Why NOT update the designs?

[aridas sofia]

Starship Polaris said:

aridas sofia said:
The miniskirts are a bow to fun, but who among you knows enough about warping spacetime to say a smooth hull won't be a necessity?

Fair question, but the practical answer to that is: the requirements for "warping spacetime" in the way that Trek ships do are entirely arbitrary. Warp drive and the properties of "subspace" are a fiction, and as flexible as the designers and writers want them to be.

That's not entirely true. There is an emerging science to warp drive, slowly adding substance to what was almost-wholly speculation. All I'm saying is that it makes sense to take heed of the substance if you care to avoid looking completely out of step in the future. If you go to the trouble of hiring science advice and listening to what they have to say, you get things more "right" than "wrong" years before everyone else, like TOS "black star" or TMP's "wormhole". The accumulation of such "rights" doesn't hurt if you want to avoid giving your product a short shelf life.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

"Warp drive" as it was used in Trek was nothing but a word - they called it a "time warp" drive at first and then just dropped a word in the second pilot. And the word "subspace" was used by Trek in a way that has nothing to do with its several actual meanings outside of the series.

Meanwhile, we have no practical notion of how to accelerate a craft with people in it to any appreciable fraction of light speed.

All that Trek really demonstrates is that if you're vague enough and people like your stories they'll fill in all the details in ways that they find persuasive.

The most remarkable thing about rereading "The Making Of Star Trek" is in noticing how routinely the producers actually ignored whatever expert advice or guidance they were given. The story repeatedly goes "well, we did this research and the experts told us "X" but in the end we decided that wasn't dramatic/wouldn't look good/didn't make any difference."

Whether it was a matter of costuming or figuring out how the crew would be fed or how to get to or from the surface of planets or whether the ship would have gravity or what weaponry/field equipment/medical equipment would be like, production demands and/or the dramatic preferences of the producers trumped extrapolation over and over. That was really the way it had to work.

 

[aridas sofia]

The Stig said:
Arguing over the suitability of a design for warping space in an impossible manner strikes me as more than a little bit absurd.

The first and foremost consideration is making the old girl look good.

Actually, that's the only consideration. The rest is not at all necessary.

I hope you won't take this the wrong way, but the fact that you write this shows that you really don't get the point. Which is completely fine. Most people don't have a clue about the science in science fiction, and I only have a tiny fraction of a clue. Enough to talk a little, and get myself into trouble. The fact we don't get it means, like the inability to appreciate the fifty different flavors of pork, we just don't get to fully enjoy the dish.

Is it worth it to this filmmaker to get the science right? I can sell a hell of a lot of ham, and make a shitload of money, but in the end it's just luncheon meat. If it's about money and just money, then forget the rest. If it's about entertainment and just entertainment, then why do science fiction? By its very nature science fiction is about more than the mundane and everyday. If you want to just throw up your hands and say "why bother" then I'd ask "why do science fiction"?

Maybe they should just go ahead and give up and say, "fine... screw it. Science fiction is too hard. We'll just do pop space opera, a'la Lucas." But then you'd have to acknowledge that you aren't doing what made Star Trek an enduring phenomenon. If pop space opera was what made Star Trek great, we'd all be on the "Tom Corbett Space Cadet" BBS. After all, he got there first. No... Star Trek was at least somewhat science fiction, and to ignore that is to sell ham to people that at the very least are expecting pork roast.

Do that and you'd better serve damned good ham. TWOK did, and even though I went there looking for something very different and was disappointed, it was successful. The same could be true this time, and we can all sit back and applaud the birth of the next Oscar Meyer. And mourn what might have been.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

aridas sofia said:
Maybe they should just go ahead and give up and say, "fine... screw it. Science fiction is too hard. We'll just do pop space opera, a'la Lucas." But then you'd have to acknowledge that you aren't doing what made Star Trek an enduring phenomenon. If pop space opera was what made Star Trek great, we'd all be on the "Tom Corbett Space Cadet" BBS.

That's not necessarily so. What's made "Star Trek" an enduring phenomenon is arguable - ask a dozen people, get at least six answers - and the other example you mention, "Star Wars," is a clear demonstration that the space opera/fantasy storytelling elements of this kind of thing are more than strong enough to enable it to last and to permeate popular culture.

Which is more plausible and more technologically likely, a teleporter than works like the transporter in "Star Trek" or the kind of mechanical and bionic repairs that enable "Darth Vader" to exist? It seems to me that the latter set of innovations are far more likely - yet the strength of Vader as an image and a part of "Star Wars" has nothing to do with the "science" that might be used to explain him. And, oddly enough, there's no evidence that either Roddenberry or Lucas gave any thought at all to the scientific plausibility (or, for that matter, the other implications of the technologies for their fictional worlds) of either the transporter or Vader in creating either of them.

It's not clear to me from experience that one person out of ten thousand who likes "Star Trek" ever examines the scientific underpinnings of the thing; if anything, they tend to assume that most of it is much more in the realm of likelihood than any of it really is. They do like the characters and the spaceships and the transporters and the Klingons and all the specific things that have carried over from the beginnings of the property to the present.

aridas sofia said: and we can all sit back and applaud the birth of the next Oscar Meyer.

A relative of Nicholas Meyer?

 

[The Doctor]

aridas sofia said:

The Stig said:
Arguing over the suitability of a design for warping space in an impossible manner strikes me as more than a little bit absurd.

The first and foremost consideration is making the old girl look good.

Actually, that's the only consideration. The rest is not at all necessary.

I hope you won't take this the wrong way, but the fact that you write this shows that you really don't get the point.

Well, there's really no right way to take "You're thick," but I'll do what I can.

Which is completely fine. Most people don't have a clue about the science in science fiction, and I only have a tiny fraction of a clue. Enough to talk a little, and get myself into trouble. The fact we don't get it means, like the inability to appreciate the fifty different flavors of pork, we just don't get to fully enjoy the dish.

At what point did Star Trek start being science fiction? I've watched all 79 original episodes, the movies and most of the spin-offs. Sometimes it grazes science ever so slightly, but it's never ever been spot-on hard SF in its entire history.

Is it worth it to this filmmaker to get the science right? I can sell a hell of a lot of ham, and make a shitload of money, but in the end it's just luncheon meat. If it's about money and just money, then forget the rest. If it's about entertainment and just entertainment, then why do science fiction? By its very nature science fiction is about more than the mundane and everyday. If you want to just throw up your hands and say "why bother" then I'd ask "why do science fiction"?

Well, again, Trek isn't really science fiction, so I'd say we're talking at cross purposes. Trek is an action-adventure format that every so often makes a point about human nature. Since that's the point, everything else is subordinate to that. Getting the science right has no bearing on action, adventure or human nature, so it really doesn't and shouldn't matter.

Maybe they should just go ahead and give up and say, "fine... screw it. Science fiction is too hard. We'll just do pop space opera, a'la Lucas." But then you'd have to acknowledge that you aren't doing what made Star Trek an enduring phenomenon. If pop space opera was what made Star Trek great, we'd all be on the "Tom Corbett Space Cadet" BBS. After all, he got there first. No... Star Trek was at least somewhat science fiction, and to ignore that is to sell ham to people that at the very least are expecting pork roast.

We could be so lucky as to have Trek be as popular and enduring as Star Wars.

Do that and you'd better serve damned good ham. TWOK did, and even though I went there looking for something very different and was disappointed, it was successful. The same could be true this time, and we can all sit back and applaud the birth of the next Oscar Meyer. And mourn what might have been.

Since TWOK was the finest Star Trek movie ever to grace the silver screens, Abrams could do worse by following in Bennett and Meyer's footsteps in this circumstance.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

The Stig said:
Since TWOK was the finest Star Trek movie ever to grace the silver screens...

I don't really agree, but even so - this would be as close to a definitive example of "faint praise" as anyone needs.

If Abrams achieves the success of TWOK, Paramount's stock will plummet and he'll be Last Year's Big Thing very quickly. Even allowing for inflation, what makes a 10 million dollar movie successful doesn't cut it when the budget's 150 million.

 

[aridas sofia]

It is fair to note that we might all be thinking of "science fiction" as different things. Here is a definition I like:

...SF is mainly about the human element, and about the effect new discoveries, happenings and scientific developments will have on us in the future.

"Scientists in the 1800s could predict the automobile; science fiction writers added the human element and envisioned traffic jams."

From this website.

I think that is a fair definition of what was Star Trek's primary appeal. The effect on the very human characters of discovering time travel, star drives, and teleportation. Of interstellar war and alien life. Of panspermia and post-human life and artificial intelligence. And more.

They didn't do it perfectly. Or consistently. But the fact that some of the very best science fiction writers of the time wrote episodes for the show is ample evidence that it was, as I said, at least somewhat science fiction. One of the very few examples ever to find its way to television, and as such to be cherished all the more.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

I can go along with that. I just don't think that it has much to do with whether the art director decides, based on the vague and unscientific directive "make it look like it has power" that the surface of a ship should be smooth or greebly.

The so-called "Star Wars look" is really, in essence, the "'2001' look." "Star Trek" was an attempt to do plausible design within very stringent budgetary and time limits. At roughly the same time, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke were doing something similar but with a bigger canvas/screen to fill and a great many more resources of all kinds.

In order to give the spacecraft models in the film a sense of scale and technical detail, Trumbull and the other designers/modelmakers refined the whole practice of "greebling" up the surfaces. I've always thought that the single most important reason that later sf film and television spaceship designs - whether low-budget or mega-expensive - didn't borrow much from "Star Trek" was because Kubrick's film made so much stronger a visual impression. More people "bought" that look of the future than "Star Trek's," and so Lucasfilm was destined to become the major consumer of styrene model kits in the Southwest.

Of course, Kubrick overestimated the mid-range viability of some commercial and political institutions. Roddenberry's intuition about keeping national flags and cigarettes out of the frame probably did more to enhance Trek's shelf-life than did many of the technological ideas he turned thumbs-up or down on.

 

[xortex]

When we have a real Enterprise, then it's time to update the design.

 

[starburst]

Cary L. Brown said:

starburst said:
Long as there isnt anything overly 60s space Ill do with the ship in whichever way it comes, be it exactly as it was or changed so only the silouette looks the same.

add hatches that go flush to the hull for weapons, means you will only see the join when you get really close.

One thing I hope they change is the overly lost in space shiny silver space/hazard suits...was watching the latest NV and thats the most dated thing they have put on screen, everything else could work.

Trek fans would buy it, problem is they want new blood to sit in the seats and spend their money so changes are inevitable.

Ya know, I never had a problem with metallic surfaces on the exterior of spacesuits. It's reflective (meaning that it protects the wearer from E/M radiation and overheating), opaque to all forms of E/M radiation, opaque to particulate radiation, flexible, and relatively strong.

The problem was that the suits just looked cheap. I wonder, if someone were to do something along the same lines, but with an unlimited budget and with a real scientific/engineering background, I wonder... could you take that TOS suit design and make it into something good without altering the core concepts?

The only REAL issue I have with the TOS spacesuits, honestly (other than the relatively cheap construction) was the absolute lack of peripheral vision. So you'd need to make the sides of the helmets into window areas (possibly with mirrored coatings?)

A good design guy could make a practical space suit from the original design without having to "radically rethink" very much of it.

I actually liked the Enterprise space suits (which had the metalic texture) so I would make it a comprimise between the two but more in the TOS colours

gastrof said:
I just thought of something.

They may very well change how the Enterprise looks for one simple reason.

The same reason I suspect caused Singer to make obvious changes to the costume in SUPERMAN RETURNS.

What is that reason?

To sell movie-related stuff.

Kids (and adults) already had plenty of Superman action figures and such. Ah...but the movie version of the costume was DIFFERENT.

"Gotta collect'm all!"

Same thing with the Enterprise.

They may change it simply to make possible the selling of yet one more model kit and new toys that look like the JJA movie version, as opposed to the TV version.

This seems to me to be a very strong possibility (if not probability)...and I think I'm gonna be ill.

Alot of fans and collectors would buy a new model just because its the one from the new film...most other people they would aim to sell merchandise and the movie to (ie non current trek fans...where the really $£$ is) may not be interested in the old ship.

Be interesting to try do a poll with the general viewing public on which ship they prefer and why, say original TOS, Refit or NuTOS (maybe even throw in E-D, E-E & NX-01)

 

[HULK]

Hulk is fine with changes to designs, but Hulk hopes that new designs will at least be close enough to TOS to be recognizable. Hulk want to be able to look at ship and go "That TOS era Enterprise."

Same with uniforms. There should be no mistake that they are TOS era.

 

[gastrof]

But then, that's the point, isn't it?

A change makes it not the TOS era Enterprise.

It may be similar, but a change makes it not the same.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

What "Star Trek" importantly derived from science fiction and what was reflected in the willingness to do research for the show - whether or not it was utilized - was an attitude and a frame of reference. And that was: the Universe is a knowable place in which inquiry and rationality yield good answers and good results more often than other methods; mysteries may be held in awe but they're to be investigated rather than fenced off or feared. "There's no such thing as the unknown - only things temporarily hidden, temporarily not understood."

Most popular American science fiction prior to the 1960s can probably be said to treat that as axiomatic. Heinlein actually rarely wrote "hard science fiction" by strict definition, but he's associated with it because he and his protagonists almost always embodied that rational frame of reference.

That frame of reference is what's either maintained or muddied or lost with each new iteration of Trek.

 

[xortex]

Polaris, who said that - 'there is no such thing as the unknown...' ?

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Jerry Sohl, a science fiction writer.

He was disguised as Captain Kirk, at the time.

 

[David cgc]

gastrof said:
A change makes it not the TOS era Enterprise.

It may be similar, but a change makes it not the same.

Like the different version of the ship in your avatar. Similar, but not the same.

 

[Holytomato]

DS9, ENT, and TOS-R.

Which one!?

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Holytomato said:
DS9, ENT, and TOS-R.

Which one!?

None of those versions of the Enterprise is identical to the others. The differences are subtle, but they're not the same.

 

[Brainsucker]

Guys, don't you realise that defend the original design of TOS is just only make the Startrek XI become the next Austin Powers movie ?

Just take example to James Bond. Defending it's old nature (sixties) only make it become something that we saw in Austin Power. So why force our will to make it stick to 60's design and not make it 2008 taste of design ?

 

[aridas sofia]

Because, the external configuration of the Enterprise in particular is not "60s design".

Quick -- name one other object from the 1960s that looks like the Enterprise.

See? The only objects in any way like the Enterprise are

A. The starships in the Star Fleet Technical Manual... from 1974.
B. The starships form TAS... from 1973
C. The refit Enterprise... from 1979-1991
D. The NCC-1701D... from 1987-1994

There's nothing like it from the 1960s. It is, in fact, a design that has been interpreted in the 1970s, 80s, 90s and 2000s, but NOT in the 1960s. The original configuration of the ship itself has been in constant reruns or sold on tape or DVD, or in endless models and other forms since the 1960s. It appears in its original form in TAS, in TNG, in DS9, GEN, and in ENT.

If it was a 1966 Mustang, it would have been an unchanging design that Ford continued to put in the showrooms for 40 years, not something stuck in the decade it was produced.

And anyway, just when did you find out what a real starship will look like, and how much the original Enterprise deviates from that standard?