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Idea: TOS Costumes Of & For Discovery Ships (Based on an Artist's Concept)
admiralwuff
Member Posts: 42 Arc User
I was scouring Deviant Art & found an amazing schematic style art piece a fellow Trekky had created.
His art piece had re-envisioned version of ships from Discovery redone in the style of The Original Series:
Total artist credit goes to jbobroony: https://deviantart.com/jbobroony . Guy's a whizz when it comes to scifi charts.
These would make perfect alternate costumes for Discovery ships in game. Also, it gives a chance to make the Disco ships more accomodating for those of us who tend not to like the Discovery visuals.
His art piece had re-envisioned version of ships from Discovery redone in the style of The Original Series:
Total artist credit goes to jbobroony: https://deviantart.com/jbobroony . Guy's a whizz when it comes to scifi charts.
These would make perfect alternate costumes for Discovery ships in game. Also, it gives a chance to make the Disco ships more accomodating for those of us who tend not to like the Discovery visuals.
Post edited by baddmoonrizin on
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Comments
Now THAT I'd have been fine with if Disco did it.....SOD the 25% difference.
That image did a lot better.
Now, TMP/Wrath of Khan style, on the other hand....
But yeah, won't happen.
The existing TOS ship in STO (Perseus, Ranger, Gemini, Pioneer, Daedalus, and Constitution) are all well done. Would be great to see more, but at least we have those.
So sorry but as long as Cryptic or PWE (aka Cryptic parent company) isn't the sole right's holder for Star Trek, getting other EU material is nearly unsurmountable odds, getting fan works is literally and totally unsurmountable. Cryptic cannot add anything that doesn't have the go ahead from CBS it's not legally possible as doing so would be a breach of contract from Cryptic's part and adding fan works is such legal minefield that pretty no sane company wants to deal with it, the "next Enterprise" event was sanctioned and official and it ended up in a cluster*TRIBBLE* that Cryptic doesn't want to repeat if they got a choice, using unsanctioned fan materials would be that fiasco time 1 000 000.
That said, Cryptic would probably have to get permission to do that from CBS and I imagine that would not fly. It definitely would not have done so under Les Moonves, and many of the people in charge of Trek today are the same people Moonves gathered together who have an utter contempt (or at least a strong dislike) for TOS aesthetics and like to pretend it never existed, so that has probably not changed much.
I totally understand. Thank you for that. Your words are pragmatic & honest. I will press at it; But I figure it's to have tried & failed despite a slight chance then to have not tried at all. I'm not afraid of failure. It's either the status quo is kept or something happens. I'll still play 'em regardless.
I hope that Kurtzman-esque intransigence begins to fade. Hopefully they'll see how the love of the TOS aesthetic is sincere & transcends generations & cultures one day. It's all to easy to hate another stylistic design because it's more established & beloved, but so much more noble to embrace it & make something new, amazing & sincere with it.
Kurtzman and his gang, to me, feel like they are bean counters who think they have talent, but don't.....like network execs.
TOS has always looked and felt the most advanced to me. Less is more.
I appreciate yer words. I agree. They're like the Manager from Dilbert. They tend to have a grossly omnipotent view of their skill set. They push paperwork; That's all they're suppose to do. Leave the aesthetic to the creative directors, their designers & technicians, who know far more about Trek because they were hired on that basis. I think it's time the fans, the foundations & the contributors send a message to them by not watching. Maybe they will get the message, much like Joss Whedon did when he went on a nearly plagiaristic show pilot spree.
I don't plan to watch anything these guys make ever again.
I also think fans outta be put in making the stuff, for they made a lot better stuff than the pros, and for quite some time.
And excellent comparison to Dilbert's manager.
TMP however, different story
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
That is actually a good illustration of the identity problem that Star Trek has had for a while now. The show spans several centuries of in-setting time, and has (or at least had) distinct eras with distinct styles, yet it is all too often treated like it is a timeless limbo instead.
People look at ships of a certain period and say "I want all of the ships to look just like this, no matter what the era is!" and it is just not even vaguely realistic to do that. Period pieces are not supposed to look like modern ones. For instance, a producer doing a WWII movie or series cannot just say they don't like propeller planes and substitute F25s, EF2000s, and SU35s for the appropriate fighters unless they want the picture laughed at, yet they do exactly that kind of nonsense in Star Trek lately and are surprised at the negative reaction from the viewers.
Back in the 1960s TOS set itself outside of the pack by going with a clean minimalist organic-curved look with gracefully thin struts that implied very advanced materials and designs to be strong enough to handle the stress, along with other innovations, while almost everyone else was going with chunky, clunky bare steel that in some cases even included riveted hull panels and flame spewing chemical rockets.
Sure, TOS has a quirky, somewhat weird, even a bit playful look even now, but that is not a bad thing if the producers and creative people actually work with it instead of spit on it in contempt the way Moonves's bunch did.
Weird and quirky look and/or feel actually works for a lot of shows, just take a look at the old Avengers series from the UK, Sanctuary, Valérian and Laureline, and a number of others. In fact, when it first came out Star Wars was considered rather weird looking with its beat up old gear and swords in space, unusual camera work, and loopy looking/acting aliens when almost everyone else was doing shiny and new geared very conventional looking "realist" sci-fi.
Just like there's some really silly TNG-era ships that people arted-up. It's just TOS ended up with a lot more, from all the old tabletop & computer games & fanworks.
(of course, the "future" versions of all those Agents of Yesterday ships look even worse.)
I'm usually thinking the same thing about the original Enterprise's retro deflector dish.
T2 science ship? The Daedalus was not a kitbash, it was one of the rejected concept models for the TOS Enterprise before they decided to chuck the conventional ideas of the time and go with the sleeker, more futuristic googie style one you see in the show. The only thing that is the same (or mostly the same) are the nacelles and the fact that it has an angled neck because Roddenberry liked those but hated the rest of the ship.
Unimaginative kitbashing is a problem though, a lot of later Trek ships, even ones seen onscreen, suffer from that.
And there is other nonsense, like the UPN executives wanted the hero ship in ENT to be an Akira (not just something that resembles one, but the exact one seen in First Contact. Luckily, the showrunner and ship designer were able to convince the execs that making something with the same general shape but cues appropriate to the era would be just as good and more acceptable to the fans to boot.
What is so retro about the TOS Enterprise's deflector dish? Sure, it is not all glowy like the plasma conductor dishes they use later on but it does the same job and looks sturdy enough for the heavily armored battlecruiser it is attached to. To me the TMP one looks incomplete without the big choke ring antenna (the thing with the concentric cylinders the dish connects to on the TOS ship) behind the dish.
> The problem isn't how the TOS Enterprise looked. It's how a lot of the later "we needed more ships of that era" amateur kitbashes look. Like the T2 science ship they made for this game.
>
> Just like there's some really silly TNG-era ships that people arted-up. It's just TOS ended up with a lot more, from all the old tabletop & computer games & fanworks.
>
> (of course, the "future" versions of all those Agents of Yesterday ships look even worse.)
Phoenix is right, although she is overly simplifying the rich history.
The Daedalus is not some silly fan model. It is a model based on Matt Jeffries’ first concept for the Enterprise. The model was made by Greg Jein, who made many movie and most of the TNG models, for the Okuda Encyclopedia and later as a museum piece to represent the “first” Starfleet vessel. A reproduction of the model was later featured in DS9 on Sisko’s desk.
When they made Enterprise the canonical thinking by Doug Dexler was that the NX Enterprise should be a Daedalus—but Herman Zimmerman et al. instisted they make a model with a “Star Trek” saucer using the Thunderchild from First Contact as a reference, because only hardcore fans would appreciate the Daedalus and they wanted a “sexier” modern design.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Daedalus_class_model
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Gregory_Jein
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/NX_class_model
Of course, all of this stuff is terribly subjective.
> Whoops. Didn't realize it was so old/official, given how much it looks like "some kid threw parts together, badly."
>
>
> Of course, all of this stuff is terribly subjective.
Well I guess I probably have not bought the T6 version either—because it is a kind of silly-looking ship...
But I do feel guilty about it.
As pointed out earlier, people seem to want everything to look the same no matter what era it is in. But there is one other detail peopl forget in TOS. The Enterprise isn't a brand new ship. She's at least 20 years old, so her design might not be the absolute cutting edge current. Yea the Constitution Class all share the same design, but we NEVER saw anything other than Connies in TOS. With the remaster we may have seen a cargo ship or something, but never anything in Starfleet outside of the Connie. So literally the ONLY reference we have to the era, is the Connie. In my mind some of the Discovery designs make sense in a design evolution as many of them, outside of the Walker class, are probably newer designs. Hell... they specifically called out that the Crossfield looked like she JUST came out of the shipyards because of the lack of scrapes on the hanger deck that would be more common in ships that have been out for a while.
To me, the more squared off nacelles feel like an evolution towards the retangular designs in TMP. The reason Enterprise didn't have those is because she is an older ship not due for a refit yet. Hell... she technically didn't get a major structural refit until the 2270s with TMP.
And frankly the Constitution Class in Discovery was a fresh take on the iconic design while maintaining many elements of the original, and she looks beautiful. The angled pylons feel better structurally, to me, than the straight ones, the neck isn't quite as exposed as the original... yet she feels like she could fit in just fine if you stick her in an episode of TOS.
For all the criticizm Discovery has taken with ship design, I feel they did the Connie justice while making her look better for a 21st century audience who may not be familiar with TOS. She's got it in all the right places.
Also to me she feels like a more natural step before the TMP refit since some of the elements in the refit design now already exist, meaning less invasive structural teardowns *looks at the nacelle pylons*.
I wouldn't have been surprised if we actually saw a Daedalus class in the canceled s5 of Enterprise as the Earth-Romulan War kicked off. And I have no problem with the NX either. Hell... in the game Star Trek Legacy during the opening cutscene an admiral's talking to Archer about how Starfleet's doing, specifically mentioning that 5 new Daedalus class ships were being commissioned. Archer jokes about them not needing his little ship anymore, which gets countered as they need Enterprise for a new mission.
And they did have a Daedalus model made for the game. While not playable, without mods, you escort 3 of them on a mission to take care of a plague on some planets under siege by the Romulans. And while they did change the design a bit and add more Enterprise era details like the warp field grills, it was easily recognizable as a Daedalus class, and fit in the time period perfectly. Was still a tin can with a golf ball, but with more detail, and I think they bent the pylons a bit.
If this was true for me then I wouldn't have suggested the two eras I did, because the TNG film/late DS9 era is by FAR my favorite era for Starfleet ship designs. Because that wouldn't make sense though I instead made suggestions that could at least work, Enterprise era design has hints of the TOS style without looking comically outdated and silly like true TOS ships do (including the TOS connie), and a TMP variant can work by simply labeling it a TMP refit. Imo TOS ships have not aged well at all and are simply laughable, and every Disco ship is hideous except for the connie (with that one they managed to take a dated piece of garbage and turn it into an absolute masterpiece).
What exactly do you see as "silly" about the design of the TOS Enterprise?