Star Trek: Picard - Amazon Prime [** POSSIBLE SPOILERS **]

Came across this on Youtube recently, thought it was quite funny.

"Kirayoshi". (I had to look that up).

Too much like Voyager

It often felt that these later varients of the Enterprise were just attempts to rehash the wonderfully balanced design of the Enterprise E. The later designs all screamed of "What if I just take the Enterprise-E and add (insert bad idea here)".

I somewhat fear that the Enterprise F would probably go that route since the Copy / Paste fleet in Season 1 came out "all Sovereign Class" (As Cpt. Freeman would likely say). I hope not, since it does look like they can pull off some good designs. I really did like the new Stargazer. If I were them I would try to do something other than an overweight Sovereign Class clone and work on an Enterprise design with it's own character.

If they were smart about this (a BIG ask with Kurtzman in the room) they would put the work into designing a proper hero-ship like they used to do before. No more phoning it in with the Crossfield Class or whatever the hell La Serena was supposed to be, but a proper Enterprise that we can get to know. And then if they were smart (glaring at Kurtzman again), Picard Season 3 might be a really good setup for a new Enterprise F show.

There is that. Whatever talent they had back in the day for design has clearly not been replicated, and that teaser image does make my heart sink a bit.

I was thinking the other day how forward-thinking and clever the TNG era designers were. I'm wondering if they had somehow managed to predict the rise of simplifed Dark Themes on computer displays with their Okudagrams and LCARS layouts. Just like contemporary dark themes, they seem to be a lot easier on the eye and very easy to take in. Clearly the Okudas knew their stuff, even back then. It could of course be a fluke that their designs remind me of what came to pass, but my gut tells me that they were simply very good at their jobs and cared about readability & quality.

Lately we don't seem to have an Okuda couple involved in Trek. Instead we have a new batch of designers who seem to have very little grasp of good UX design and have a bizarre fixation on transparent light-up displays which just adds to the visual soup of current Trek shows. Gone are the days were we too would get a couple of seconds to see the LCARS display reporting on what was happening, and instead we get rotating shaky-cam while the cast breathlessly scream information dumps at us. Hopefully they can get their act together at some point.

That brings up an excellent point, design language. The TNG designs were clearly built up to differentiate itself from TOS / Movies. There's this clear progression from stark utilitarian style of TOS to a more comfortable cruise-liner-ish style of the Galaxy Class, and then all the way to a fusion of both styles in the late TNG era for example on Voyager.

The Discovery-era shows have their own design language too, but all it seems to say is "We wanted to make JJ-Movies, so we're making this TV-show instead."

^^ Do people actually buy these comics?