What exactly do you see as "silly" about the design of the TOS Enterprise?
Pretty much everything except the general silhouette of the ship, it quite simply looks like a cheesy, low budget 60s design (I'm aware that TOS wasn't actually low budget, but it sure looks like it was). All of that is fine for when it came out but nowadays it just looks silly. Even in the late 80s/early 90s when I was a kid watching TNG and the TMP era movies I laughed the first time I saw a picture of the TOS Enterprise. The Discoprise fixes every issue I've ever had with the TOS Connie.
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rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,582Community Moderator
Ultimately this is a case of "to each their own".
I respect the TOS Connie as she is the ship that started it all. But there are elements of the Discovery Connie that does solve a few issues, like the neck and pylons. And its not "ape brain" thinking. Its more structural and tactical. Even with advanced technology, structure is important. I always felt that the neck seemed way too thin for anything other than turbolifts on the TOS Connie. Which means you have very little material you have to cut through in combat. Shields go down... what is one of the most vulnerable places on a Connie? Go for the neck. Hell... while it was Kelvin Timeline that vulnerability was exploited in Star Trek Beyond. The shorter, thicker neck of the Discovery Connie helped to offset that weakness a bit while still maintaining the iconic shape.
The straight pylons probably cut into usable space, especially in the shuttlebay. You can't just have pylons stop at the edge of the hull, even with SIF generators. You have to have conduits and stuff going into them that aren't running along the inside of the hull. The angled pylons on both the Discovery and Refit variants allow for more usable space inside the secondary hull, including expanded shuttlebay facilities.
But the fact remains... none of this would be possible without the TOS Connie. Like any ship, she has her good angles too. She is the ship that started it all. Could she have been designed a bit better? Maybe. But the fact remains that you gotta respect the old girl. Even if she looks a bit silly today... she's still got staying power and a charm all her own.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder after all. Some may agree, some may disagree. But we can ALL agree that the TOS Connie started this adventure we love.
What exactly do you see as "silly" about the design of the TOS Enterprise?
Pretty much everything except the general silhouette of the ship, it quite simply looks like a cheesy, low budget 60s design (I'm aware that TOS wasn't actually low budget, but it sure looks like it was). All of that is fine for when it came out but nowadays it just looks silly. Even in the late 80s/early 90s when I was a kid watching TNG and the TMP era movies I laughed the first time I saw a picture of the TOS Enterprise. The Discoprise fixes every issue I've ever had with the TOS Connie.
Odd as it may sound, those are the same problems that I have with the DSC Enterprise design. It looks like someone just grabbed off the shelf parts and textures and jammed them together without any unifying theme. Not to say that it looks actually bad (it look great in a conventional sort of way), just that the Discoprise looks busy, mundane and chunky in comparison to the original, kind of like a beer stein compared to a stemmed wine glass. The odd patchy gray color of the Discoprise does not help any with that ponderous heavy look either, often it makes the ship look like it was made of concrete instead of ceramic coated metal like the TOS ship is supposed to be.
You can see that in pictures of the two ships compared at the same size, the DSC warp nacelles are chunkier and bigger overall, the impulse deck bulkier, the saucer does not dip in as much and there are a lot of flats where the TOS ship was curved. One of the best examples is that the TOS bridge island looks almost like it was smoothly extruded from the saucer surface while the Discoprise one does not.
One of things that puts off some people about the TOS design is that it is less mechanistic than is currently fashionable. Ironically, Jefferies first tried that mechanical approach (the Daedalus design for instance) and on a TV screen it just looked dull and boring. Then he turned to googie design, its organic minimalism and slightly alien and playful shapes and proportions produced a ship that would look good even on snowy black and white broadcast TV screens.
The TOS design makes heavy use of Phi ratios, angles and curves to suggest nature while at the same time being obviously technological, the dichotomy makes a little itch in the back of the mind that people either find intriguing or irritating. Star Wars uses some of the same "brain itch" technique with their asymmetric shapes and weird hanging panels though they do it in a very busy, more art deco style overall.
The warp struts were never meant to stop at the surface of the secondary hull, they penetrated in a ways. In fact, the struts made a kind of U shape in the secondary hull, sort of like how the NX nacelles were tied together though you cannot see that from the outside (they did show it in TAS however). The engineering rooms you saw in the show (well, two of the three rooms that same set was supposed to represent anyway) sat on top of that horizontal transverse warp core (the little dilithium crystal console corresponded to the bulge in the TNG core but was probably bigger and the crystal port was the only part of it that poked up through the deck).
Also, the struts on the TOS ship are not over the shuttlebay the way they are on the JJprise, they are further forward. Remember, the TOS Enterprise was not a carrier, the shuttles were the Trek equivalent of the two seaplanes WWII battleships carried or the two choppers a modern Areligh Burke carries so that bay does not forward that far.
What I liked about the DSC redesign isn't so much "more realism" as it's all space magic anyway and Star Trek isn't hard scifi (in fact it's just as much space opera as Star Wars just in a different style) what I do like is that it makes the movie refit seem less like a 100% rebuild with no orginal parts retained and more a major refit with major compenents retained as the secondary hull and pylons look more like the movie versions rather then straight up copies of the TOS ones.
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Pretty much everything except the general silhouette of the ship, it quite simply looks like a cheesy, low budget 60s design (I'm aware that TOS wasn't actually low budget, but it sure looks like it was). All of that is fine for when it came out but nowadays it just looks silly. Even in the late 80s/early 90s when I was a kid watching TNG and the TMP era movies I laughed the first time I saw a picture of the TOS Enterprise. The Discoprise fixes every issue I've ever had with the TOS Connie.
I respect the TOS Connie as she is the ship that started it all. But there are elements of the Discovery Connie that does solve a few issues, like the neck and pylons. And its not "ape brain" thinking. Its more structural and tactical. Even with advanced technology, structure is important. I always felt that the neck seemed way too thin for anything other than turbolifts on the TOS Connie. Which means you have very little material you have to cut through in combat. Shields go down... what is one of the most vulnerable places on a Connie? Go for the neck. Hell... while it was Kelvin Timeline that vulnerability was exploited in Star Trek Beyond. The shorter, thicker neck of the Discovery Connie helped to offset that weakness a bit while still maintaining the iconic shape.
The straight pylons probably cut into usable space, especially in the shuttlebay. You can't just have pylons stop at the edge of the hull, even with SIF generators. You have to have conduits and stuff going into them that aren't running along the inside of the hull. The angled pylons on both the Discovery and Refit variants allow for more usable space inside the secondary hull, including expanded shuttlebay facilities.
But the fact remains... none of this would be possible without the TOS Connie. Like any ship, she has her good angles too. She is the ship that started it all. Could she have been designed a bit better? Maybe. But the fact remains that you gotta respect the old girl. Even if she looks a bit silly today... she's still got staying power and a charm all her own.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder after all. Some may agree, some may disagree. But we can ALL agree that the TOS Connie started this adventure we love.
Odd as it may sound, those are the same problems that I have with the DSC Enterprise design. It looks like someone just grabbed off the shelf parts and textures and jammed them together without any unifying theme. Not to say that it looks actually bad (it look great in a conventional sort of way), just that the Discoprise looks busy, mundane and chunky in comparison to the original, kind of like a beer stein compared to a stemmed wine glass. The odd patchy gray color of the Discoprise does not help any with that ponderous heavy look either, often it makes the ship look like it was made of concrete instead of ceramic coated metal like the TOS ship is supposed to be.
You can see that in pictures of the two ships compared at the same size, the DSC warp nacelles are chunkier and bigger overall, the impulse deck bulkier, the saucer does not dip in as much and there are a lot of flats where the TOS ship was curved. One of the best examples is that the TOS bridge island looks almost like it was smoothly extruded from the saucer surface while the Discoprise one does not.
One of things that puts off some people about the TOS design is that it is less mechanistic than is currently fashionable. Ironically, Jefferies first tried that mechanical approach (the Daedalus design for instance) and on a TV screen it just looked dull and boring. Then he turned to googie design, its organic minimalism and slightly alien and playful shapes and proportions produced a ship that would look good even on snowy black and white broadcast TV screens.
The TOS design makes heavy use of Phi ratios, angles and curves to suggest nature while at the same time being obviously technological, the dichotomy makes a little itch in the back of the mind that people either find intriguing or irritating. Star Wars uses some of the same "brain itch" technique with their asymmetric shapes and weird hanging panels though they do it in a very busy, more art deco style overall.
The warp struts were never meant to stop at the surface of the secondary hull, they penetrated in a ways. In fact, the struts made a kind of U shape in the secondary hull, sort of like how the NX nacelles were tied together though you cannot see that from the outside (they did show it in TAS however). The engineering rooms you saw in the show (well, two of the three rooms that same set was supposed to represent anyway) sat on top of that horizontal transverse warp core (the little dilithium crystal console corresponded to the bulge in the TNG core but was probably bigger and the crystal port was the only part of it that poked up through the deck).
Also, the struts on the TOS ship are not over the shuttlebay the way they are on the JJprise, they are further forward. Remember, the TOS Enterprise was not a carrier, the shuttles were the Trek equivalent of the two seaplanes WWII battleships carried or the two choppers a modern Areligh Burke carries so that bay does not forward that far.