Better Star Trek

[Aldarion]

Nuff said.

So, how would you bake a better Star Trek?

 

[ATP]

Nuff said.

So, how would you bake a better Star Trek?

They are only better looking.
Better ST would use teleporters to kill enemy,not send red shirts to their heroic death.

 

[Typhonis]

Better Trek requires better stories, better ideas. You need to go back to the original premise. Master and Commander. Because that is what Star Trek is at it's heart a lone ship on the edge of civilization boldly going where no one has gone before. You need the three great conflicts to promote your story even though they do not need to be violent. Man vs Himself, Man vs Man, Man vs Nature.

Star Trek needs to show there is hope for the future. That we can be better than what we are. That mankind CAN reach for the stars and get them. Than we may be the rising Ape meeting the falling angel but we can rise higher.

 

[Aldarion]

True, but I never really liked Star Trek's aesthetics. Especially TNG and after, design of Trek's ships - both exterior and interior - is rather bland and soulless.

 

[Typhonis]

The aesthetics CAN change. You can mix things up. Hell Steampunk Trek? OK Keep it in the solar system. You have the inner planets plus Jupiter to explore though Jupiter takes months to reach. Mars is roughly 6-8 weeks away depending on the distance to be traveled. For long range communications you have the great Heliographs orbiting Earth, Mars and Venus.

Earth is normal, Mars is dying and Venus is a swamp world with dinosaurs. Reptile men of Venus, the strange Red and Green men of Mars with the mysterious Grey martians lurking about. Take Space 1889, War of the Worlds and John Carter for inspiration. The Federation is just a re-skinned British Empire. For Ferengi, possibly the US. France can be Romulans with Germany/Prussia as the Klingon stand-ins.

There are no phasers or photon torpedoes. You have civil strife as automata replace normal workers. The most powerful computer currently is they Stanley Bruggs Mk VI. It uses a rotating metal drum that weighs a ton and holds an incredible amount of information. 20 million bytes.

 

[Bassoe]

True, but I never really liked Star Trek's aesthetics. Especially TNG and after, design of Trek's ships - both exterior and interior - is rather bland and soulless.

The aesthetics CAN change. You can mix things up.

Go full retrofuturistic.


Star Trek reflects, or at least, reflected until kurtzman and friends came along, the notions of the better future we missed out on. It should look the part.

You might think that a kid who was an expert on werewolf trivia at age ten would have gone in for the wildest of space fantasies, but I didn’t. Star Trek always seemed hokey to me. (I figured out early on that Star Trek was a transparent pastiche of mid-1960s US foreign policy, with the Klingons as Russia, the Vulcans as Japan, the Romulans as Red China, and Captain Kirk as a wish-fulfillment fantasy version of Gen. William Westmoreland who always successfully pacified his extraterrestrial Vietnams.) Quite the contrary; my favorite spacecraft model kit, which hung from a length of thread in my bedroom for years, was called the Pilgrim Observer: some bright kit designer’s vision of one of the workhorse craft of solar system exploration in the late 20th century.

Dilithium crystals, warp drives, and similar improbabilities had no place in the Pilgrim Observer. Instead, it had big tanks for hydrogen fuel, a heavily shielded nuclear engine on a long boom aft, an engagingly clunky command module up front bristling with telescopes and dish antennas—well, here again, you get the picture; if you know your way around 1970s space nonfiction, you know the kit. It came with a little booklet outlining the Pilgrim I’s initial flyby missions to Mars and Venus, all of it entirely plausible by the standards the time. That was what delighted me. Transporter beams and faster-than-light starflight, those were fantasy, but I expected to watch something not too far from Pilgrim I lifting off from Cape Canaveral within my lifetime.

That didn’t happen, and it’s not going to happen. That was a difficult realization for me to reach, back in the day, and it’s one a great many Americans are doing their level best to avoid right now. There are two solid reasons why the future in space so many of us thought we were going to get never arrived, and each one provides its own reasons for evasion. We’ve talked about both of them in this blog at various times, and there’s more than the obvious reason to review them now.

 

[ATP]

The aesthetics CAN change. You can mix things up. Hell Steampunk Trek? OK Keep it in the solar system. You have the inner planets plus Jupiter to explore though Jupiter takes months to reach. Mars is roughly 6-8 weeks away depending on the distance to be traveled. For long range communications you have the great Heliographs orbiting Earth, Mars and Venus.

Earth is normal, Mars is dying and Venus is a swamp world with dinosaurs. Reptile men of Venus, the strange Red and Green men of Mars with the mysterious Grey martians lurking about. Take Space 1889, War of the Worlds and John Carter for inspiration. The Federation is just a re-skinned British Empire. For Ferengi, possibly the US. France can be Romulans with Germany/Prussia as the Klingon stand-ins.

There are no phasers or photon torpedoes. You have civil strife as automata replace normal workers. The most powerful computer currently is they Stanley Bruggs Mk VI. It uses a rotating metal drum that weighs a ton and holds an incredible amount of information. 20 million bytes.

Larklight by Phillips Reeve.Trilogy for teens,but written so well,then it is better then sci-fi for adults.

 

[Aldarion]

The aesthetics CAN change. You can mix things up. Hell Steampunk Trek? OK Keep it in the solar system. You have the inner planets plus Jupiter to explore though Jupiter takes months to reach. Mars is roughly 6-8 weeks away depending on the distance to be traveled. For long range communications you have the great Heliographs orbiting Earth, Mars and Venus.

Earth is normal, Mars is dying and Venus is a swamp world with dinosaurs. Reptile men of Venus, the strange Red and Green men of Mars with the mysterious Grey martians lurking about. Take Space 1889, War of the Worlds and John Carter for inspiration. The Federation is just a re-skinned British Empire. For Ferengi, possibly the US. France can be Romulans with Germany/Prussia as the Klingon stand-ins.

There are no phasers or photon torpedoes. You have civil strife as automata replace normal workers. The most powerful computer currently is they Stanley Bruggs Mk VI. It uses a rotating metal drum that weighs a ton and holds an incredible amount of information. 20 million bytes.

I would LOVE that!

And don't forget giant spider robots!

 

[Skallagrim]

For Ferengi, possibly the US.

If this is (based on) the 19th century, I would like to send in my application on behalf of the Dutch.

 

[Captain X]

True, but I never really liked Star Trek's aesthetics. Especially TNG and after, design of Trek's ships - both exterior and interior - is rather bland and soulless.

I couldn't disagree more. TNG set the standard as far as I'm concerned. Galaxy class best class.

 

[Aldarion]

I couldn't disagree more. TNG set the standard as far as I'm concerned. Galaxy class best class.

I used to like it, but nothing can beat flying Gothic cathedrals as far as aesthetics are concerned.

 

[Typhonis]

If this is (based on) the 19th century, I would like to send in my application on behalf of the Dutch.

Yep late 19th century Earth. Circa 1889 possibly.