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Disco Connie in June?

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  • phoenixc#0738 phoenixc Member Posts: 5,459 Arc User
    edited June 2019
    artan42 wrote: »
    Except that the official big shooting model has "1:48" marked on it which agrees with all the paperwork for the show that put it at about 288 meters. It was designed to be that size and aside from the occasional error was shown to be that size in every episode. They simply never said the numbers in dialog since there was no valid reason to do so in any of the scripts they filmed and Roddenberry was a stickler for keeping the dialog clean and free of extraneous technobabble.

    Is that supposed marking visible onscreen? As it's not then it's not canon.

    No, that marking is on the side with the wiring iirc and clearly shows the size the ship was designed to be. The "only stuff onscreen" thing is a handy, simple rule of thumb, but that is all that it is, a rough approximation. The actual canon is much more complex than that and a bit fluid at times (in fact Roddenberry was infamous for his capriciousness in that regard) and was a (usually) subtle multi-way tug of war between Roddenberry and various executives. In general though Roddenberry mostly supported older points over newer ones. In fact, he considered the hardest canon to be the first two seasons of TOS, and regularly denounced just about everything from third season TOS to TNG (and especially the movies) as "dropped from canon" though he always relented a few days or years later (in fact, his last words on canon was that "it is all canon" though it makes things a bit ambiguous on some conflicting points).

    The simple fact is that not everything on the MSDs is considered hard canon, though it would be nice in some ways since we would have all of the Franz Joeseph ships like the Saladin-class destroyer and Federation-class dreadnaught as well as FASA ships like the Orion Wanderer-class light cruiser that have appeared in them and other various screens in the background but not considered canon enough due to IP issues to include in licenses like the one Cryptic has. Even if it all was hard canon it is not always consistent and the 400 meter thing is an outlier at best.

    Matt Jefferies finalized the size of the ship he designed for TOS at about 288 meters (and an earlier version was about half that size btw). Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the show in the first place agreed on it, and the scale shooting models were made to standard fractions of that size. That is as canon as you can get since they are the intention of the creator of the thing and are supported by internal documentation. As for being on film, the ship was implicitly shown at that 288 meter size in every episode (with that one exception I mentioned earlier), it is just hard to tell since there was nothing much around it to compare it to.
    artan42 wrote: »
    There is no need to inflate the ship to 400 meters to fit everything seen in TOS in easily (with only one exception). That even includes the fact that the "engineering room" set actually represented THREE different engineering areas: the impulse deck (at the back of the saucer), and the port and starboard warp engineering decks (in the secondary hull). In fact, the only thing that is ever shown in TOS that would not fit the 289 meter ship is the fact that they made a slight scaling error in the shuttlebay miniature set that, if you unbend everything from the forced perspective and compare it to the shuttlecraft, puts the Enterprise at approximately 330 meters, not the ridiculous 400+.

    Well obviously Drexler thought so when he drew up the MSD that took the sets into account. Obviously as he has actual measurements of those I'm more inclined to take his word over yours. Especially as his MSD appeared onscreen.

    What Drexler thinks is only actually relevant to the particular series he worked on, in the larger scheme of things the most one could say is that he made an outlier that splits the canon on this particular issue.
    artan42 wrote: »
    That means either the ENT MSD you talk about is wrong or the Defiant that appeared in ENT was not the same one that was lost in the TOS episode "The Tholian Web".

    No. It means your assumptions are wrong and that your headcanon based on what some people thought 50 years ago doesn't trump what is shown.

    No, it is the size the ship was designed to be by the original designer, and supported by all the relevant paperwork from the show that ship was designed for. That is not "head canon". Insisting that one single outlier figure a person not even associated with the original series pulled out of their backside for a piece of throwaway background graphic in a long-after-the-fact spinoff overrides all the information from the original show about the length of the original TOS ship is what fits the definition of "headcanon".
    artan42 wrote: »
    The ENT producers probably inflated the size because they were fixated on the idea that ships would have to get bigger over time, instead of thinking about how new tech tends to be smaller and more efficient than older stuff. That semi-trailer sized unit with the dilithium crystals in it in ENT that Tripp was always dinking with was about the size of an office desk in TOS for instance. With that kind of miniaturization you can pack a lot into a WWII battleship-sized hull. They even show that effect between The Cage and TOS, the dorsal sensor dome was an entire deck high in Cage, but much, much shorter and flatter in TOS.

    Well that goes against Drexlers directly stated intent so I can safely ignore it. But it does show, that, interestingly, the same few people keep making wild assumptions for why ships get rescaled. And those are always TOS centric. TNG did not miniturise compared to TOS just because things were more advanced.

    Not having seen whatever you are basing your interpretation of Drexler's intent on I will not comment on what that was. On the other hand TNG did miniaturize things to some degree if you look at communicators, tricorders, even phasers and other stuff, and realistically technology tends to advance in uneven bounds so the tech advances between ENT and TOS do not necessarily have to be the exact equivalent between TOS and TNG.

    One of the main metaplot points in ENT was that the NX was grossly inefficient and far behind the tech level of almost every other starfaring culture of the time, so of course it was bigger than the TOS era equivalent would be. Then on top of that, the NX saucer had to hold a crude early version of (almost) all of the engineering equipment that the TOS Enterprise had in the secondary hull in addition to all the regular saucer stuff.

    Just as speculation, Daystrom's duotronic breakthrough shortly before the Enterprise was built in 2245 (which was talked about in "The Ultimate Computer" was probably a big part of it, possibly along with the transstator technology that is mentioned in "A piece of the action" and other probable breakthroughs that would logically come from the Federation founder nations coming together and combining research would bring. But that is only speculation even though it is realistic in light of the way technology often advances in uneven leaps like that in the real world in situations like that.

    On the other hand, a very good argument can be made for ENT and everything following it being a continuum branch caused by a combination of the events in "First Contact" and the temporal time war (which would also explain the, shall we say rough spots, some of the sloppier bits of writing in ENT caused). Personally I am not a fan of that theory though Discovery does lend it a lot of weight nowadays.
    artan42 wrote: »
    Lol, that would be quite a refit, one that would make the TOS to movie version refit look trivial. The look is totally different,

    Sure thing. Except, no. It would require the rebuild of the slope of the saucer, a new bridge dome, a new impulse assembly, new pylons, and new nacelles. Far less that the complete overhaul the TMP got. The DSC one needs some components swapping out, the TMP one needs stripping down to the bones and building up.

    So you are trying to say that changing the scale of a ship from that supposed 400 meters down to 288 meters is somehow easier to do than pop the saucer off of its old secondary hull, mate it with a new secondary and strip off and rebuild the equivalent of superstructure on a real-world warship (which the navy does do btw) that they supposedly did in the early 2270s? Very amusing. And who do you suppose the Federation would hire to accomplish that scale change, Doctor Hank Pym?
    artan42 wrote: »
    and nothing short of a timeline reset could possibly make the two match up without a lot of problems. For one thing DSC uses a completely different design philosophy from TOS, and that extends to the basic shapes that make up the ship. What are they supposed to do, wave a magic wand and make the off-kilter art-deco shapes suddenly flow into the googie-like shapes of TOS?

    Oh look, it's the same stupid argument TMP got. The single difference is you've had 40 years to headcanon TMP plus a hefty dose of nostalgia filter whereas DSC has only had a year so far.

    What TMP "got" is irrelevant, especially considering the length of in-setting time between TOS and TNG was a lot longer than the less-than-a-decade between DSC and TOS. Technically setting DSC that close to TOS makes it what is known as a "period piece", except that Moonves and company ignored the setting to come up with something completely different so it is not really period either.
    artan42 wrote: »
    And looks are not the only thing different, the technology is a primitive whackadoodle mix of ENT taken only slightly forward and a kind of generic pseudo Star Wars. They treat warp drive almost as if it was a jump drive instead of the realspace FTL drive shown in all the Treks up to (and including) ENT. In fact, in TOS it was standard doctrine to fight in warp (and they even did a little of that in ENT after Reed figured out how to balance the phasing to allow them to shoot out of both the shields and the warp bubble at the same time), but in DSC they apparently have some trouble even talking to other ships in warp much less shooting at them.

    Oh look, more TOS worship. TOS was a flawed and dull premise that every instance of the franchise from TMP onwards ignored as it tried to iron out more realistic and reasonable rules and looks for the franchise. Obviously DSC draws more from ENT than TOS, because ENT is a more relevant part of the franchise and works more like the TNG era than TOS did.

    "TOS worship"? is that what TOS haters are calling not being contemptuous of TOS nowadays? Anyway, you already made the fact that you despise TOS clear enough already, and your dislike of the style does not negate any of the facts I presented. As for the nonsense of Paramount trying to re-define the TOS era into something else, just look at TNG:Relics, DS9:Trials and Tribble-ations, and ENT:In a Mirror, Darkly and you will see the original TOS style of ship (or at least a reasonable facsimile anyway since they did not have the original set pieces or models and had to recreate it all within budget) so they obviously were not trying to erase TOS.

    artan42 wrote: »
    For example, in a video interview the set designer for DSC talked about how much she hated the TOS esthetics (what she called the "carboard Enterprise") and that in her opinion the only design that was worth anything was for "The Undiscovered Country" and so she based the DSC interiors on that. CBS seems to be making at least a little headway in clearing out that toxic situation, but they have a considerable way to go.

    Not liking TOS is not 'Toxic', it is an opinion. You do not get to enforce what shows other fans like, you do not get to enforce what shows they do not like, you are not part of the production team so don't get to enforce what their staff use for influence, and you do not get to enforce a mandatory enjoyment of TOS onto anybody else.

    As it happens I agree with her. TOS is an aberration, it is anomalus. It does not look, sound, or feel like any other part of the franchise. From TMP to ENT the franchise ignore it and DSC should continue to do so. That is not related to my enjoyment of TOS (I like it, mostly), it's an objective fact. Elements of every other TV show and film carries into others except TOS.

    You are missing the point. Just having an opinion is not toxic, but deliberately stacking the executive and other positions with people who have nothing but contempt for the material very often is. Just look at the mess that kind of thing made of the 2002 "Birds of Prey" TV show production environment to see an example of that.
    artan42 wrote: »
    If not the Temporal Cold War then some other time intervention (or the lack of a necessary one) or some other reality-warping event would have had to cause the changes.

    Nope.
    Star Trek under CBS is rather like The Terminator series in reverse, with technology degrading (in function anyway) instead of improving each loop.

    Nope.

    I see you cannot come up with a real argument to answer mine here.
    artan42 wrote: »
    According to what Burnham says in S2E1the hulls are titanium (and her pronunciation of that is very clear), not tritanium like they are in TOS, but ordinary garden variety titanium like a cold war era Russian attack sub.

    Being made of a real metal (which forms parts of actual space craft and not just subs, though that would make your point look stupid) is different from being made from a fiction metal, why?

    It is different because the fictional supermetal makes it easier to suspend disbelief at some of the impossible stuff they do. That is why Roddenberry went with "phaser" instead of "laser" for the weapons for instance, so the realization that lasers could not do what they showed would not break immersion. Secondly, the substitution of the real-world metal for the canon fictional metal shows either a lack of regard for continuity or a lack of knowledge of it or both which is unprofessional.

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