🌟 Star Trek, TOS 🌟

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I loved the way the finally explained the more mean spirited Vulcans. This reminds me I will have to decide to rewatch all the pre Abrams ST series as soon as I'm done with Fantasy Island.
Yeah, there was one guy - named "V'Las" who was like the head Vulcan during that last-season story arc - he was just over-the-top: ordering various people to be destroyed left and right - he was on the verge of handwringing at the camera like a scenery-chewing comic book villain. Turned out he was conspiring with the Romulans, but he definitely was not in touch with the teachings of Surak. (He had to be the most unVulcan-like Vulcan I ever saw.)

What was interesting during that story... I didn't learn till much later that the young Vulcan girl was supposed to be the same Vulcan old lady (T'Pau) who presides over Spock & Kirk's combat in "Amok Time."



She ends up reforming Vulcan society with truer interpretation's of Surak's teachings on logic & enlightenment.



Yeah, there was one guy - named "V'Las" who was like the head Vulcan during that last-season story arc - he was just over-the-top: ordering various people to be destroyed left and right - he was on the verge of handwringing at the camera like a scenery-chewing comic book villain. Turned out he was conspiring with the Romulans, but he definitely was not in touch with the teachings of Surak. (He had to be the most unVulcan-like Vulcan I ever saw.)

What was interesting during that story... I didn't learn till much later that the young Vulcan girl was supposed to be the same Vulcan old lady (T'Pau) who presides over Spock & Kirk's combat in "Amok Time."



She ends up reforming Vulcan society with truer interpretation's of Surak's teachings on logic & enlightenment.
I didn't know that, or maybe I forgot. You seem to have a much better memory about this stuff then me and I've watched Enterprise 2 or 3 times, I can't remember which



I have trouble with simple, overhead fluorescent lights, so I don't know how anyone could function on a bridge where there are a thousand lens flares hitting you in the eyes at every angle!

Had the same thought. So many lights! So many things lit from the side! Why?!? Stuff lit from the bottom and diagonally. The lens flares had lens flares. How does the bridge crew get anything done in this super-shiny overlit environment?



I didn't know that, or maybe I forgot. You seem to have a much better memory about this stuff then me and I've watched Enterprise 2 or 3 times, I can't remember which
There's a network called H&I ("Heroes & Icons") and they show ST episodes from each series between 8:00pm - 1:00am.

l keep watching the Enterprise episodes at 12 am because that's my only TV time of solitude.

I keep remarking how there was virtually no continuity or cross referencing between episodes in TOS, while Enterprise almost seems obsessed with continuity - for instance T'Pol is still dealing with her mind-meld-rape (and resulting Pa'nar syndrome - https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Pa%27nar_Syndrome) in season III that she suffered in season I.



Had the same thought. So many lights! So many things lit from the side! Why?!? Stuff lit from the bottom and diagonally. The lens flares had lens flares. How does the bridge crew get anything done in this super-shiny overlit environment?
You guys might enjoy this video comparing ST bridges (unfortunately, the narrator kind of likes the Abrams' bridge - although I think he refers to an "Apple store" criticism)...




You can't make a rainbow without a little rain.
There's a network called H&I ("Heroes & Icons") and they show ST episodes from each series between 8:00pm - 1:00am.

l keep watching the Enterprise episodes at 12 am because that's my only TV time of solitude.

I keep remarking how there was virtually no continuity or cross referencing between episodes in TOS, while Enterprise almost seems obsessed with continuity - for instance T'Pol is still dealing with her mind-meld-rape (and resulting Pa'nar syndrome - https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Pa%27nar_Syndrome) in season III that she suffered in season I.

Hubby just found that H&I channel about a week ago, and he hasn't stopped watching it. He's been watching the "Comic Book Heroes" shows, ("Batman", "Superman", and "Wonder Woman"), plus "Walker, Texas Ranger" and "Lethal Weapon".

Unfortunately they show the Star Trek shows during prime time, so they're opposite all the newer shows that we watch.
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You can't make a rainbow without a little rain.
You guys might enjoy this video comparing ST bridges (unfortunately, the narrator kind of likes the Abrams' bridge - although I think he refers to an "Apple store" criticism)...


Thanks for this video. (I was going to watch it now, but I just noticed that it's about 18 minutes long, and I'm so tired right now that I'll probably fall asleep during it, so I'll have to watch it tomorrow.)

Years ago, I went to a Star Trek exhibit where they had a full bridge setup where people could walk through it and feel like we were on the bridge of the Enterprise. It was such a great experience.



The Donut Problem and Modern Starship Design

Contemporary Trek embraces more complicated shapes. The beauty of the original ship was balance of the shape and not the complexity (e.g., the popsicle struts holding up the engines are almost embarrassingly simple). Today's designs are rather busy, and tend on include holes in the primary hull (the saucer). This started with the Vengeance



Which may have been influenced by droid ships from Star Wars

Which may have borrowed from the Derelict ship from Alien


In addition, primary hulls are complicating the saucer shape in other ways by taking bites out the saucer, as if the ship was improperly designed to intersect with the secondary hull and nacelles and so, had some bits cut out of it, as we find on the Picard series. See below for two examples.





And of course, there is the donut design of the Discovery




The shapes are getting busier, but I don't know that busier means better. And it raises the question why? Why waste the space? You could have deck and crew where those donut holes and cut outs are. Also, it moves away from the smooth elegance of the Star Trek universe. Star Wars is old, weathered, covered in greebles, but Star Trek offers us a futuristic utopia--smooth lines, unhurried, elegant, unified. The design philosophy is informed by the premise. In short, this is a bit of an aesthetic concern.



I like that post^....It's always interesting to see these different Star Trek ship designs. It's ironic how the artist are cutting into the saucer portions. I guess it's suppose to look more aerodynamic? No air in space right. Now, I'm not enough of a hard core fan / techie to know if a ship traveling at warp speed encounters enough sheering force to warrant saucers with holes?

Me thinks this is the most efficient ship designs:




A system of cells interlinked
The above are the correct efficient designs. The people who come up with all the ship designs in most of the sci-fi stuff always add some sort of sleek and aerodynamic shapes, which in an airless environment, it just so much waste of potential space. As long as you can properly account for inertia, and slow down and speed up the ships without causing the crew to stroke out, a giant cube is always the way to go.

Resistance is futile.
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The original designs of the ship featured a spherical primary hull as this is the best pressure-holding shape (our space ship has a positive pressure of breathable air), so I think that might be the ideal shape for the main area as opposed to a square. The difficulty in the original sketches was that that big ball up front rather obscured the rest of the ship.


In the "real world" aerodynamics is not a concern, but symmetry of mass relative to vector of travel would be important. Bi-lateral symmetry (like an airplane) would not matter in space, but the basic symmetry of mass does make sense for any ship that makes use of anything resembling old-fashioned reaction-thrust (i.e., rockets, ion-drives). The ships of The Expanse get this detail right.



Star Trek is premised on the idea of 2 warp engines creating a warp-field for faster-than-light flight, so we may excuse the bilateral symmetries of so many ships in this 'verse. Also, warp fields may have warp dynamics resembling aerodynamics, so there might be some in-universe logic for the smoothness.

Again, I think that the chief design principle is utopianism. Humanity has "made it." We've grown up (or we're nearly "grown ups"), and so the ships show a utopian elegance. The ships are elegant because a utopia should be elegant. The Enterprise D, for example, exudes the sense of aesthetic concerns balanced with practical concerns. The ships curves blend into each other gracefully.



This is humanity expressing the notion of form meeting function as a sort of statement about humanity (as opposed to the brutalist architecture of the Borg which has no sense of "pretty," but only "practical"). Federation ships, I think, should appear to be practical (having propulsive bits, and habitation bits, and so on), but should also be elegant, unhurried, and unified (not greebly, kit-bashed, or weathered). The Borg, on the other hand, are just all about business (they're not here to sell you on any cloying optmisitic idealism by signing you up for a popular club of planets in a space bureaucracy and they're not trying to scare or otherwise impress you). They are here to assimilate you, so it makes sense that their ships are squared off with pipes and bits scattered around. The squares make sense. The Borg is brutalism.

The trouble with Trek is that it has been around for so long that there is this sense that the designs are a bit tired and need to be spruced up (e.g., the giant nacelles of the JJ-Prise, the barrel-rolling pizza-cutter that is Discovery, the super-busy Neo-Constitution class in Picard), but I find that the best shapes exude a simple elegance, like an old Jaguar or Ferrari.




The Enterprise NX-01 had "holes" in the main hull that most people don't know about... that's because they were sealed when the ship was in motion... but the ship had two cargo access-ways on each side of the saucer section that went clean through the hull of the ship from top to bottom (this presumably made loading cargo a snap since cargo pods could fly directly through the ship and make stops at any deck, rather than trying to move cargo once it's aboard).

I don't think this fact was ever demonstrated on the show - I only know if from one of those ST spaceship books!




Old School Meets New School: Picard


Compare these two images and ask if significant inspiration wasn't taken from this oddball "squat" painting of the Enterprise made for Star Trek TMP.






Edith Keeler Must Die (And so too must Christopher Pike)


Context here.



The season finale of Strange New Worlds has Pike in the center seat where Kirk is supposed to be for Balance of Terror. Pike has been established as a more touchy-feely guy (the approving dad you never had), but he's got the "right ideas at the wrong time." Just as Edith Keeler's soft touch politics were the wrong moment at the rise of National Socialism, so too is Pike's softer, trusting, "can't we all just get along approach." Kirk is the right man for the moment, because he is a bit more hard-edged.



How do we justify Pike getting his face-dipped in a deep fryer and having to play a never-ending game of 20 questions with one blinking light? The same way we justify killing off peacenik Joan Collins. They're just too good for this world... ...at the moment.



Kirk is thus the better man for the time, but not the better man timelessly. Space hippies are right! Peace! Love! The world is not ready for rock and roll yet (but your kids are going to love it).



FX Reel for TMP Enterprise altered to JJ-Prise style design.






FX Reel for TMP Enterprise altered to JJ-Prise style design.




Cool.

My only question is: if you're going at Warp point 5, would you still use Jupiter's gravity for the slingshot effect?



Cool.

My only question is: if you're going at Warp point 5, would you still use Jupiter's gravity for the slingshot effect?

My question is how they got there so fast. At half the speed of light, they're 86 minutes away from Jupiter.



I'm beginning to think it's all fake!

The hardest part of writing fantasy and science fiction is NOT that you're re-writing the rules of the universe, but rather the hardest thing is to play by your own rules.



If on TOS they had held on to just a few of the technologies they discovered (e.g., the Enterprise rigged by aliens to be capable of intergalactic travel, synthesizing drugs that give humans telekinesis, synthesizing drugs that humans move as fast as the Flash, time travel), they could have easily overcome the "baddie of the week" rather easily. I mean, at the point you've cracked time travel, you don't ever have to "lose" again (e.g., Star Trek IV), so why limit yourself to whales?



3ft original model of the Enterprise has apparently been found after being missing for 45 years.