Go here to see photos of Engineering in the new series Enterprise. It looks more like TNG or DS9 or VOY than TOS.
Go here for a picture of the ship’s exterior. I wonder if they plan to do any special effects with a model or if they will be all-digital…?
Go here to read an interview with Scott Bakula and look at a video of his appearance on last night’s Entertainment Tonight. In that video, you will see the Bridge set, unfinished. (You need Windows Media.)
In this article, it is revealed that the ship will have a complement of between 70 and 80. About the aliens, there is this:
Damn straight. The new "old’ Enterprise already looks more advanced that the TOS one. I knew this was a bad idea, this just confirms it. Don’t Bergman et. al know that most ST fans are continuity freaks? sigh
A friend of mine thought the new Enterprise should be more “retro” than the original ship. If you did that, you’d have nothing more than some folding chairs and Etch-A-Sketches. This new ship looks like the old ship would have looked like if the show were being done for the first time using today’s special effects. Being the open-minded semi-hardcore Trekkie that I am, I’ll watch it and not make judgements. Even when they tamper with already established history (and they will).
I think the engineering shots kinda work, actually. The brass sheen to the metal and the purple light through glass actually feels a bit Jules Verne, y’know? Old-fashioned sci-fi. Almost starting to look like an actual engine room, FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER, rather than a bunch of plasma balls and lava lamps. Hard to pull off but it should work, if engineering is anything to go by.
I agree about the outside of the ship. But short of giving the thing a couple of funnels, I don’t see what else they could’ve done. Anybody seen the makeup and outfits? I’m betting they go for sideburns and flares. That’ll age it up pretty fast.
Ok, open up my handy dandy “Star Trek Chronology” which is quite out of date (1996). 5 years before the Earth - Romulan wars. Now the first ships I saw were the Daedalus-class. With that big ball in the front (vageuly resembling the ship that carried HAL and company to Jupiter in 2001. That’s kinda what I was expecting. This was looks a little too stylish. Now why would they go from disc to ball and back to disc? Oh well, it’ll bother me but not so much.
Here’s a pic of a Daedalus-class starship, the USS Pioneer NCC-163
anyway I guess once I deal with it I’ll be ok. But I guess they try an explain the design by giving it at X rating for experimental. So this must be the first ship with a disc. But I don’t think they should have called it the Enterprise.
Although what I was really really hoping for was a nice big Winebago!
Labels! They label their freakin’ access panels! My fellow engineer/tech geeks, can we have a Hallelujah?
I feel better about this already. Of course they’re not going to make it look cheesy just because TOS visuals look cheesy. That would be silly. They’re trying to make it look more real–if the Enterprise D had real engineers on board instead of motile fountains of technobabble, you’d see sticky notes everywhere. “Plasma Conduit Access–DO NOT OPEN”–“Screwdrivers”–“Junk Bin”. Engineers label things, even if it makes them look less pretty.
I do have the unpleasant impression that that horribly vulnerable little node between the front ends of the nacelles is supposed to be Main Engineering–can we say, “Gonna need another Chief!”? I just hope the writing doesn’t suck too bad–I consider it oddly hopeful that Bakula said they were having trouble spouting even minor technobabble. Maybe they’ll cut it out.
Maybe I’m just a big old-timey geek myself, but TOS Klingons are the ones I’m used to! Even after all these years, whenever I see that make-up with the forehead ridges, I say to myself, “That’s not what Kligons look like.”
That being said, I tend to agree that we can’t really expect them to make the sets and effects look “more primitive” than TOS. They cannot aim their show just at the hard-core Trek fans. They’ve got to try to bring in new viewers as well. And you can’t do that with a new show that looks like it’s thirty years old.
It’s strange for an old Trekkie like me to say, but I find that I’m not so het up about continuity errors as I used to be. Oh, I still notice them. Occasionally I will even comment on them, if they seem particularly interesting. But finding continuity errors no longer makes me think, “Dammit, they just don’t care!” Maybe it’s because I’ve started to realize that every TV show has mistakes like this. The difference is that Dick Van Dyke Show fans, for example, don’t compile lists of them.
I am guardedly optimistic about Enterprise. But then I’m one of those weirdos who thought Voyager had a few moments where it wasn’t utter crap, so don’t listen to me.
I don’t mind the fact that the ship looks cooler than TOS’s Enterprise. It isn’t necessarily the case that the more advanced things get, the nicer looking they get. There are few passenger aircraft more beautiful than a Lockheed Constellation. Compared the the flying-phallic-symbol Boeing 777, it is a work of art. But the 777 can fly twice as fast, twice as high, and probably 10 times as far than the Connie.
I love the look of Engineering. It actually looks like a place where engineers would work.
I’ve seen a (admittedly not very good) picture of Bacula apparently in uniform (can’t figure where for the life of me…)
Only problem I have with it is the fact it has the ‘arrowhead’ insignia on the arm (afforementioned continuity muddling). Other than that, while it doesn’t look military, it looks like something people would wear…
'Course it could just be a cool shirt he was wearing for promotional purposes.
I love the new look. The uniforms, IIRC, are pretty spiffy in a retro-50’s, seaquest dsv sort of way. The ship is really neat, too. The bridge design is going to be particularly cool. I’m sick of all these computerized touchpad displays.
I only wish someone other than Berman were involved. He’s going to fuck it up. There’s no question of if. It’s only a matter of when.
The TV Guide article has a great line about whether the vulcan is going to wear a cat suit. He said of course not. Fucking liar. The moment ratings slip, they’re going to slip her into the tightest outfit they can squeeze her into and start shovelling out plotlines about sexual habits.
One of the few DS9 episodes I remember was the one where Big Fat Scotty was stuck in the transporter for 50 years. When they sucked him out, they mocked up the Enterprise bridge in a HoloSuite. Dax goes on and on how “retro” it was. Like that’s the way Star Fleet designed it, to look old and clunky.
When Sisco and his crew went back in time (if this isn’t the same ep, I remember 2) to the tribble infestation, the had the “old” Klingons (of course, they used old footage) and when Worf was asked why they looked funny, he got all snippy and said something to the effect of “we don’t talk about it.” So the Original Series Klingons were an aberraton.
No matter what they do with the new series, they’ll have some excuse for it. (No matter how half-assed the excuse is.)
-Rue.
One of the few DS9 episodes I remember was the one where Big Fat Scotty was stuck in the transporter for 50 years. When they sucked him out, they mocked up the Enterprise bridge in a HoloSuite. Dax goes on and on how “retro” it was. Like that’s the way Star Fleet designed it, to look old and clunky.
When Sisco and his crew went back in time (if this isn’t the same ep, I remember 2) to the tribble infestation, the had the “old” Klingons (of course, they used old footage) and when Worf was asked why they looked funny, he got all snippy and said something to the effect of “we don’t talk about it.” So the Original Series Klingons were an aberraton.
No matter what they do with the new series, they’ll have some excuse for it. (No matter how half-assed the excuse is.)
-Rue.
Look at the bottom left image. There is an open hinged door. It’s not one of those automatic sliding doors that became a Trek icon all their own. I bet it won’t make that SHOOP sound effect when it opens. It looks like a futuristic version of a water-tight door on a naval vessel (air-tight, in this case). The bottom of it is set a foot or so above the deck. Now, THAT’S realistic, that is attention to detail.
**
Does anyone know the answer to this?
Jinxie: In DS9, Sisko had a small model of a Daedelus-class ship in his office. In several episodes, a character would stand or sit near it, so it was often in full view. This was actually a preliminary design for TOS Enterprise, but Gene Roddenberry didn’t like it, so he had his designer (Matt Jeffries, I think) go back and Jeffries replaced the sphere with the saucer and re-designed the secondary hull (Engineering and Shuttlecraft bay).
BTW: this ship IS simpler than TOS Enterprise in that it has no secondary hull, just a saucer with two warp engines attached.
Actually, they had labels all over the place on TNG, DS9 and VOY, it’s just that the font was too small to be visible on TV. The set designers took this as an opportunity to insert in-jokes (names of the show’s behind-the-camera crew, for example) and stuff like the first line of the Gettysburg Address or the opening line from A Tale of Two Cities. Also, every ship had a brass plate near the Bridge turbolift with that ship’s slogan. Enterprise-D had “To Boldly Go Where No One Has Gone Before.” Another ship had “Wherever You Go, There You Are,” from Buckaroo Bonzai. This was never seen on camera, but there was a photo of it in an issue of Cinefantastique magazine (which I am sure will devote an entire issue to the new series).
From Esprix, quoting Rick Berman:
**Kirk’s communicator required more range than a cell phone. We are still unable to design a communicator that can send a signal to an orbiting ship and still be small enough to fit in the palm of Kirk’s hand. It requires too much power and needs a large antenna. Here are two photos of a guy using a satellite phone from the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. Note that the transceiver is the size of a laptop computer. Here is a better view of the phone he used. It ain’t something you can clip to a utility belt or put in your pocket.
Interesting, it’s not working for me anymore, either. It was the only one I could find, though. However, the exact same image is supposed to be in the next issue of TV Guide (July 14 - 20). I never buy TVG anymore; I use the listings that come in the Sunday Los Angeles Daily News, but that’s what it says here.
I like the fact that the warp nacelles have red half-globes on the front end, as the TOS Enterprise did. I’m bothered, though, that the sides of the nacelles seem to glow, as TNG Enterprise-D’s nacelles did.
I also think the saucer section should have some of the sharp edges that the TOS Enterprise did, rather than the rounded edges seen in later starships.
Putting such nitpicks aside, I’m excited about this series. They seem to have found a way to stay in the Star Trek universe but approach it from a fresh angle that offers all kinds of possibilities. How would humans react to new, know-it-all aliens with pointy ears? What was it like to go into space without transporters and instantaneous communication with HQ? How do you avoid war with these scary Klingon people when you don’t have a universal translator? I want to know.
I refuse to let continuity-worship interfere with my enjoyment of good stories. If they put a good story on the screen, I’ll watch.
