The video below explains why the original starship Enterprise design looks great, using a few bits of art-math.
To my eye, the TOS Enterprise is the pinnacle of sci-fi spectacle. No other spaceship design comes close in terms of just being plain beautiful… sure the XD-1 has sorta-realism going for it, the Millenium Falcon and the Star Destroyer have their charms, the Gunstar and Starfury are utter badassery. But the NCC-1701? Just gorgeous.
What’s sad is that with such a fantastic basis, Star Trek ship design has kinda cratered. The refit Enterprise from the movies? A worthy successor to be sure, and a number of the other movie-era ships are up there: the Grissom is good, the Excelsior and Reliant are awesome. And even though the actual *show* is something I’ve completely lost interest in, the NCC-1701D from TNG has grown on me, as hav a number of other TNG/DS9/Voy ships. But the 1701E from the movies? Meh. The Enterprise was always *elegant,* be it 1701, 1701A or 1701D, it was just a slick design. But the 1701E started the trend of making Trek ships… well, not quite sure what the word I’m looking for is, so I’ll go with “shardy.” The NX-01 from “Enterprise” left me cold, which, actually, was kinda fine since it was supposed to be a technology prototype built by people who didn’t really know what they were doing yet. The Enterprise from the nuTrek movies? Bleah. And the “Discovery” ships took “shardy” to whole new levels of excess. The brief glimpse of the TOS 1701 from the last scene of the season finale of “Discovery” (plastered all over youtube) just looks sucko. It’s a mishmash of TOS and movie era with a whole lot of needless excess CGI’ed onto it.
The “Discovery” take on the 1701:
Bleah. Details and greeblies just for the sake of tacking them on.
The Mirror Universe episode of “Enterprise” included a faithful CGI 1701-type ship. That, along with a number of fan-created CG Enterprises, show that the design *still* works just fine, no need for a bunch of Just Cuz design changes or revisions to jazz the thing up.
With the rapid advance in CGI, there’s no good *technical* reason (though some powerful legal reasons – the rights are all over the place) why a movie or series couldn’t feature not just *a* 1701-type ship, but *the* TOS-era Enterprise, complete with Tarkinized 60’s-era Kirk and Spock & Co. I suppose someone could even write some bloated crossover event flick where the nuTrek Enterprise goes through a spatial anomaly into a parallel reality, runs into the Discovery, they start comparing notes, rejigger the anomaly to send the nuEnterprise home and whoopsie, end up bumping up against the *real* Enterprise. Do it right, and it might even redeem Discovery and nuTrek. If nothing else, it’d be worth the price of admission to see the Karl Urban and Deforrest Kelly McCoys making life hell for the two Spocks, and the Chris Pine Kirk putting the moves on the Grace Lee Whitney Yeoman Rand. Maybe use *that* as the excuse for why she left the show: she left her Enterprise to be with PineKirk. And there’s even a good way to explain why TOS didn’t suddenly get a bump up in technology levels: they wanted to adopt the nuTrek technologies, like interstellar transporters, but the cost would have been prohibitive. The new technologies would have introduced lens flares all over, and no sane civilization wanted to put up with that.