What's up with modern ship designs?

The Mad Professor said:
See, I liked Serenity because it felt "real."

Of course, that might have something to do with the fact that it WAS "real." They built the entire gorram ship as a set to make sure that everything fit together and to keep visual continuity throughout the show.
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Don't get me wrong, I LOVE the inside of Serenity.
If you gave me a choice of either the Millennium Falcon or the Serenity to actually live on in space...
I'd choose Serenity. It feels like home.

But that "home" could have been structured to fit into any outside shape.
Unfortunately, the fact is, the outside shape of the ship dictated where everything was laid out on the inside.
"Form before function", as opposed to the "Function before form" that you imply, and that I prefer.
They could have put all that stuff in a simple saucer.
Instead they chose to cram it all into a chicken.
 
I like the fact that they're fans, but somewhere along the line something happened with oversight of the designs IMO. I really like Doug Chiang, and I don't know if any other previous SW artists on the crew, but something went wrong there. That's why my guess is that Lucas was keeping the look consistent, at least to how he sees SW.
 
Perhaps I should be more clear, liking something isn't the problem but liking something without seeing where it can go and what can be changed is a problem. The latter is my problem with most of SW fans within the "fandom"; so many are just stuck in that one place. In fact, that's the problem with fans of anything in general. Rather than taking what came before as an example and building on the world, moving forward, we're just left cannibalizing the same old material.

Since we're talking ship designs (even though the problem extends far beyond that), and now Star Wars, they look so blase in the new film because nothing about them changed because that's considered "Star Wars" by a collective that seems to be unable to look past the surface of what made the entirety of the originals good in the first place. Hell, that's why they just remade the '77 film only faster, dumber, and with a blue filter. Nothing new is being done because new would be degraded as "un-Star-Wars", and if we can't do anything new, what's the point of doing anything?
 
When Disney asked the public what they wanted from a new SW movie in about 2012-14, the public did not say "Give us more new & different stuff! Expand the boundaries of what it means to be SW!" The public said "Oh PLEASE, quit making prequel-style movies! Just give us back the OT for the love of God!!" So that's what Disney did. TFA was a glorified OT highlight reel.

If you say the public is ready for something a little more new & different now, in hindsight after seeing TFA . . . I won't disagree.

But TFA is not going to reinvent itself retroactively. It isn't the movie that the public decided they wanted after seeing TFA. It's the movie they said they wanted after seeing the prequels, without any idea of what TFA would eventually be.
 
No matter what they do, people will be lined up to bash it, if it isn't one thing, it's another. Inevitable. 100 percent loved the new Star Wars, said no one ever.
 
I quite like the Dark Matter ships:

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Pillar of Autumn :D

The Bungie-era Halos are filled with great designs. Another game with some nicely designed ships is "STAR CITIZEN", Mark Hamill has done some work on that :)

Wes R said:
They're very much like the Alien ships where they're more realistic, they're built in orbit to stay in orbit so they don't have to be fancy which is how they'll be in a few hundred years assuming we make it that long. That said I never figured out how the dropships in alien or halo are meant to escape into orbit off a planet with high gravity.
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Someone should ask Cameron about that. I'm sure he had something in mind.

Inquisitor Peregrinus said:
JJ gave us the dramatic visual of his NCC-1701 being built on the ground, and later submerged beneath an ocean on another planet. The level of robustness that Enterprise has to withstand such varying gravitational and shearing forces must be staggering. That ship is about th esize of the Prime Enterprise-D, and that ship would never have dared such a thing. The ludicrousness of it all kinda kicked me out of the experience (along with many other things in the two nuTrek films so far)
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Something similar in the Terminator 'verse. After Cameron stopped making them, the Terminators became indestructible transformers with superman-type of strength, and after T3 they lost their ability to "terminate". Straying farther and farther from "canon" if you will. The concept of verisimilitude seems to have died.

CessnaDriver said:
I don't know a damn thing about the game, but the Mass Effect ship struck me as very nice when I first saw it.

http://i261.photobucket.com/albums/ii44/CessnaDriver/CessnaDriver122/latest.jpg
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Having played the games I can say it's even nicer "in action" :)
What sucks though is the fact that the inside does not match the outside, at all.
 
Good lord I hate the idea that capital ships can operate in atmosphere. I was lost the moment I saw the JJprise being built on earth. I feel like they lost a very important factor when they did that.

Remember when the Galactica dropped in on new Caprica? That was the most badass capital ship maneuver in sci-fi history

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I think it all went wrong when they gave over the carefully crafted model ships, built out of wood, plastic and model aircraft parts, in favour of rendered cgi crafts. In the 'old days', a visual effects person would have a physical model to pass a camera over, allowing the viewer time to look at the model built. (OK, Star Trek the motion picture overdosed this). But with modern cgi, there is no model to actually photograph, so film makers don't have the same emotional attachment to the models, and therefore don't shoot them to be seen. Compare the star destroyer in A New Hope to The Force Awakens. In the old film, the model was photographed and seen in all its glory, allowing us to see features up close. I've seen The Force Awakens twice and couldn't describe the new star destroyer at all.
 
somerset fox said:
I think it all went wrong when they gave over the carefully crafted model ships, built out of wood, plastic and model aircraft parts, in favour of rendered cgi crafts. In the 'old days', a visual effects person would have a physical model to pass a camera over, allowing the viewer time to look at the model built. (OK, Star Trek the motion picture overdosed this). But with modern cgi, there is no model to actually photograph, so film makers don't have the same emotional attachment to the models, and therefore don't shoot them to be seen. Compare the star destroyer in A New Hope to The Force Awakens. In the old film, the model was photographed and seen in all its glory, allowing us to see features up close. I've seen The Force Awakens twice and couldn't describe the new star destroyer at all.
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I disagree, it has nothing to do with the medium as much as the visual style of the director. The people who work days and nights modelling, texturing, lighting, and comping these ships almost certainly have as much love for their work as any of the old ILM modelers did for theirs. The same goes for the director I'd argue, if they don't do any loving panning shots of their model it's not because it's CG, it's because that's not what they want or like. Just like a physical model, a CG model can be as detailed or as plain as the director, or whoever wants, there's nothing inherent in the medium that limits the amount of detail, just like with a physical model it's just a matter of how much time and money you want to spend on it.
 
George Lucas is said to have taken some flak from the studio in 1976 when they saw he was building mammoth soundstage sets for ANH, only to glance over them like they were ordinary during shooting. That creative decision has been highly praised in hindsight.

Directors typically show off what is new & different. In 1976 that was ILM models that withstood closeup shots and did some rudimentary dogfighting maneuvers in space. Slow laborious movement also conveyed size. (Godzilla used to walk in slo-mo all the time too.) In 1976 just making the Star Destroyers look convincingly 1:1 scale was an achievement.

In TFA they were able to show the Falcon crashing & whizzing around a few hundred yards above the Jakku desert, in broad daylight, with total realism. So that's what they showed off this time. That sort of thing would still have been a big endeavor for ILM even by the era of ROTJ (you doubt that? Look at the weak blue-screening all over the Jabba sail barge & Sarlacc Pit scene).
 
somerset fox said:
I think it all went wrong when they gave over the carefully crafted model ships, built out of wood, plastic and model aircraft parts, in favour of rendered cgi crafts. In the 'old days', a visual effects person would have a physical model to pass a camera over, allowing the viewer time to look at the model built. (OK, Star Trek the motion picture overdosed this). But with modern cgi, there is no model to actually photograph, so film makers don't have the same emotional attachment to the models, and therefore don't shoot them to be seen. Compare the star destroyer in A New Hope to The Force Awakens. In the old film, the model was photographed and seen in all its glory, allowing us to see features up close. I've seen The Force Awakens twice and couldn't describe the new star destroyer at all.
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I too disagree. Strongly even.

It doesn't matter if it's a real- or a CG-model. The maker will generally put in an equal amount of passion into the work.

astroboy said:
As far as CGI ships go, both Nugalactica and Stargate had amazing designs

The viper MK 2 was brilliant

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What did you think of the large Ori ships(with the big glowing center)?
 
The Terminator said:
I too disagree. Strongly even.

It doesn't matter if it's a real- or a CG-model. The maker will generally put in an equal amount of passion into the work.



What did you think of the large Ori ships(with the big glowing center)?
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Loved them. I loved that they felt like something from another galaxy that only magical religious fundamentalists would build. The Stargate ships were all very well thought out.

The destiny was a thing of beauty.

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astroboy said:
Loved them. I loved that they felt like something from another galaxy that only magical religious fundamentalists would build. The Stargate ships were all very well thought out.

The destiny was a thing of beauty.

Sent from my Nexus <script id="gpt-impl-0.5478966476183912" src="http://partner.googleadservices.com/gpt/pubads_impl_92.js"></script>7 using Tapatalk
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Completely agreed, except for the last thing, Destiny was fugly as hell :lol :lol
I would argue Daedalus was the best Earth based ship.
 
The Terminator said:
Completely agreed, except for the last thing, Destiny was fugly as hell [emoji38] [emoji38]
I would argue Daedalus was the best Earth based ship.
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All of the earth designs were perfect. They looked like they were made by the military using alien tech.

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