I'm not going to get into the "art deco vs whatever" debate because that still goes over my head, and honestly don't see why that's relevant...
The viewscreen debate... if it has a HUD overlay already... wouldn't it make sense that they can also overlay more information over it so that its basically no different than a "traditional" viewscreen? Just because its being prejected onto a transparant material vs an opaque one really doesn't matter does it? The viewscreen is STILL relaying data from the sensors. The material its being displayed on really doesn't matter. And they can polarize it so that you don't get the glare from lightsources. And structural integrity... its most likely the same material as all the other viewports on the ship.
How often have we seen "Warp Combat" as portrayed in TOS outside of TOS? Honestly as far as I can recall... we don't. Most of the combat at warp seemed to lack any maneuvering because ships were trying to knock each other out of warp. And most of the time they don't even fire Phasers at warp. Its all torpedos. Voyager blew a nacelle off the Equinox with torpedos, the Borg Cube used some kind of torpedo system to knock the Enterprise-D out of warp...
And a lot of the other things the TOS Enterprise is "capable of" seems to disappear later on. Warp 14, ability to glass a planet, ship mounted phaser Stun setting...
Honestly a lot of the "TOS had this when DSC didn't" arguments kinda fall apart a bit when compared to the rest of the franchise. TNG era was more consistant with technology and capabilities, which some of which was carried over into Enterprise, which again I believe was carried over into Discovery. TOS wasn't consistant with itself at times, saying the Enterprise could do this one episode but not the next. Which leads to splitting hairs on details that start getting to obscure levels at times.
Trying to say the TOS Enterprise is a different kind of ship from the DSC Enterprise also kinda feels off to me. We haven't seen enough of her in action to really judge. Outside of retrofitting her shuttles and other things into combat support craft, she fought just as effectively as the TOS version. I can see the TOS Enterprise firing her phasers just like the DSC Enterprise no problem. And I can see the TOS Enterprise losing a chunk of her saucer section the same way because that was an armor piercing torpedo lodged into the hull, and a rather big one at that. So saying one has better protection than the other... I just don't see the argument.
Weapon accuracy... I don't think that's an issue. The DSC Enterprise could bullseye things just as easily. However we must consider the circumstances. How many times did we see the TOS Enterprise in active combat against multiple enemies? And I mean everyone actively maneuvering or one side swarming the other. Nomad probably wasn't trying to hide its presence, or even trying to evade or disrupt a sensor lock. The dang thing was basically Godly after all. What did it care about a matter/antimatter warhead flying in from 90k? On the other hand a Klingon BoP is going to be actively attempting to evade to avoid getting shot.
Until at least DS9, we didn't really see much in the way of active battles. Most ships just tanked everything thrown at them. However that is a product of available technology. The studio really had no choice but to show most combat encounters that way. As technology improved, so did the ability to show active battle scenes, such as those we started to see in DS9 during the Dominion War.
With the consoles... touchscreens can be configured to a user's preferences, and Discovery has shown that they have a mix of touchscreens and physical controls as well. So if Uhura was using a touchscreen, she could have set it to her preferences, that way she could still manipulate something without looking because she knows where her hand is in relation to whats on her console. As for Sulu... I still feel that having something more than the box of jellybeans makes more sense for helm controls.
One thing we have to remember is that TOS was the origin of everything we know. It was a product of the 1960s, and had to make up a lot of stuff. As the franchise grew, things had to change and the shows had to try and be more and more consistant. Some things weren't carried over. So IMO trying to put down things because they don't fully line up with TOS is a bit... weird, and kinda hair splitting on details. No one is right or wrong, but we still have to consider when things were made, and the limitations of those eras.
And honestly the fact this is even being debated just shows how much we know and enjoy Star Trek. lol we're such nerds.
The googie vs. art deco thing is about style fatigue and loss of uniqueness more than the actual styles themselves.
In short, googie is an upbeat futuristic style that mixes clean surfaces, natural organic curves, spirals, angles and proportions (often with a bit of optical illusion or other "how did they do that" element). It depends on the overall form and the play of light on the surface (Roddenberry originally wanted the hull to be a smoothly shimmering pearlescent white btw) to catch the eye rather than added decoration.
Art deco is a much older (and easier to do) style that uses regular geometry, equal divisions (half, thirds, quarters, etc) from centerpoint (like the circle of bolts on a truck wheel or the 1/3 circle symmetry of the struts on the Discoprise instead of the golden ratio one of the TOS-E), and repetition in patterns which gives it a mechanical, industrial look. It is the patterns which mostly catch the eye in that style, like the grooves in the neck and the pattern of little domes on the saucer of the Excelsior and the Aztecing all the ships had from the movie era onwards, rather than the simple shapes underneath.
Googie style is rather rare on TV/movie science fiction, possibly due to its playful upbeat nature not sitting well with jaded, cynical Hollywood culture and it was something that set it apart from the rest, though the main reason from the seventies onward was undoubtedly because Star Wars was purely art deco and Paramount move division was trying very hard to coattail them to woo the SW fans over so they made it as close to Star Wars as they dared without alienating the Trek fans. Of course they apparently did not realize that they were mostly the same demographic so doing a quality Trek film without the Star Wars hooks would have worked just as well, or better.
Unfortunately, Paramount were not the only ones to jump on that lemming train and soon just short of everything was being done in art deco style and has been ever since, and to those who can see the differences in styles it has gotten very old and dull. To me the DSC Enterprise looks clunky, inelegant, dull and industrial, and a lot older than the TOS one for instance.
The viewscreen thing is simple. They are brighter, higher resolution, and far more flexible in use than a hud, and since the screens in Star Trek have always represented depth-showing holographic display surfaces there is no perceptual difference between an image on the screen and looking out a window. The icing on the cake is that you get that view without sacrificing safety because it does not require a big hole in the armor for it.
As for combat in warp, the real reason of course is that Paramount movie division was coat tailing Star Wars and wanted to do the relatively static ultra-short range combat of big ships that it featured. They did give a reasonable in-universe explanation for the change though, a major breakthrough in shield technology meant that they needed more power to break through them than they could get off of the impulse stacks so they tapped the warp power instead, which meant they could either move fast or hit hard but not both.
And yes, they mainly use torpedoes when firing in warp, which is not surprising since after about 2270 phasers competed with the warp drive for energy. Still, they have shown phasers used at warp several times, like when the USS Phoenix killed a fleeing Cardassian freighter and its escort at warp using two different weapons systems, and unless the Federation has a secret third weapons system on the Nebula class that means they killed one of them with phasers at around warp six.
As to why DSC does the close-and-slow combat in an inappropriate era continuity-wise, my guess from everything I have read and seen about their behind-the-scenes workings the most likely explanation is that they started with a combination of The Undiscovered Country and the first Kelvin movie as their basis for the series and they seem to know (or care about) very little of the rest.
Warp 14 in the old cubed scale that TOS used is fast but Voyager outdid it many times, it is approximately warp 9.55 in the new scale TNG used, so no it did not disappear after TOS. It is not like it does not happen with real world measures, just look at how many different versions of "ton" there are.
They never said they could "glass" a planet, they said they could destroy all life on a planet in twelve hours time. That is not an unreasonable timeframe considering they have dozens (or hundreds) of extremely high yield warheads along with beam weapons that cause a creeping disintegration effect and can be scanned across a planet rather quickly. For that matter they could even scratch up chemical, biological, and radioactive warheads with what they have on board, or asteroid bomb it (though that would take longer) quite easily.
As for why they never did it after TOS, they never actually did it IN TOS either, and the threat of doing so is only effective if the recipient of the threat believes you will do it, and no in one later years who knew anything about the Federation would believe it since the Federation did not have a habit of actually doing it.
TNG was no more consistent than TOS was, it had just as many (in fact a lot more but it ran longer too) instances of being able to do something one episode but not do the same thing in another. One good example was how they needed a special McGuffin to get close enough to a star to do closeup readings of the corona, but in another episode a Klingon captain used a trick of skimming along the surface of a star and using the disturbance of the warp field starting up suddenly to cause a CME to destroy its pursuers who were skimming along just over the surface of the star in their wake.
In fact, TOS was more realistic by using warp drive even at sublight the way they often did because it handily explained why they could maneuver nose-first like an aircraft in space instead of vectoring (like in The Expanse) and mostly ignore inertia and time dilation like they did.
Weapon range and accuracy are actually a tremendous factor. In fact, the reason the TOS Enterprise never faced hoards of fighters or small ships is that no one was stupid enough or desperate to throw them away uselessly like that. The TOS Enterprise easily one-shotted a Klingon scout hapless enough to be spotted by it for example, and their accuracy meant that a smaller ship's greater maneuverability was useless in trying to avoid being hit.
TOS ship combat was meant to be as realistic as possible, which is why it comes across as similar to combat in The Last Ship where it is usually ships of similar size and/or capability duking it out with careful measured shots with wild fire-everything as fast as possible combat a rare happening at most.
Of course, also factoring in to TOS was the high cost doing the special effects (which was compounded by a mixup which resulted in a lot of the stock footage of the ship from various angles and maneuvers being lost very early in the series) so they only had a few stock shots of firing, none of which would have been good for Star Wars style mass brawls in space.
Personally, I don't see how you can not see that the Enterprise and the Discoprise are two different kinds of ships. Roddenberry and Jefferies based the way the ship was set up on WWII capital ships (with a bit of submarine thrown in for the torpedoes) and the shuttlebay represented the floatplanes on launch rails they often carried on those ships. Today's Arleigh Burke class, a cruiser-sized guided missile destroyer, is another example of the idea with its two helicopters.
Like them, there were only meant to be two ready shuttles and a few spares broken down and packed away.
The DSC Enterprise on the other hand carries and launches several squadrons of fighters, along with packing in extra utility shuttles for use as makeshift fighters. Its main guns even seem to be weaker since they apparently cannot swat frigates and light destroyers in one shot with them like the TOS ship did with the Klingon DDR equivalent.
As for controls, the idea was that the bridge stations would autoconfigure to the preferences of the person sitting that station at the time, that is why there was no need to label everything, it was all the familiar controls in the familiar places, and holographic labels were supposed to be available if needed (that is why the panel surfaces were black, it was thought that it would make the occasional "holographic" display use easy, but it did not work out).
Of course, they stopped actually doing that "self reconfiguring" during the filming of the first pilot since it was pain in the butt to keep swapping the modules between takes and there was not enough detail to easily see that it was different.
Also, originally they had some flat touch display areas on the control panels, unfortunately the transparencies in them burned in about thirty seconds so they had to leave them off. Later they replaced those sections with more jewel controls which is why the panels are not quite as sparse looking in the actual series compared to the pilot. Touch screen controls were nothing new in science fiction even back then, but like handheld satphones it took decades for real world technology to do anything similar.
And as I said earlier, the changes between TOS and the movie era had nothing to do with self-consistency (it was already as consistent as a TV series got) and everything to do with apeing Star Wars to tap into the gravy train it turned out to be.
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rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,696Community Moderator
I still feel that you can't difinitivly call the DSC Enterprise different from TOS Enterprise. We've only seen her actually fight once, and it was clearly a situation that required them to improvise with the makeshift fighters. Something I feel the TOS Enterprise could do if necessary. They just never had to. And until she had to maneuver to cover Discovery, Enterprise was holding her own pretty well without moving.
The way I see it, while she may not look the exact same on the outside, she is the same ship on the inside with the same capabilities. Just updated look.
And I kinda see space combat in Star Trek as a whole to be more submarine warfare honestly. While the larger ships would probably adopt more of a cruiser or battleship approach like you said, for the most part they're still trying to outmaneuver each other. We've seen it more as our technology improved. It was most apparent in DS9, although we saw some of it in the later parts of TNG, and even in Generations when the Enterprise-D tried to evade the BoP when they pierced the shields.
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I still feel that you can't difinitivly call the DSC Enterprise different from TOS Enterprise. We've only seen her actually fight once, and it was clearly a situation that required them to improvise with the makeshift fighters. Something I feel the TOS Enterprise could do if necessary. They just never had to. And until she had to maneuver to cover Discovery, Enterprise was holding her own pretty well without moving.
The way I see it, while she may not look the exact same on the outside, she is the same ship on the inside with the same capabilities. Just updated look.
And I kinda see space combat in Star Trek as a whole to be more submarine warfare honestly. While the larger ships would probably adopt more of a cruiser or battleship approach like you said, for the most part they're still trying to outmaneuver each other. We've seen it more as our technology improved. It was most apparent in DS9, although we saw some of it in the later parts of TNG, and even in Generations when the Enterprise-D tried to evade the BoP when they pierced the shields.
We are getting a Pike TV series with Spock and Number One so we will have plenty of evidence to compare the TOS Enterprise to the DSC Enterprise.
I still feel that you can't difinitivly call the DSC Enterprise different from TOS Enterprise. We've only seen her actually fight once, and it was clearly a situation that required them to improvise with the makeshift fighters. Something I feel the TOS Enterprise could do if necessary. They just never had to. And until she had to maneuver to cover Discovery, Enterprise was holding her own pretty well without moving.
The way I see it, while she may not look the exact same on the outside, she is the same ship on the inside with the same capabilities. Just updated look.
And I kinda see space combat in Star Trek as a whole to be more submarine warfare honestly. While the larger ships would probably adopt more of a cruiser or battleship approach like you said, for the most part they're still trying to outmaneuver each other. We've seen it more as our technology improved. It was most apparent in DS9, although we saw some of it in the later parts of TNG, and even in Generations when the Enterprise-D tried to evade the BoP when they pierced the shields.
There might be a way for the TOS one to fit some of the smaller pods they used in though it would damage the ship a bit and would not be something they could do long term (also even with this it would not explain how they had squadrons of regular fighters/shuttles in a bay meant for two).
The corridors in TOS were a bit wider than the ones in The Undiscovered Country and DSC, so they might have been able to remove the section seal doors from the back of the shuttle pad and stacked some up in the corridors between the bay and the next section seal (unfortunately it would probably have required evacuation since without the doors it would all go to vacuum with the shuttlebay opened if the force field flickered or dropped.
The main section seal doors look like this (they never showed them closed, and did not even have functional prop doors for it on the set, they would have had to drag in pieces by hand and set them up manually for that if they ever needed it in a script):
You have a good point about Star Trek combining surface and submarine style warfare, the proximity phasers and photon torpedoes set on proximity fuse are like depth charges and hedgehogs, and the TOS Enterprise had the US submarine standard arrangement of six tubes forward and four aft (in fact in Journey to Babel Kirk ordered "forward tubes two, four, and six" loaded to try and hit the Orion scout with a spread).
Still, even mixing surface and submarine elements TOS used a more realistic naval combat style than the wild Star Wars furball DSC does. Roddenberry was very adamant about the fact that a tiny shuttle could not possibly generate the energy needed to do any damage to a capital ship, no matter how many rowboats armed with tommyguns you throw at a realworld capital ship it will never pierce the hull armor, and ships in space have solid hulls without people walking around on an open deck to kill with the machineguns.
The thing with a "visual reboot" is that for it to be just that the overall feel has to be the same, and they failed the feel part totally, DSC feels like a branch like the Kelvin stuff, not like mainline TOS (or really any of the other Treks except Kelvin) though it has just the barest whiff of it of it on very rare occasions. DSC feels more like the difference between Battlestar Galactica and NuBSG, a full reboot.
Honestly a lot of the "TOS had this when DSC didn't" arguments kinda fall apart a bit when compared to the rest of the franchise. TNG era was more consistant with technology and capabilities, which some of which was carried over into Enterprise, which again I believe was carried over into Discovery. TOS wasn't consistant with itself at times, saying the Enterprise could do this one episode but not the next. Which leads to splitting hairs on details that start getting to obscure levels at times.
I have only seen "DSC had this when TOS didn't" argument not the other way around with Discovery's extensive use of holographic technology and using replicators instead of food processors.
TOS had those unlabeled jellybean buttons instead of the touchscreens we've come to take for granted here in the real world, as well as a smooth matte surface to every ship instead of the modern nubbly look. (In both cases it should be noted that the original appearances have been outpaced by reality in a case of The Aesthetics of Technology, so faithfully reproducing those appearances, or trying to make DSC appear even less advanced, would have made the show look positively silly to modern eyes.)
The issue is not about the aesthetics of technology, but of technology. There was no mention of holographic technology in TOS, but DSC is full of holographic technology. Enterprise kept its technology mostly consistent with what was expected in the 22nd Century, but updated its aesthetics. Discovery did whatever they thought looked cool and then had to come up with some convoluted explanation why TOS didn't have it. It works extremely well in the 32nd Century, but not 10 years before TOS.
TOS mentioned holographics several times (and they were going to use holographic recorded "letters" in fourth season before the show was cancelled) but they only actually showed them twice since the scripts never had a reason to beyond that.
When Kirk, Spock and McCoy came across the three witches apparitions (from Macbeth) in Catspaw they first thought someone was trying to punk them with a hologram (which was more or less what Sylvia and Korob actually were doing as it turned out).
And in That Which Survives they had no trouble with the fact that the entirely real and solid looking Losira was actually a hologram though they could not figure out how could a hologram could touch people and objects (they obviously did not have experience with holomatter photonic life forms yet).
So they had sophisticated holographic image technology, and in TAS they showed a crude but functional holodeck (probably the type Tasha Yar demonstrated to a guest, which used tractor/pressor beams and forcefields instead of holomatter).
One of the main concepts of TOS ruled out doing anything like the holocomms they used in DSC with any kind of regularity, which was the fact that the ship was out of realtime communications range most of the time. The DSC stuff would only work if they were practically parked on a starbase or along a major relay string (which actually could have been the case because they were at war with the Klingons, not exploring out on the fringe). Most of the time the TOS Enterprise received electronic dispatches instead of live communications because of that delay.
For example, in TOS there was something like a six hour communication lag between the Romulan neutral zone and headquarters because the relays were so sparse on the frontier, Kirk was on his own because if he tried to kick any decision upstairs they could not get a reply for a minimum of twelve hours even if the Admiralty replied immediately upon receipt.
I am going to guess he is talking about how, back in TOS, the Federation was supposed to be this entity of ultimate good, Gene wanted everyone to get along, and shake hands, by the end of the episode, and the main cast was supposed to have no real flaws, and have no real inter personal conflicts.
Starting with TMP, but especially from Wrath of Khan and onward, this entire ideal was thrown out. The cast was shown to have a lot more character flaws, the Federation was shown to be massively corrupt(even conspiring with the Klingons to keep the conflict between their two governments going), and there was a lot more violence, and solving problems by simply killing your enemy. Gene rather infamously hated the movies, and said he didn't consider them canon. He spent his last days suing everyone involved with Undiscovered Country for "ruining his vision" and making Star Trek "too violent"
Early TNG was still under Gene's lordship, but starting with Season 3 onward he was pretty much removed from the equation, and we saw a lot of these same changed to TNG season 4-7. DS9 was the first Trek show made away from any real control of Gene, and DS9 is arguly the most dark dipeiction of Trek even today. Taking all of those previously mentioned changes to 11, and throwing in Section 31 for good measure.
Voyager, Enterprise, Discovery, and Picard, all draw a lot more from the DS9 ideal then they do TOS or early TNG, and are thus a lot more consistent with each other then TOS/early TNG is to any other Trek.
Fair enough and it does make sense. I agree, although I would argue the characters on TOS had some level of interpersonal conflicts. Spock and McCoy bickered and insulted each other on many occasions.
If you have heard Roddenberry's talks from the conventions he did not consider the Federation some kind of all sweetness and light, everyone gets along no matter what, utopia. They were striving for utopia and were better off than today, but were nowhere near there yet.
He used to tell audiences that the Federation was no utopia, it was just that it was effectively a classless society so the crime and prejudice inherent in a highly unequal classed society like we have now simply do not exist for the most part. You just have to watch TOS with that in mind to see what he was talking about.
They did not have the urban blight, burglary, and muggings that you find in tiered economies but they did have corruption to some degree, inter-service rivalries such as Starfleet and civillian agencies had friction and butted heads (The Trouble With Tribbles implies that one is quite common in fact).
Conspiracies are also present, in fact The Conscience of the King reveals that Kirk and Riley are part of a vigilante conspiracy to track down Kodos the Executioner for his crimes on Tarsis IV. Turnabout Intruder even brings to light that a group of misogynistic admirals had been for years posting their (invariably male) male protégés to all the capital ship commands and in effect putting a glass ceiling on the postings a female captain could get.
People still committed crimes, even killed other people, but most of the economic reasons were eliminated so it was a lot rarer.
Also, a lot of the "everyone gets along" stuff people quote nowadays is a misinterpretation of Roddenberry's insistence that everyone working together for a long time (like a ship crew) be intelligent and professional about it and not waste time and resources constantly backstabbing each other like a soap opera.
And finally, from what I have heard of his personality and natural contrariness I suspect that the tug of war he always had with the network execs caused him to pull in the utopia direction at times (especially during the movie era since he was effectively pushed out after TMP, and in TNG where he was still reeling from the treatment the movie division gave him) and that is what everyone remembers the most. On top of that, the toxic mess in the TNG writer's room in the first year or so had more to do with Maizlish sowing chaos than Roddenberry himself.
And it is not surprising that Roddenberry was against The Undiscovered Country since until DSC came out it was the most anti-Trek of anything in the Trek universe, especially as it was written before Roddenberry tore into it. It went beyond deconstruction into actual (if low-key) contempt for Star Trek and the ideals it was founded on.
Well if androids can do mind meld's now I am sure they can get Shatner to retract his statement about not going anywhere with the covid problem existing. As well as telling all the natural forming temporal phenomenon that exists in the Trek lore that in the new discovery time setting that their existence is illegal and that mikey spock will be coming to arrest them.
Comments
The googie vs. art deco thing is about style fatigue and loss of uniqueness more than the actual styles themselves.
In short, googie is an upbeat futuristic style that mixes clean surfaces, natural organic curves, spirals, angles and proportions (often with a bit of optical illusion or other "how did they do that" element). It depends on the overall form and the play of light on the surface (Roddenberry originally wanted the hull to be a smoothly shimmering pearlescent white btw) to catch the eye rather than added decoration.
Art deco is a much older (and easier to do) style that uses regular geometry, equal divisions (half, thirds, quarters, etc) from centerpoint (like the circle of bolts on a truck wheel or the 1/3 circle symmetry of the struts on the Discoprise instead of the golden ratio one of the TOS-E), and repetition in patterns which gives it a mechanical, industrial look. It is the patterns which mostly catch the eye in that style, like the grooves in the neck and the pattern of little domes on the saucer of the Excelsior and the Aztecing all the ships had from the movie era onwards, rather than the simple shapes underneath.
Googie style is rather rare on TV/movie science fiction, possibly due to its playful upbeat nature not sitting well with jaded, cynical Hollywood culture and it was something that set it apart from the rest, though the main reason from the seventies onward was undoubtedly because Star Wars was purely art deco and Paramount move division was trying very hard to coattail them to woo the SW fans over so they made it as close to Star Wars as they dared without alienating the Trek fans. Of course they apparently did not realize that they were mostly the same demographic so doing a quality Trek film without the Star Wars hooks would have worked just as well, or better.
Unfortunately, Paramount were not the only ones to jump on that lemming train and soon just short of everything was being done in art deco style and has been ever since, and to those who can see the differences in styles it has gotten very old and dull. To me the DSC Enterprise looks clunky, inelegant, dull and industrial, and a lot older than the TOS one for instance.
The viewscreen thing is simple. They are brighter, higher resolution, and far more flexible in use than a hud, and since the screens in Star Trek have always represented depth-showing holographic display surfaces there is no perceptual difference between an image on the screen and looking out a window. The icing on the cake is that you get that view without sacrificing safety because it does not require a big hole in the armor for it.
As for combat in warp, the real reason of course is that Paramount movie division was coat tailing Star Wars and wanted to do the relatively static ultra-short range combat of big ships that it featured. They did give a reasonable in-universe explanation for the change though, a major breakthrough in shield technology meant that they needed more power to break through them than they could get off of the impulse stacks so they tapped the warp power instead, which meant they could either move fast or hit hard but not both.
And yes, they mainly use torpedoes when firing in warp, which is not surprising since after about 2270 phasers competed with the warp drive for energy. Still, they have shown phasers used at warp several times, like when the USS Phoenix killed a fleeing Cardassian freighter and its escort at warp using two different weapons systems, and unless the Federation has a secret third weapons system on the Nebula class that means they killed one of them with phasers at around warp six.
As to why DSC does the close-and-slow combat in an inappropriate era continuity-wise, my guess from everything I have read and seen about their behind-the-scenes workings the most likely explanation is that they started with a combination of The Undiscovered Country and the first Kelvin movie as their basis for the series and they seem to know (or care about) very little of the rest.
Warp 14 in the old cubed scale that TOS used is fast but Voyager outdid it many times, it is approximately warp 9.55 in the new scale TNG used, so no it did not disappear after TOS. It is not like it does not happen with real world measures, just look at how many different versions of "ton" there are.
They never said they could "glass" a planet, they said they could destroy all life on a planet in twelve hours time. That is not an unreasonable timeframe considering they have dozens (or hundreds) of extremely high yield warheads along with beam weapons that cause a creeping disintegration effect and can be scanned across a planet rather quickly. For that matter they could even scratch up chemical, biological, and radioactive warheads with what they have on board, or asteroid bomb it (though that would take longer) quite easily.
As for why they never did it after TOS, they never actually did it IN TOS either, and the threat of doing so is only effective if the recipient of the threat believes you will do it, and no in one later years who knew anything about the Federation would believe it since the Federation did not have a habit of actually doing it.
TNG was no more consistent than TOS was, it had just as many (in fact a lot more but it ran longer too) instances of being able to do something one episode but not do the same thing in another. One good example was how they needed a special McGuffin to get close enough to a star to do closeup readings of the corona, but in another episode a Klingon captain used a trick of skimming along the surface of a star and using the disturbance of the warp field starting up suddenly to cause a CME to destroy its pursuers who were skimming along just over the surface of the star in their wake.
In fact, TOS was more realistic by using warp drive even at sublight the way they often did because it handily explained why they could maneuver nose-first like an aircraft in space instead of vectoring (like in The Expanse) and mostly ignore inertia and time dilation like they did.
Weapon range and accuracy are actually a tremendous factor. In fact, the reason the TOS Enterprise never faced hoards of fighters or small ships is that no one was stupid enough or desperate to throw them away uselessly like that. The TOS Enterprise easily one-shotted a Klingon scout hapless enough to be spotted by it for example, and their accuracy meant that a smaller ship's greater maneuverability was useless in trying to avoid being hit.
TOS ship combat was meant to be as realistic as possible, which is why it comes across as similar to combat in The Last Ship where it is usually ships of similar size and/or capability duking it out with careful measured shots with wild fire-everything as fast as possible combat a rare happening at most.
Of course, also factoring in to TOS was the high cost doing the special effects (which was compounded by a mixup which resulted in a lot of the stock footage of the ship from various angles and maneuvers being lost very early in the series) so they only had a few stock shots of firing, none of which would have been good for Star Wars style mass brawls in space.
Personally, I don't see how you can not see that the Enterprise and the Discoprise are two different kinds of ships. Roddenberry and Jefferies based the way the ship was set up on WWII capital ships (with a bit of submarine thrown in for the torpedoes) and the shuttlebay represented the floatplanes on launch rails they often carried on those ships. Today's Arleigh Burke class, a cruiser-sized guided missile destroyer, is another example of the idea with its two helicopters.
Like them, there were only meant to be two ready shuttles and a few spares broken down and packed away.
The DSC Enterprise on the other hand carries and launches several squadrons of fighters, along with packing in extra utility shuttles for use as makeshift fighters. Its main guns even seem to be weaker since they apparently cannot swat frigates and light destroyers in one shot with them like the TOS ship did with the Klingon DDR equivalent.
As for controls, the idea was that the bridge stations would autoconfigure to the preferences of the person sitting that station at the time, that is why there was no need to label everything, it was all the familiar controls in the familiar places, and holographic labels were supposed to be available if needed (that is why the panel surfaces were black, it was thought that it would make the occasional "holographic" display use easy, but it did not work out).
Of course, they stopped actually doing that "self reconfiguring" during the filming of the first pilot since it was pain in the butt to keep swapping the modules between takes and there was not enough detail to easily see that it was different.
Also, originally they had some flat touch display areas on the control panels, unfortunately the transparencies in them burned in about thirty seconds so they had to leave them off. Later they replaced those sections with more jewel controls which is why the panels are not quite as sparse looking in the actual series compared to the pilot. Touch screen controls were nothing new in science fiction even back then, but like handheld satphones it took decades for real world technology to do anything similar.
And as I said earlier, the changes between TOS and the movie era had nothing to do with self-consistency (it was already as consistent as a TV series got) and everything to do with apeing Star Wars to tap into the gravy train it turned out to be.
The way I see it, while she may not look the exact same on the outside, she is the same ship on the inside with the same capabilities. Just updated look.
And I kinda see space combat in Star Trek as a whole to be more submarine warfare honestly. While the larger ships would probably adopt more of a cruiser or battleship approach like you said, for the most part they're still trying to outmaneuver each other. We've seen it more as our technology improved. It was most apparent in DS9, although we saw some of it in the later parts of TNG, and even in Generations when the Enterprise-D tried to evade the BoP when they pierced the shields.
normal text = me speaking as fellow formite
colored text = mod mode
We are getting a Pike TV series with Spock and Number One so we will have plenty of evidence to compare the TOS Enterprise to the DSC Enterprise.
There might be a way for the TOS one to fit some of the smaller pods they used in though it would damage the ship a bit and would not be something they could do long term (also even with this it would not explain how they had squadrons of regular fighters/shuttles in a bay meant for two).
The corridors in TOS were a bit wider than the ones in The Undiscovered Country and DSC, so they might have been able to remove the section seal doors from the back of the shuttle pad and stacked some up in the corridors between the bay and the next section seal (unfortunately it would probably have required evacuation since without the doors it would all go to vacuum with the shuttlebay opened if the force field flickered or dropped.
The main section seal doors look like this (they never showed them closed, and did not even have functional prop doors for it on the set, they would have had to drag in pieces by hand and set them up manually for that if they ever needed it in a script):
You have a good point about Star Trek combining surface and submarine style warfare, the proximity phasers and photon torpedoes set on proximity fuse are like depth charges and hedgehogs, and the TOS Enterprise had the US submarine standard arrangement of six tubes forward and four aft (in fact in Journey to Babel Kirk ordered "forward tubes two, four, and six" loaded to try and hit the Orion scout with a spread).
Still, even mixing surface and submarine elements TOS used a more realistic naval combat style than the wild Star Wars furball DSC does. Roddenberry was very adamant about the fact that a tiny shuttle could not possibly generate the energy needed to do any damage to a capital ship, no matter how many rowboats armed with tommyguns you throw at a realworld capital ship it will never pierce the hull armor, and ships in space have solid hulls without people walking around on an open deck to kill with the machineguns.
The thing with a "visual reboot" is that for it to be just that the overall feel has to be the same, and they failed the feel part totally, DSC feels like a branch like the Kelvin stuff, not like mainline TOS (or really any of the other Treks except Kelvin) though it has just the barest whiff of it of it on very rare occasions. DSC feels more like the difference between Battlestar Galactica and NuBSG, a full reboot.
TOS mentioned holographics several times (and they were going to use holographic recorded "letters" in fourth season before the show was cancelled) but they only actually showed them twice since the scripts never had a reason to beyond that.
When Kirk, Spock and McCoy came across the three witches apparitions (from Macbeth) in Catspaw they first thought someone was trying to punk them with a hologram (which was more or less what Sylvia and Korob actually were doing as it turned out).
And in That Which Survives they had no trouble with the fact that the entirely real and solid looking Losira was actually a hologram though they could not figure out how could a hologram could touch people and objects (they obviously did not have experience with holomatter photonic life forms yet).
So they had sophisticated holographic image technology, and in TAS they showed a crude but functional holodeck (probably the type Tasha Yar demonstrated to a guest, which used tractor/pressor beams and forcefields instead of holomatter).
One of the main concepts of TOS ruled out doing anything like the holocomms they used in DSC with any kind of regularity, which was the fact that the ship was out of realtime communications range most of the time. The DSC stuff would only work if they were practically parked on a starbase or along a major relay string (which actually could have been the case because they were at war with the Klingons, not exploring out on the fringe). Most of the time the TOS Enterprise received electronic dispatches instead of live communications because of that delay.
For example, in TOS there was something like a six hour communication lag between the Romulan neutral zone and headquarters because the relays were so sparse on the frontier, Kirk was on his own because if he tried to kick any decision upstairs they could not get a reply for a minimum of twelve hours even if the Admiralty replied immediately upon receipt.
If you have heard Roddenberry's talks from the conventions he did not consider the Federation some kind of all sweetness and light, everyone gets along no matter what, utopia. They were striving for utopia and were better off than today, but were nowhere near there yet.
He used to tell audiences that the Federation was no utopia, it was just that it was effectively a classless society so the crime and prejudice inherent in a highly unequal classed society like we have now simply do not exist for the most part. You just have to watch TOS with that in mind to see what he was talking about.
They did not have the urban blight, burglary, and muggings that you find in tiered economies but they did have corruption to some degree, inter-service rivalries such as Starfleet and civillian agencies had friction and butted heads (The Trouble With Tribbles implies that one is quite common in fact).
Conspiracies are also present, in fact The Conscience of the King reveals that Kirk and Riley are part of a vigilante conspiracy to track down Kodos the Executioner for his crimes on Tarsis IV. Turnabout Intruder even brings to light that a group of misogynistic admirals had been for years posting their (invariably male) male protégés to all the capital ship commands and in effect putting a glass ceiling on the postings a female captain could get.
People still committed crimes, even killed other people, but most of the economic reasons were eliminated so it was a lot rarer.
Also, a lot of the "everyone gets along" stuff people quote nowadays is a misinterpretation of Roddenberry's insistence that everyone working together for a long time (like a ship crew) be intelligent and professional about it and not waste time and resources constantly backstabbing each other like a soap opera.
And finally, from what I have heard of his personality and natural contrariness I suspect that the tug of war he always had with the network execs caused him to pull in the utopia direction at times (especially during the movie era since he was effectively pushed out after TMP, and in TNG where he was still reeling from the treatment the movie division gave him) and that is what everyone remembers the most. On top of that, the toxic mess in the TNG writer's room in the first year or so had more to do with Maizlish sowing chaos than Roddenberry himself.
And it is not surprising that Roddenberry was against The Undiscovered Country since until DSC came out it was the most anti-Trek of anything in the Trek universe, especially as it was written before Roddenberry tore into it. It went beyond deconstruction into actual (if low-key) contempt for Star Trek and the ideals it was founded on.