That is completely irrelevant to my point, though. There's a reason our science has been able to produce results, and that's because there are ways to compensate for any issue of perception.
You said something couldn't be blue and not blue at the same time. The question inevitably becomes: what do we
mean by "blue"? Most people in most contexts
don't actually mean "that which can be determined via spectrometer under controlled conditions to reflect visible light of wavelengths in the range of 490–450 nm and absorb others"; rather they mean "that which gives the impression of the appearance I associate with the word
blue." Depending on the circumstances, those two things may coincide, or they may not. Color is a
concept, not an immutable property.
http://www.askamathematician.com/2012/06/q-do-colors-exist/
"Objective" means that it doesn't rely on the observer, which it doesn't. Your perception or mine has no bearing on what's considered "true" in-universe.
Quite the contrary, there can be never be any such "truth"
without perception and consideration. Art is indeed
totally reliant on the observer for any and all meaning it has,
including where the observer in question is the artist themself. One can choose to accept the author's own interpretation (or any other's) and incorporate it into one's own, or not. Neither choice actually makes
any interpretation "truer" than any other, although in contexts such as discussions like this one, some may be better argued and/or supported than others.
If I was being really awkward I’d say that the discussion quoted here has more to do with the production values of Star Trek rather than the actual design of the Enterprise - but that’s a can of worms
Obviously the original sets and models wouldn’t have worked on film since they were built for TV - and televisions were a lot smaller and had way worse quality and resolution than they do today.
Naturally, the two are interlinked...which reminds me, as to the earlier query regarding the color scheme of TMP versus TOS:
“Another thing I changed was the basic color concept. The original Star Trek
was brightly colored. But a lot of that came about because color TV had been recently invented and all the networks wanted as much color as they could get for their money, right away. I used to get directives from NBC to use more color. ‘We spent a hundred million dollars to invent this system and we don’t want any grays or browns.’ So I felt, and Robert Wise felt, that the brilliant color was not very realistic, that it seemed distracting. He wanted to concentrate on people's faces or the emotion involved, and bright turquoise and red things vibrating on a widescreen were not what he wanted to do...”
-
Robert Fletcher, costume designer
Sidebar: has there been a retcon this big in Star Trek before?
Still not really seeing what's so "big" about this one, to be quite honest. Fandom already widely accepted that the changes made to the model between the two pilots and then the series proper indicated refitting(s)
long before DSC came along. DSC just slipped another one in, or perhaps fleshed one or more of them out, depending on one's preferred interpretation.
But if your question is "has
Trek ever substituted one noticeably different design for another previously depicted without direct comment before?" then the answer is unequivocally
yes, although undoubtedly quibbles with any of several examples I might cite will be raised along the lines of "but that's not the same, because this is the
Enterprise!"
Which brings me to...
I would just say that there is a difference between ‘introduce new stuff with a view to merch’ And ‘introduce a slightly different version so the old merch licenses won’t do, and new toys can be sold’.
Without necessarily accepting as factual the premise that this is the sole or even primary reason for what has been done on DSC—after all, nearly
every incarnation of
Trek thus far has introduced its own distinct versions of various elements for no particular reason at all beyond simple artistic desire to put their own stamp on things—to this sayeth one wiser than I:
-
MMoM
