything else that follows current Hollywood trends) is any kind of advantage?
