Check Out USS Enterprise From ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ In 2019 Ships Of The Line Calendar

Universe Publishing has revealed details on their 2019 Star Trek calendars, including the next in their popular Ships of the Line series. One preview of note was the July 2019 spread, which features the USS Discovery and the USS Enterprise from Star Trek: Discovery. The Enterprise from the original Star Trekas envisioned by Star Trek: Discovery – was seen in the final moments of the season finale.

July features the USS Discovery alongside the new version of the USS Enterprise

The USS Enterprise, under the command of Christopher Pike, is expected to play a role in the early episodes of the second season of Discovery, which begins shooting shortly. As we reported from the recent WonderCon Discovery panel, production designer Tamara Deverell explained how they approached the design for the show, saying:

For the Enterprise, we based it initially off of The Original Series. We were really drawing a lot of our materials from that. And then we particularly went to more of the Star Trek movies, which is a little bit fatter, a little bit bigger. Overall, I think we expanded the length of it to be within the world of our Discovery, which is bigger, so we did cheat it as a larger ship.

USS Enterprise meets USS Discovery in the season one finale

Ships of the Line 2019

The image featuring the USS Discovery and USS Enterprise – credited to artists John Eaves and Scott Schneider –  is one of 13 ship images from the 2019 Star Trek Ships of the Line Calendar.

The 2019 Star Trek Ships of the Line Calendar will be released in August and can be pre-ordered from Amazon for $14.99. You can see see the thumbnails images for the full set of images on this year’s calendar below.

Preview of March which features USS Voyager docked at DS9

More Star Trek calendars for 2019

The Ships of the Line Calendar is just one of many Star Trek calendars lined up for 2019. Here are the others, all available now for pre-order. Click links and images below for previews or to pre-order at Amazon.

Star Trek Discovery 2019 Wall Calendar – $14.99

Star Trek 2019 Wall Calendar: The Original Series – $14.99

Star Trek Posters by Juan Ortiz 2019 Poster Calendar – $19.99

Star Trek 2018-2019 16-Month Engagement Calendar – $14.99

Star Trek Daily 2019 Day-to-Day Calendar – $14.99

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I get to be the first to complain. The decimated neck destroys the elegance of the Enterprise. Bango!

First of many, I’d imagine.

I see your complaint and I raise you the potato-peeler nacelle struts, which I just deem a really unncessary change. Apart from the two changes mentioned, I don’t really mind what they’ve done BUT I still think that redesign raises a far more general question: If the producers didn’t really dig the look and feel of TOS in the first place and parts of the DSC staff keep repeating that they feel “boxed in” by the constraints put up by TOS, then why choose DSC’s setting in the first place? As far as I’m concerned, everything that happened in the first season, could just as well have happened in the post-VOY era – with the slightest of changes maybe, all of which would be unsubstantial. But I won’t keep crying over spilt milk and will just trust the production staff to take at least some of the fandom complaints to heart. I’m just naive like that.

You hit the nail on the head. This entire series could have been Post Voyager and everything would have made sense. Section 31, new tech that was never discussed before like the spore drive. The war could have also easily happened – maybe ancient klingons return to Qonos and take back what they think is theirs and that the TNG era klingons aren’t pure and etc etc… It would have allowed the past to stay in the past without shoe-horning this show into where it is. Just because the federation found enlightenment doesn’t mean it cant go swirling back to a more brutal time given the right events. (ie. some would say the World and well, mostly the US has regressed from previous progress lately – a perfect social commentary of the world right now)

Unfortunately I found the writing this season to be pretty weak. Things resolved without really being resolved. They were all over the place. So whether or not the specific period they chose to tell these stories doesn’t really matter. This was a poor attempt at turning Star Trek into something it’s not.

Agreed, with the possible exception of Sarek, who died during TNG.

I agree from the get-go I think it should have been post Voyager

Yeah because Voyager was such a popular show…. It’s almost like you guys want Star Trek to die.

Voyager lasted seven seasons, clearly it was popular enough. The only Trek shows that cancelled prematurely were all the pre-24th season shows.

Let’s hope Discovery changes that.

@Tiger2

Voyager was very lucky to make those 7 seasons. The ratings in the final few seasons were pretty bad. The only reason UPN didn’t cancel it was because it was deemed their flagship show. It would be really embarrassing to cancel your flagship show.

Enterprise got cancelled because it was on a channel no one watched or had, and fans got bored with Trek. I stopped watching Trek sometime after the 5th season of Voyager.

Uh you do realize both Voyager and Enterprise were on the exact same channel? So I don’t really get your point. Enterprise was also their flagship show once Voyager left, it still got cancelled anyway.

And honestly I seriously doubt there are more people watching Discovery than was watching Enterprise in its last season. The difference is Discovery is on a streaming site with hardly any shows and paid for its first season with Netflix. But in terms of actual viewers, my guess it would just be 3-4 million tops in the U.S. which is what Enterprise had when it got cancelled.

Tiger2 – I think UPN was stepping back from Star Trek during Enterprise’s time.

A quote from Memory Alpha:

” Executive Producer Rick Berman has divulged that the relationship between UPN and Star Trek, which had been a warm one during the production of Voyager had taken a turn for the worse, “Our relationship with the network was distant. And it wasn’t embracing and warm and…a sense of working together that had existed in all the years before.” (ENT Season 3 Blu-ray-special feature, “In a Time of War”) Another example was, according to Brannon Braga, their decree, if the series was to be renewed for a fourth season – the network actually already of a mind not to do so – , to get rid off Scott Bakula as Jonathan Archer, which Berman fought tooth and nail, successfully as it turned out (though he had not been able to resist their decree to add “Star Trek” to the series title which was originally just Enterprise, explicitly intended as such). That the series was renewed for a last season, was in no small part due to the fact that strong backing was received from an unexpected corner; Scott Bakula has unequivocally cited Garry Hart, a Star Trek supporter, who had just been promoted to another position within the conglomerate, as the driving force behind the renewal, thereby thwarting the cancellation intents of his successor(s) at UPN for the time being, conceivably an instance of “studio politics”. ”

UPN also started to lose affiliates by that time also. Many people just had no way to access the channel. The UPN affiliate in my area was a half snowy analog channel. It was one of the reasons I gave up on Star Trek.

That explains why Enterprise got cancelled…it was on a bad network which got cancelled itself a few years later.

Don’t get me wrong, I had given up on Enterprise as well after its first season. Many people did. But I was watching it from Asia at the time. But it also proved once the network changed hands they were not gung ho for Trek anymore. And yes I think the network being in disarray is what killed it for others as like you said they were having troubles even watching the show as the channel was being dropped, so you can’t blame it all on Enterprise.

I kind of blame it on Voyager. I got so tired of ST doing the same old thing over and over again. When I heard the news about the cancellation I wasn’t the least bit surprised. A lot of fans like me just lost interest.

Discovery bought me back to Trek.

Give it up. No one wants that.

Very much agree. A number of us here have been saying the same thing since this time period was announced. Thus far I see nothing which makes any sense for this show to be set ten years prior to TOS. They could have done whatever they wanted with the Klingon look, ship design, tech upgrades, and it would have felt like natural progression. The time period DISC is set in is the thing taking me out of the show the Most, out of a list of things.

I agree they shouldn’t have set the series pre-TOS. However, I’ve come to accept the fact that the studio needed to link the series to a recognizable time period. Most Americans have heard of the Enterprise, Klingons and Spock. Less are familiar with Janeway, the Dominion, Riker…etc.

I agree too. If Spock is still alive in the TNG universe, and Tuvok served with Sulu, imagine Old Xon set in post Voyager moment – whether with the original actor or not – as a wild connection to Kirk, Spock and Sarek and as the step father of Michael. They could still have a new Klingon war, as stated above, and less stress on the culture of bad Vulcans because by that time, Vulcans probably would have allowed some assimilation. So Michael’s character issues would be based on her being celebrated instead of shamed, and we would be juding her actions on whether she was actually Vulcan enough.

They linked it to a familiar period of Star Trek but if you were a casual viewer tuning in to the pilot it wasn’t necessarily recognizable as Star Trek or even JJ’s movies. I suspect that if CBS and Paramount were a shared entity this series would have been connected to the Kelvin timeline and that directive would have come from the studio.

Exactly. The only two characters that we have seen from TOS has been Sarek and Mudd, two I doubt a non-Trek viewer would even know. So I never get this argument. Discovery doesn’t have Kirk, Spock and Uhura, it has Burnham, Saru and Tyler, which means these are the characters people are watching the show for. If you’re just watching to get a Spock reference then you could watch any of the 24th century shows since he’s mentioned in all of those as well.

Potato peeler! THAT’s what that reminds me of. Yeah, that’s a design element I don’t quite get.

Agreed JAGT, agreed. I will never get it either and why bother putting it in this era. Nothing that they showed couldn’t have put in another time period. That said I’m fine with the new look of the Enterprise.

@Mirroe Galt — completely disagree with you. The elongated neck has bothered me since I first saw TOS in the 1970s. This is an improvement.

Nope. The Elongated neck on the 1966 original looked silly.

@David Oakes — yup!

Oh my God! Are you guys freaking kidding me? The Enterprise looks a hell of a lot better now. Who cares about the neck being a little shorter. I used to modify my AMT Enterprise model EXACTLY that same way. Even as a kid, I thought the neck was a little too long. I’m 51 and have been watching Trek since I can remember. TOS was always my favorite. But I grew up and so did Trek. I love the updates on the original.
I love watching the fan shows online for their kitschy, sentimental value… but I wouldn’t want to watch a new show that was looked like it was made in the 60s.
You “fanboys” drive me up the fricking wall with your whining. Let the rest of us fans enjoy the update.

I agree. I really love the look of the new Enterprise. And people can probably at least admit that stays more truer to TOS than the Kelvin version does.

Captain Ransom. OK. Just HOW did you modify that neck support again? As I recall, on the AMT model, that part was a two piecer combined with the secondary hull, and was very significant in the support of the primary hull. Which had a notched hard piece that connected the two for gluing.

My question, Captain Ransom. Where did you make your cut?

I have to think back about 35ish years… but if I remember correctly, I tool it out of the middle of the neck and fused the neck together by melting the plastic slightly. I had to do the same thing to the nacelles so they would still line up correctly. Then I just smoothed out my plastic welds and added detailing in with my xacto knife. I always modified my models cars and space ships. Wish I still had it in my collection. I just don’t have the time or patience to build models anymore at 50.

I had quite a collection myself in the day. Nice effort!

Trek on!

Click the link!

I actually thought the same thing.

But looking at the overall design of the enterprise, its hard not to try and think about ways to make it even better.

For instance. The warp drive support struts could incorporate a piston / hydraulic design. This would help stabilize the ship in a collision. Seems strange now looking at the overall design and not think that it should not have the ability to also be put together in several different configurations. This might help the ship maneuver, or make it easier to enter a confined space port hanger bay.

Just a thought.

The part of the DSC Enterprise design are the swept back nacelle struts. The departure form the straight struts really changes of the lines of the old girl.

If Star Trek Discovery had a cohesive story that was captivating, I don’t think people would complain nearly as much about the redesigns. But the fact that the show is not well written just exacerbates people’s frustrations.

I agree, that said all the Trek series had pretty shoddy first seasons, TNG DS9 Voy and Ent didn’t really get good until season 3.

Some people (Like myself) think Star Trek Discovery is very well written.

That is fine. You are entitled to your opinion of course. While I think individual scenes are handled skillfully, elements like character motivation, plot points, arcs, and themes were all over the place. Discovery, season 1, was a first draft that went out the door way too early. Here’s hoping that these elements are much tighter and make more sense come season two!

Yeah. Discovery has a much better season 1 than any of the other spin-offs. If it follows the trend of getting better around season 3, Discovery could become one of the best Trek shows.

I have always said this before came on and that if the story is great people will forget or ignore the redesigns. If its not great they will beat on the changes a lot. And yeah it looks like the latter is happening. Now of course that doesn’t mean EVERYONE feel that way but clearly enough.

I’m someone in the strange middle I’m not that bothered by most of the changes but yeah didn’t think the story was that great for most of it. But the parts I liked I REALLY liked. I just wish it was more of it.

Star Trek fans love to complain. That’s nothing new. They even wrote death threats when they found out Janeway was a woman.

LOL that is true about Janeway. Thankfully it didn’t seem to be the case when Burnham showed up. So I guess we have come a long way. ;)

A whole bunch of racist crap came out on the internet when they announced that a black woman was the lead. I saw a lot of that on reddit.

No thats true as well but I don’t think anyone was making bomb threats at least. ;)

I think the ship is beautiful and aggressive looking at the same time.

That ship design is “on fire” – like a garbage dumpster fire.

I hate the Discovery but I love this. While I didn’t hate the original Enterprise. I was always bothered by the simple nacelle pylons and weird neck(although I prefer it over the voyager and other ships that went neck-less-except for the Enterprise E). The TMP Enterprise is the best, with the meticulous work they put in that.

Yeah I still think the Discovery itself is pretty ugly (and especially when its next to the new Enterprise).

The lighting in that render looks so much better than literally every VFX shot in the show itself.

I respectfully disagree with you there, Will ;)

I agree. Everything is blue in Discovery and e every effects shot looks animated.

She looks awesome. This is how it should have always looked.

Um, no, it is not how it should have always looked. The way it looks is the way it should have always looked.

Yup.

I agree with HN4 this is how it should have always looked.

@Daniel

The TOS Enterprise never impressed me. It just looked cheap and silly to me. This new version looks like a ship.

@HN4 agreed. The old design worked for the 60s, but this design is a beauty. Hopefully we get to see this Enterprise in action

@Daniel I think we might be getting a spin off, now that we know who is playing the Pike.

@HN4 I’d watch that!

For its time I think it looked fine, but yes for today it does look a little cheap to me as well. I can’t blame them for updating it.

@HN4 — I agree. THere’s a lot here to appreciate. The original Enterprise was far from perfect, and I have thought so since the 1970s, when I first saw her. My youth was spent trying to redesign her. TMP came darn close. If TMP had done something like this, I suspect there would have been a lot less complaining about the nacelles in 1979.

@Curious Cadet – To me it always looked like a flying saucer with two rockets connected to the back end.

All I know is when the AMT models 1st came out, I built a few of them but I could never find a way to display them that prevented the pylons from detaching from the hull eventually from the stress of supporting the nacelles against gravity. It was enough to convince me than an actual starship would need reinforcement of the pylons there before I ever saw the Mike Minor designs. And when I did, it made sense to me that he had reinforced them.

It looked taller in the show, but it’s still amazing.

The December image is Bill Krause’s USS Hood design:
comment image

Absolutely love what Bill creates! His TOS movie era ships are glorious

Love it, looks gorgeous :)
Despite the changes, it’s still instantly recognizable.

I really loved the “new” Enterprise. Very elegant, the way it should be on the big screen.

I was expecting something along these lines in 2009.

People complaining about nacelle pylons….. I just can’t. THIS is what you have to worry about when the world is on fire.

You can’t what?

He can’t be a nerd that complains all day for no reason.

The world is fire, sure, but this is a website dedicated to Star Trek so it’s nice to have something else to focus on.

Change purely for the sake of change is pointless. And that’s all this show seems to be about. (And bad writing.)

Then don’t watch?

Dr. Image,

Re: Change purely for the sake of change is pointless.

No, it’s fashion.

Sure some of it IS for the sake of change, like the Klingons. But in this case the old Enterprise would look pretty out of date to all the ships we seen on Discovery so far. It would look and feel like something out of the sixties and why I understand it was updated.

I’m not sure why they stuck with the “saucer and tri-cylinder” motif at all with the discoprise. There are plenty of sci-fi and even Star Trek ships that do away with this design aesthetic – namely the Defiant class and the starfleet holoship in INS. The Jeffries design is old and therefore dated. It’s like if the 60s batmobile turned up in Batman Begins. TV Batman was set in the 60s and Begins was set in the 2000s. TOS was done in the 60s and DSC is done in the 2000s. It seems anachronistic to see the Enterprise looking like this in the discoverse. Why isn’t she gold plated like the Discovery? Why doesn’t she have square nacelles (since most of the ships we’ve seen have square flat nacelles). For me, this design doesn’t make sense alongside the Discovery design language and I would have liked a more radical departure akin to the Begins Batmobile tank. Or the visual reboot of the Klingons. The Enterprise could have looked like it fit so much better into the Discovery continuity.

“The Jeffries design is old and therefore dated.” So? It’s still the starting point of Star Trek and should have been used no matter what.

I actually agree with you – but the “old = dated” argument seems to be the stance taken by the production team to Star Trek in general so I figured if you can’t beat em join em

The BB car is required for the story to be something wholly apart from the previous batmobiles, so the 66 beauty would have been wholly inappropriate, as it couldn’t possibly do what the story called upon it to deliver. But that doesn’t date the original design, it speaks to the different story and universe of the Nolan films. The Lincoln Futura upon which the 66 car is based and most midcentury car design still looks tremendous to my eye, and discarding that look just because it was from a different decade seems arbitrary as Hell to me. Then again, the Burton car looked like a diseased Corvette from a lot of angles, like David Cronenberg’s nightmare threw up a pile of metal bits, so I never liked it (or that 89 film) at all.

Part of the issue I think that divides us on DSC is that the look of space and vessels in space is so drastically altered from everything before. You can say that is true to a lesser degree between TOS and BermanTrek too, especially when they use too much fill light in the later shows, which sabotages the look of the 1701 when it shows up in T&T on DS9, making it appear almost computer generated when in fact there was a fine miniature built, but the crazed overdone blue and hazy look of alleged space vacuum in DSC just distances me from buying the exteriors every single shot, and that’s not even getting into the lack of appeal in the hero ship’s flatness and the seaQuest looking fiasco of a thing that the Emperor was flying in. The companies involved on the VFX have shown consistently they are able to deliver really convincing work time and again, so presumably this is another creative call by the folks running DSC, and once again points to just horrid judgement on their part. I’m thinking it is going to be years before we hear about all the b-t-s stuff, which may involve vfx artists being told to make their stuff more stylized and crappy to suit the screwy tastes of TPTB — I honestly cannot understand any rationale for wanting or accepting the visuals as delivered on the series thus far (though non-space stuff like the creature they were torturing seemed to be delivered with a high level of expertise.)

@kmart I must confess to my original post being a little tongue in cheek (poor attempt, I know). FWIW I think you’re spot on here. The 66 Batmobile is my favourite design (the Burton era ones were a bit weird…) but it would have been anachronistic to see it in Batman Begins for a whole mess of reasons. But, we weren’t expected to accept Begins as a prequel to 60s Batman (but that’s a whole nother story I guess).

As for the overlighting of ships in the Berman era, my brother and I used to talk of the “ship glorification team” whose job it was to fly in a shuttle ahead of the TNG Enterprise and shine a big light on her so that she looked amazing – given that she lacked the self illumination of the TMP Enterprise…!

I also think the *design* of the Jeffries Enterprise hasn’t dated whatsoever. Sure, the production has, and the TOS graphics look awful now, but they looked good at the time. In terms of Jeffries designing a ship that looks as futuristic now as she did then, I think he did a bang up job. I really don’t buy into the “old design must equal dated” argument that the DSC team seem to present (and that many people have argued here and on other forums). I agree that DSC looks *so* different to what we’ve seen before – but this has the effect of making the Enterprise (even in its “visual reboot” form) look jarring and out of place compared to her apparent contemporaries.

I suspect 2 reasons why they want the visuals to be how they are: firstly, original Star Trek is embarrassing to the people who are making it (c.f. The comment about wanting to get as far away as possible from the campy 60s radioactive man TV show in the Simpsons). Secondly, to my mind, “visual reboot” means that the production and writing teams lack the creativity or the impetus (or both) to come up with a compelling reason as to why the alternate future Star Trek presents looks like it did in the 60s (just with modern production values like in the ENT episodes). At least the DS9 team acknowledged that to address the Klingon forehead thing would be ridiculous – even though I loved the augment virus story that came later. Disco forces us to assume that the ship pictured above is the same ship from TOS and to me it just doesn’t look right in the discoverse. Even after you accept that disco has a different visual continuity to the rest of all of Star Trek, the Enterprise still doesn’t fit in with the established discovery aesthetic (which I must admit I also don’t like). Maybe one day they’ll pull the old “reset the timeline switcharoo…!

Then why don’t we go for realism? In interstellar space with no light shining on them the ship, any ship, would be invisible. The only way you could tell it was there was by seeing the stars behind it disappear. Be thankful the effects team lit the ships up so you can see them.

Silhouetted against stars would be beautiful in deep space, offset only by running lights. Then again, they’re usually at warp in deep space, so you have a different look justified. But the main improvement they can make is a big hard strong light from the sun when in-system. ALL of these would be improvements on the visuals we’re getting.

Joking aside I would actually prefer better lighting of the ships in DSC. The Discovery would benefit from a ship glorification team.

I would not be averse to seeing a BEYOND style warp drive treatment, as that ties right in with what was initially intended for TMP.

But I’m guessing the real problem with lighting the DISCOVERY is that the ship is so damned flat, which may also contribute to why they do such a weird job of lighting ‘normal’ space shots … too much of it wouldn’t register if you were going with a single light source, unless the ship was practically barrel rolling during a cut, or you kept it in some perfect angle relative to the sun source, which would require a lot of cheating to make it not look even flatter. But that again points to how once you did a few tests, you modify or scrap the design in favor of something that does work, instead of pulling what amounts to being a ‘Q’ move and change the lighting throughout the whole universe (actually universes, plural) to try and polish your design-turd.

I absolutely love this design!!!

I really started falling in love with the Enterprise when I saw TMP and TWOK. It was one of the first ships I tried building out of LEGO when was a kid.

This new design though is just amazing. The constitution class is the ship you want to be on in Star Fleet. The design scream exploration while at the same time conveying that this ship can hold its own in a fight.

Looking forward to season 2!

When I saw it it made me realize just how much I miss Star Trek. Discovery still doesn’t feel like Star Trek to me.

I enjoy a handful of episodes but this is the first season of Star Trek that I’ve actually been able to finish and it left me excited for season 2!

The Enterprise was the hook for me. Hopefully they won’t rush the story. Serialized storytelling is fine but if they lose focus the story that unfolds becomes a bit of a mess.

There was absolutely no need to redesign that ship. It’s just stunning how the designers of previous Star Treks embraced and revered Star Trek’s history. These people think it needs altered and changed to fit their view. No thanks.

Love it. It looks great. Can’t wait for season two.

Looks like a natural evolution of the NX-01 Refit update. In that light, I dig the shit out of it!

Folks on both sides of the screen would have a better time, I think, if we’d all just accept that Discovery is, for all intents and purposes, a reboot. There’s no shame in that. Just say so, and stick to it. At this point, trying to weave all of this back into the original timeline is just not worth the hassle, and nobody is going to be happy.

(EDIT: Meant for this to reply to the article, not this particular comment — but hey, at least we’re on the same page, conversation-wise, I guess. :D)

No worries, knew it wasn’t about me 👍👍

It’s not a reboot. It’s Star Trek with fresh ideas.

“….at this point, trying to weave all of this back into the original timeline is just not worth the hassle, and nobody is going to be happy.”

Well put, Fortyseven. Totally agree. Just call it a reboot and be done.

Agreed, great looking design.

I can’t believe that they are utilizing a Gabe Koerner render that’s almost a decade old! That’s astonishing to me. Gabe’s still alive. He presumably still has his model. Why not have him render up a new image? I’ve had that image as one of my rotating desktops since he first released it.

I’d like to know how it is that he’s never been brought in to work on Star Trek.

A lot of what shows you are able to work on in Hollywood depend on timing. If you happen to be locked in on another show, then sadly you miss that opportunity. A lot depends on what VFX house wins the bid for the show/movie. If they have the staff that can do the job and they don’t need to hire additional artists, then your opportunities to be able to work on that show diminish. But, Gabe has had opportunity to do plenty Star Trek like things during his time on Orville. I did a few episodes of Orville while working at one VFX house and we got to go visit Gabe and the rest of the in-house VFX team. I’d say he seemed pretty happy. ;)

This is actually a new render of Gabe’s popular image. The editor of the calendar had requested Gabe do this one for the 2019 calendar

So many butthurt fans. Do us all a favor and just either put up and shut up or just leave the fanbase. Your toxicity is what is making the rest of us hate your virtual guts. Get out of here, go watch the Trek wannabe The Orville. Like it or not, Discovery is here to stay! So sick of the butthurt. Get out of here. Stop being a fan. 😡 does nothing to CBS. Nothing. They don’t care what the noisy 10% says about it. 76 million people were talking about it at its peak (that’s according to Parrot Analytics). That is FAR BEYOND The Orville. The Orville sucks and has 21% percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Where is Discovery? 82%. But go right ahead, be like Alec Peters and try and sabotage CBS’ control over the TV franchise. You won’t succeed.

Just attended a big Con in Dallas. celebrating comics, superheroes, Star Wars, anime…even the 50th annivetsary of 2001 was in the spotlight with a panel featuring Gary Lockwood and Kier Dullea. Trek Discovery had 0 representation, 0 merchandise and 0 buzz. The show is a dud.

Maybe you weren’t around long enough to remember the same conflicts happened over ENT, and before that, over VOY, and before that, over DS9, and before that, over TNG. Being unhappy about the quality of new material is a part of being a Star Trek fan. I bet that if you go far enough, you will find Star Trek fans complaining about 1970s Bantam novels and MEGO figurines being too different from the original show. ;)

Leave us to our complaints and our silly old outdated shows, and don’t worry – if you wait long enough, we’ll eventually die out, and then you can claim the legacy for yourself, without any resistance and any “toxicity”. At least until a future new show comes along and craps all over YOUR favorite memories. :-P

Gatekeep much?

@Wes

TRUTH !!!

I think our frustration is based o the DSC lighting and lack of clarity in the FX shots. At Trekcore, they have some basic outlines of the new Klingon models in DSC which reveal designs that are much more clear, and seemingly more familiar than anything we actually saw as viewers of the the show. FX is an art, and they definitely made some artistic choices in the “look” of the ships moving around each other and through space in a way that we, as the audience, felt lost by. I mean physically lost. If we had gotten to know a ship indivdually as a location, I think we all would have adujsted to the new designs and most felt more comfortable with their lineage.

Some of you are a sad parody of the typical Star Trek fan. Always sucking the fun out of everything. This is an artist’s rendering. The actual cg model used in the show is pictured right there with a slightly longer neck and nacelle struts that aren’t as pushed out as the drawing. I remember the art of the TNG films book where you could look at many John Eaves drawings of the final Enterprise E design but it wasn’t totally screen accurate. Why? Because it was an artist’s drawing… Keep on hating. Discovery is doing just fine with new viewers and us old regulars who understand that it’s 2018 and yes, Trek evolves.

I’m not really sure how many new Star Trek viewers there are out there. Discovery is still playing to an established fanbase, not expanding the board with people who haven’t previously watched Star Trek. This isn’t one of those shows people are talking about at work and where I work I’m the only one watching. Stranger Things, This Is Us, pretty much everything on the CW, The Walking Dead? Sure. Star Trek Discovery? Not so much.

Denny C.

Where’s My Money Denny?

It’s in CBS’s pockets, just like mine.

Denny C…I personally know only one other person who watches it. No one at work talks about it, no family, no other friends than the one (and he considers it an alternate timeline). My wife, who has liked every incarnation of the franchise, can’t stand DISC and won’t watch it with me. So I share in the wonder of what are the ratings really like, and is anyone outside this small fan base watching?

My wife watched the finale with me because she was in the room but after the premiere she had zero interest and we’ve watched a lot of Star Trek together over the years. My father, a man who watched TOS when it was still airing on NBC and then watched every series that followed, tuned out after the first half hour. My circle of friends and I have attended every movie premiere together since The Voyage Home, would get together for each season premiere and finale but with Discovery I’m the only one who rode the show out from the first ep to the season finale. So, yeah, I don’t know anyone who is actually watching this show. Maybe they’ll catch up on it at some point in the future but right now know one one knows what the heck I’m talking about when I mention Discovery.

Hate the break it to you, but the world doesn’t revolve around you and Denny. People are watching. It was in the top five most streamed shows on Netflix outside the US, and the number one show on CBS All Access.

No, it doesn’t but I’m surrounded by people in their 20s and 30s and none of them are watching and these are people who absorb a lot of media on any given day. Who exactly it is that watches each week is a bit of a mystery as well as the total number of viewers.

Denny C – That’s called Anecdotal Evidence. Unless you know everyone in the world, your opinion really doesn’t count for much.

I know the business and the evidence itself isn’t anecdotal. Discovery is doing what it needs to do for All Access but it needs to reach a wider audience.

Denny C – Ok Denny, Let’s go eat, huh.

Funny you should mention eating. Exactly what I’m doing. Go figure.

Don’t worry about it.

Odd, I’m glad I don’t work at your office.

A large portion of my team watched it and we had great discussions every Monday morning. We’d even got together for the mid season finale.

Disco is reaching a wider audience than simply “Star Trek fans’ and its doing a much better job than past shows have done.

Not saying you need to like it, but its getting a lot of traction

I think you probably would, actually. These people live and breathe TV but this one hasn’t clicked for them, especially for the casual Star Trek fans. One comment was that they had lost them with all of the spoken Klingon at the beginning of the show, another mentioned that they weren’t as engaged and others were just indifferent after watching the first episode and with a serialized drama if you tune out after the first couple of episodes it’s unlikely that you’ll revisit the show at a later date.

So, maybe too Star Treky? Not Kelvinverse enough? I’m not sure what it is. As a Star Trek fan I understand what’s clicking with fans and what isn’t but for non-fans there needs to be a hook and I’m not entirely sure what that would need to be.

Star Trek fans ARE tuning in, even those who aren’t necessarily fans of Discovery because despite the grumblings Star Trek fans are a patient lot.

Rick,
It might be a cliche to suggest this, but do you work in IT? So far this century, I haven’t worked anywhere that a current TREK was being discussed. In fact, the last time I can recall anything like a water cooler discussion to participate in was during VOYAGER’s first season. And that includes a seven year stretch working in a department (of a much larger facility) that was staffed mostly with sci-fi & fantasy-minded folk, nearly all of whom went out to see HELLBOY opening weekend, and SERENITY as well. As I recall, SERENITY got beat badly by DOOM that month, but nobody I know ever saw that, so maybe that suggests I was living in an unusual bubble, but I gotta tell you, the two times I brought DSC up during the last couple months at my current day-job workplace, I got uncomprehending stares, like ‘what are you talking about?’

I’ve been watching Star Trek and Doctor Who since I was a kid. I never talk to people about it in real life.

You’re hanging out with wrong kind of geeks. I would never go out to see Serenity. Firefly sucked.

Just attended a big Con in Dallas. celebrating comics, superheroes, Star Wars, anime…even the 50th annivetsary of 2001 was in the spotlight with a panel featuring Gary Lockwood and Kier Dullea. Trek Discovery had 0 representation, 0 merchandise and 0 buzz. The show is a dud.

LOL, ok.

Agree 100%

They seriously need to abandon the landscape format for the ‘Ships of the line’ calendars,and go back to the traditional format

On one of the Discovery facebook groups, someone who claims to be part of the computer modelling team that put it together says that they had instructions to change the original design by 25%. The original design is apparently owned by the Matt Jeffries estate, so CBS was either unwilling or unable to pay to license the original. Take that with a large grain of salt though.
That being said, it is not a horrible update. I was braced for worse, perhaps some overworked version like we saw in the 2009 movie, so in the end glad it retains much of the look and feel.

I wouldn’t get my fake news from facebook.

I think that was referring to the McQuarrie design that Discovery echoes, not Matt Jeffries TOS Enterprise. TOS Enterprise and everything related to it belongs to CBS. Back in the 1960’s people were little more than hired guns. No residuals, no intellectual property rights and the list goes on. Whatever work you did belonged to the production company or studio and that wouldn’t begin to change until the 1970’s.

I believe Ryan Church did some pretty faithful sketches, but Abrams wanted a more hotrod style design. I am talking about Trek 2009.

I’ll be 100% honest, I actually do love the look of the Enterprise in Discovery. But after reading the quote in the article, my worst fears about Discovery came true – retcon. When Discovery was made public, we Star Trek fans were reassured that Discovery took place in the Prime Universe. Then we were hit with retconned Klingons and Klingon ships, which most fans took tongue-in-cheek, expecting an explanation that never came. Then at the end of Season 2, the Enterprise arrived, but she wasn’t the Original (TOS) Enterprise.

As a fan, I honestly feel lied to. But all hope isn’t lost just yet. There is still room for them to TOSify the Enterprise in a refit for her 5-year voyage and Klingons ending up experimenting again to restore the true Klingon genome, which results in the Augmentation. Though I won’t count my chickens.

You mean the end of season 1.

I have no problem with a visual retcon of a 1960’s tv show. I think the biggest mistake Star Trek has made over the years was “Relics”, “Trials and Tribulations”, and “In a Mirror Darkly”. Establishing that that cardboard looking sets were the future was such a huge mistake.

@Rel — I agree. Berman/Braga’s pandering to the fans has done a disservice to the entire franchise and public perception. Now as DISC tries to wean the puppies from the teat, we’re treated to all manner of howls and teeth gnashing. That said, I loved “Trials and Tribulations” for the nostalgia of it all. There was really no way to do a show like that otherwise. That’s why people shouldn’t get too invested in visual canon. They should just accept that a love-letter to the fans like “Trials and Tribulations” is the exception to the rule, and doesn’t have to make sense in universe. On the other hand, I really wish “T&T” hadn’t introduced the scripted canon that the TOS Klingons somehow looked different than the TNG Klingons, thus begating the worst mistake of all, retconing the Augment Klingons.

Curious Cadet – It’s sad how they pandered to the fans in last season of Enterprise. B & B were so desperate for ratings they just turned the show into a TOS nostalgia trip for all the bad reasons. I don’t even consider the Augment Klingons to be canon. I don’t think the Discover writers do either.

@HN4 — I really liked a lot of Season 4 ENT. But the needless retconing of something that didn’t need to be was an issue. The good news is, that even accepting it as canon, it does not in any way suggest that this explains the Klingons we saw in TOS. In other words, this may be a chapter in Klingon history, but for all practical purposes the Klingons in TOS had ridges, etc. which they simply didn’t have the budget to show us at the time. The Augment Klingons, for all we know, were shipped off to a colony like lepers. In other words, visual canon is meaningless to me, particularly when it comes to TOS.

Curious Cadet – I can agree with that. Those Augment Klingons still looked nothing like the plain human Klingons from TOS. The Augments looked just like regular 90’s Klingons without ridges. They really goofed up on that episode.

@Rel – I’m with you. I remember watching Relics as a kid and thinking how stupid that scene was. It looked like Scotty just wondered on to a grade school theater set.

I think that points up the real contrast in our views. I was much more bothered by what seemed like character assassination on Scott in that episode, making him very one-note, and how they really just threw away the concept of a Dyson Sphere as a background element. Whereas you seem to have fixated on a relatively faithful recreation of a bridge set that pretty much screamed STAR TREK at a lot of us. When you say ‘grade school theater set’ …you know what I think of? The planetscape in HIDE & Q, where it seems like set the camera at exactly the wrong height and made the forced perspective background look even more glaringly artificial than it did the rest of the time (which is saying a lot, considering how awful the faked planetscapes looked in TNG, as if there had been no tech advances and perhaps some slip-backs since the 60s.)

Don’t take my desire for a visual update to TOS as not loving TOS. I’m a child of the 80’s however TOS was my first Star Trek and I still love it to this day. The aesthetic however doesn’t hold up to what I would consider the future. The computer voice alone warrants a change.

TNG is also a show that could use some visual updates if it were to ever be remade (movies aside). A lot of people forget that TNG was a who of the 80’s more so the 90’s.

To me there is nothing wrong with updating the visuals of classic shows. The stories and characters are still canon.

Rel,

Re: The computer voice alone warrants a change.

I should say. If they really want to portray it more advanced than our era then they should give it a British accent they never could manage for Hawking. And if they really want to impress do it with Majel’s existing American accented voice model modified for credible Brit.

I don’t understand why there is an argument regarding the verisimilitude of the TOS Enterprise with “reality.” Trek is entertainment, and in my view, it is artistic and creative. There is no real Federation. There is no real future timeline. If people are going to argue that this timeline or that timeline is incorrectly portrayed, then I will take that as an intellectual exercise. But it’s not worth much of my time.

Star Trek is entertainment. It is great entertainment. It has occupied hours of my time, and probably millions of hours of time if the audience overall is accounted for. That is, every hour that you and I and the rest of the world have “invested” in watching a Trek show, or reading a Trek novel or story, probably encompasses millions upon millions of collective hours.

But to argue over whether this particular ship feature or another is “realistic” or “canon” isn’t very productive, is it? We already know that Captain Pike was portrayed by two different actors, for example, even in TOS. Was that a “violation” of canon?

This is creativity at work.

I would say, as a matter of personal opinion (and yours may differ) that tearing down creative efforts in this regard because it’s not “realistic” misses much of the point of something like Star Trek.

Such criticisms, to me, seem to diminish this enterprise, in more ways than one.

My biggest issue was doing a prequel. This storyline would have been better served as a post Star Trek Nemesis series and arguably quite a bit more interesting. After decades of peace the relationship between the Klingons and Federation completely break down, new technology is developed and the use of technology which may walk a very fine ethical line (we saw hints of technology which echoed the Genesis device).

@Azurian, DISC is NOT a retcon. They’re making no effort whatsoever to reconcile the look of DISC with that of TOS. Nor should they IMO. YMMV. The less I hear about how the Klingons look physically different from TOS, for TMP, from TNG, from DS9, VOY, ENT, et al, the better. This is the first time in 30 years I’ve been remotely interested in the Klingons. I love how alien the new look is — I don’t need to know it’s because of some virus, rather than a limited production budget in the 1960s, or the horrible decision to turn them all into Gene Simmons and a Kiss cover band mebers in the 1980s.

There also seem to be this feeling among fans that every Klingon in the Klingon Empire needs to look the same. Like the 6 billion people that live on earth look identical. There are thousands of planets in the Klingon Empire.

Discovery has 99 problems but this ship ain’t one.

Nice to see it isn’t all images of TOS ships/TOS Enterprise. 2017 was the worst (I called it ship of the line), 2018 was better, 2019 looks even better! :)

They just. Can’t. Leave. It. Alone.

Sigh.

Spectacular blend of tos show and tos movies Enterprise!

The enterprise as rendered in discovery looks so much better and more realistic than discovery does. That ship needs a refit

The new Enterprise design is gorgeous.

From this angle, it reminds me a bit of the Enterprise E! (Which coincidentally also appears in this article.) I guess it’s because the overall elongated look and the red impulse engines…

Love it. Love the casting choice for Pike, I love the updated look for the Connie. Really nice.

“A good crew… and a fine ship – a credit to her name.”

…”credit to her name.”
..more like a credit to “his” name, now. She’s gone from sexy lady to armored male warrior. Good job, Discovery.

Works for me.

Did anyone notice the really crappy FAKE version of the 2009 JJ-Trek Ent? That pic still gets mileage…

~Pensive’s Wetness

No problems with the main elements (drives, primary and secondary hulls), but the connections are just wrong. People like to say the neck or pylons of the TOS design are weak, but it’s been established there are SIFs and other reinforcing forcefields to shore up the mechanical structure. In addition to materials and manufacturing innovations we can’t yet imagine. If you want to talk silly, talk about placing the bridge extending from the hull, rather than buried deep inside the ship in a sheltered place.

Well, I still have my AMT Ertl model to play with. I’ve recently been aztecing the hull with slightly contrasting shades of light gray. It’s subtle.

So when the forcefields turn off, the ship falls apart. Great head canon design.

NOT!

Stow the snark and go look it up in the TNG and DS9 manuals. Forcefields are used to shore up structural integrity. How often in a pitched battle did Worf bark, “Structural integrity fields are XX percent/failing!” Presumably that’s not the time to go to warp.

I’m not a nerd. I like women.

Boy, if that ain’t the most warnable/bannable post in this thread, then I better stop reading now. You’re conflating … well hell, anybody can see how exactly what you’re doing with that snipe and the implications.

Happily married these 10 years past, thank you very much. And I agree, Kmart, it does cross a line of civility.

Praetor Tal,

Re: Happily married

In these future days, marriage is not in and of itself conclusive evidence one way or the other in refutation of his/hers bigoted assumption that nerds don’t like women.

Indeed. But I doubt HN4 is very much interested in evidence.

I love this new version of the U.S.S. Enterprise! This is the version that shouldve been used in the Abrams movies, a perfect blend of TOS Enterprise updated for modern tastes!

P.S. Star Trek Discovery is a great addition to the Trek universe. SO much superior to the JJ universe. I was skeptical but Discovery won me over (and I’m a die hard TOS trekker)

People still want an explanation why it does not look like a physical model from 1966, in a show for the 2018-2019 season? Discovery being set in the Prime universe is the only problem. Since they don’t have the excuse everything is different because of Nero.

What?

I am talking about how the new version is cgi,and looks like a show produced today not in the sixties. The original was a model shot on film, not digitally. Plus the reason the JJ writers gave for the enterprise looking different. You know because of time traveling villain.

I very much like the re-imagined Enterprise, along with nearly everything else in all the calendars.

Art is about creativity. Discovery’s ship designers have exercised that creativity with great respect to the original and beautiful source(s).

In my view, regarding ship design, etc., there is nothing to complain about. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but that alone doesn’t make that opinion correct. With regard to art, or TV, or film, or literature, I think we need to understand what is presented in the context under which it is presented — not simply assert our own opinion as the only correct one.

It’s possible there are multiple correct opinions, especially in regard to these subjective matters.

Actually, the very notion (if true) that at least one of the ships on DSC has had its design modified by a specific percentage from its origin to avoid paying the original designer — and the comments in various threads suggest this might be true of the MJ TOS ship OR the original McQuarrie bastardization of Ken Adam’s TITANS design, which was the admitted basis for the fiasco that is the Discovery — is enough to show that the words ‘great respect’ have very little to do with the creative process. It seems that it was more like ‘change just enough to cover our behinds.’

CBS owns the rights to the design. They don’t have to pay anyone one. It was changed because it looks silly. It always looked silly.

I think a key consideration is your qualifier, “(if true),” and even if it is true, there is cause to believe that as another poster has said, the producers are within their rights to make relevant changes in design. It would be in any event a very subjective judgment to say that a specific percentage of the original design was changed; it might be said that only 24% was changed, or 20%, or conversely 26% or 30% was changed, for example. How does one quantify “change” in the creative arts? I do not understand Trek to promote hostility about its fanbase as a deliberate intention, and while I understand business concerns and speculation, it seems to me appropriate to have some deference to what creative decisions were made in the interests of the artistic side of the franchise. Arguments over design are fun as long as they don’t detract from the main goal of Trek, which is entertainment for a very large range of audiences.