Hello fine people of the Internet. I knew I should have not. But I did it anyway. I watched the Picard show. And I cannot decide if this "spacelaser opens rift with tentacle monsters" was a joke or just lazy (Howard the Duck, Transformers, Hellboy, several Superheromovies....god dammit please tell me it was a joke and I just didn't get it....). What also left me wondering, beside hundrets of other things happening in this show, if joke or lazy was the ship design. Not the ship design in general (it all looked like it came from discovery concept art..but I'm ok with that). But the "federation fleet" was just too much for me. Two(?) different ships. Both looking like uglyer cousins of the Souvereign Class. Grey, industrial boringness.....wich must at all costs be prevented from becoming the new "post nemesis" standart look of federation ships. So before I can not longer control myself, here my suggestion: What do you think Federation ships/technology of that era should look like? I want to see it all. Ships (outside and inside), LCARS, uniforms, equipment (phasers,tricorders etc.).......all that stuff and more. (my hopes for Picard season 2: Q shows up and declares everything what happened before TOS and after VOY non canon.)
I've got one. The shift from TOS in the 2260s to TMP in the 2270s (And again into the 2280s) is dramatic and different. Everything from the uniforms to the sets and control interfaces more or less changed dramatically between these periods in Trek history. So, in about the span of a decade things iterated. but between TNG/DS9/VOY/NEM/PIC- a span of 35 years- The PJ one-piece uniforms, LCARS, rank pips, semi-organic ship design... all if it looks very samey. With a bit of a budget Voyager could have been a guest star on TNG in season 4. Picard's Zheng-He could have been a background ship in First Contact. This is between 2364 and 2399 essentially and Trek has been very stable in it's "Look" (Broken slightly with Nemesis, broken dramatically in real life only by Discovery and the Kelvin films). Even the Relativity of the 29th century looks like just another cut of TNG. The challenge is to create a New Look/feel/set staging completely different from the TNG universe. Leave behind LCARS, one-piece uniforms, and organic looking ships. Treat TNG like yesteryear's TOS (Or appropriately, TMP) and design for us an alternate 2380 that is just as dramatically different as the early trek movies are from TOS. If you need a specific parameters of the challenge, it is this: Depict a starfleet officer (Not necessarily human, perhaps Humanoid though) in uniform, within an interior Federation setting (A bridge, a corridor, a briefing room, a starbase observation lounge), looking at a starship. You can depict these three subjects separately or together.
I came here to suggest an art contest....only to find that I made the same suggestion in 2005. ^^^ THIS I'd love to see the aquatic Federation member Alonis, any of the non-humanoids from the DS9 Relaunch Mission Gamma tetralogy, or those from the Titan book series, among others.
I've got another one. The Enterprise is iconic, and the basic shape/silhouette has gone on to inform the entire Federation lineage for decades. Even into Voyager, the nacelles-saucer-hull combination is still there. Your challenge is to reimagine the Star Trek universe as if Matt Jeffrie's Ringship was accepted as the television series Enterprise. You can choose any Enterprise or Federation starship and re-imagine it with this premise. Show us a scene of the new vessel in action. You can show us something like the ringship 1701 Enterprise embarking a shuttle (wherever that is). Or a re-done Enterprise-D with magnificent rings orbiting a planet. Perhaps tell us what a remade Voyager was like, breaking the format. Show us maybe the Defiant looking rather conventional next to a Federation of ring-ship variants.