Making  Futures (continued)

Drawings  from Flash Gordon were also viewed and they similarly were rejected, it  was felt they were to 'hokey' with their airfoil fins and rocket shapes. The  design ideas finally got narrowed down to a primary 'saucer' hull, a secondary  'cigar' hull and two engine pods, extended on nacelles. After a little  refinement Roddenberry and his team settled on the design, happy that they  produced a spacecraft with both elegance and implied power.

Their  effort paid off, the kit model for the Enterprise later proved to be one of the  best selling ever. A sure sign that the design had struck a cord with the  audience. Roddenberry and his team are reminiscent of Verne in his researching.  Both they and Verne sought educated advise, strove to design a realistic and  plausible spacecraft. Doing so partly out of respect for their  audience/readership, partly out of scientific integrity. They both mix elements  of the familiar and the strange. The strange being the new  elements that indicate the design is from the future, the familiar is the foundation the design rests on, which allows the viewer to relate  to the design, to understand it.

Speculative  design often extrapolated from this familiar foundation. though it is sometimes  this 'safe' familiar ground which deprives a futuristic design of predictive  success. Jules Verne for all his prophetic glory had his spacecraft cobbled  together in a workshop. It is doubtful that Verne could ever have comprehended  the scale of the Apollo space program. It cost $25 thousand million dollars and  indirectly involved over half a million workers. Even if the cost was adjusted  into 1880'a dollars it would have exceeded Verne's imaginings.

Simiarly Roddenbery's many  assumptions will eventually look silly. For example he made the Enterprise the  same general size as the aircraft carrier of the same name. This analogy with  ocean going vessels and space vessels is a classic (even classical) part of the  visual/thematic language of science fiction. In criticising both Verne and  Roddenberry I wish only to illustrate that futuristic design is a dramatic tool.  Even when attempting to be realistic it is not the same as futurism.

As  conceptualist Ron Cobb said " What I like about futuristic design Work is  the fascinating moods it can create.. They are unique and can haunt you. They  have qualities  that religion used to have in that, very often you encounter the  awesome"

The  star ship Enterprise was redesigned for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. By this  time the Enterprise was an icon familiar to millions. Rather than reinventing  the ship Roddenberry had it restyled. The new Enterprise was designed by Andrew  Probert, who kept the ships from unchanged while completely modernising its  trimmings. The ship became a more subtle and intricate beast. The engine pods  were no longer tapered cylinders, they became complex forms, shaped vaguely like  retractable craft knives. Gone was the radar dish sticking out of the from, in  its place a flush parabolic collector. The new enterprise is more in line with  the dictates on modern product design. Like today's consumer products it is  slick and curvy, betraying its injected molded origins all too readily

The  Third Enterprise was designed for the new Television series 'The Next  Generation' which was set thirty years after the classic Trek films. The new  Enterprise is supposed to look futuristic to the characters in the 24th  century!!

It  retains the same basic layout as the two previous incarnations but is radically  different in styling. It is bigger and more streamlined, and then pan caked to  make it look more streamlined still. In a way it is a pity that such an original  design had to conform to the oldest cliche. Streamlining is the ABC of science  fiction visual alphabet. It seems like a step back into the realm of Flash  Gordon's rocket ships.

However,  If these things conform to a language, then surely they must follow the rules of  the language. People understand 'streamlining' as an indication of progress and  speed, it certainly does in product design of the mid to late 20th  Century.

If the new Enterprise had not  been streamlined, people probably would not have necessarily interpreted the  changes as pertaining to its advancement. It could be that the further away you  get from present understanding, the more you are forced to rely on the motifs  and cliches of the visual language.

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