Can someone explain why The Enterprise looks so fucking weird?

Can someone explain why The Enterprise looks so fucking weird?

I understand that there's no air friction in space, so you can make a literal borg cube, but why does it look so stupid?

I know the warp nacelles give off some kind of harmful radiation so they're put away from the hull. Dunno if there is some kind of explanation for the affinity for saucers though.

its a fucking tv show?

saged.

Haha, I interrupted your board masturbating to itself, and now you're sad.

Go ahead, tell me how smart you are. Fill me in. It's fine. It's my thread to de-rail. I bet you know calculus. Could you show me? I'm a brainlet, but you're just so smart! I bet you could show me! Oh smartie, I bet you could lie to me with statistics!

Faggot, I want to discuss plausible explanations for design choices like this nice young man did:Sorry to interrupt your serious science and mathology.

what this nigga said

>>> r/iamverysmart

r/iamverysmart

faggot

it’s retarded but hey rure of coor
t. Winchell Chung

Wow - this doesn't look at all like a troll/bait thread.

The Enterprise D (the one shown int he OP) had a good reason for the wonky shape; it was effectively two different ships in one, able to separate into two combat capable ships One was a saucer and the other included the warp drive.

Although this was usable for coordinated attacks, another use seemed to be that all the most dangerous parts of the ship which were the most likely to fail catastrophically and destroy the ship were located in the lower section (such as the warp core), so in case of an emergency the saucer could be used as a large escape shuttle.

neck yourself

>tfw I'll never get so triggered when someone tells me my off-topic post is off-topic

Real ships might actually look like that.

The "explanation" is that the warp nacelles (thingies on either side) emit a short range field of hard radiation and thus are kept on struts some distance from the hull. For the warp bubble to work, they also have to be in a configuration where they can emit a field that surrounds the ship, and cannot be outside the shield bubble.

Further, the saucer section contains all the living quarters, and thus the bulk of the children, as this is a ship with families on board. It can be detatched, should the ship go into battle, and has its own, slower and less radioactive warp drive, in addition to some phaser armorment. Albeit, they hardly ever do this in the series, and seem to often knowingly go to war with everyone aboard.

Beyond that, "Fuck you, it's sci-fi."
(Also, apparently, everyone who ever flew on the Defiant is sterile.)

Granted, when you have the sort of shields this beast is supposed to have (capable of borrowing through several miles of rock at sub-light speeds, yet remain unharmed), a second set of passive navigation shields that can take meteor impacts at relativistic speeds and deflect 50 gigawatt lasers, and a series of internal "structural integrity" shields, you can do whatever you want - cuz magic.

Not that real world ships and space stations don't sometimes take bizarre shapes, being freed from the structural limitations of gravity.

Well, considering what it used to look like...

I think they were aiming for a "benign" looking ship that didn't look particularly imposing, and had some sciency looking bits sticking out of it. The TNG enterprise, of course, merely revamped that original look. Most of the Federation ships look fairly fragile and benign - even the USS Defiant warship is fairly timid looking.

Meanwhile, most of the bad guy's ships look either ugly or downright angry, cuz that's how ya know they're bad guys.

Although NCC-1701-H took it into bizarre sports car levels (google that thing, seriously).

In anycase...

- available 24/7.

Here's the early sketches from TOS. The middle one has a note from Rodenberry saying "looks like a duck". They wanted something different from the missile look of other scifi ships, but nothing too complicated for the model department.

H was a mid-life crisis starship - J is when the senility started kicking in.

I think J is a temporal starship to boot, so we're gettin into Dr. Who magitech levels.

>Dr. Who magitech levels.
...As opposed to today's shroom powered Discovery, built something like 400 years before J?

>taking discovery seriously

warp drive doesn't actually impart thrust on the ship. it just puts the ship in a bubble and then contracts and expands spacetime around the bubble. the ship is still being pushed by the Impulse Drive. Which is some sort of fusion rocket that can drive a ship with out warp to a significant fraction of the speed of light.

if you notice on any variant of the Enterprise or other starfleet ship that has skinny necks. The impulse drive is always located on the back of the saucer section, or back of the neck as is the case with the enterprise D. so the thrust is being imparted on the saucer section and the engineering hull and warp nacelles are being pulled along.

It looks stupid because it's fuckin' stupid.

Also, the more surface area your ship has, the more phaser banks you can fit on it. Naturally, the enterprise D is a compromise between maneuverability at impulse speeds and surface area for phaser banks, with reduced profile for frontal assaults which is ideal for the defensive nature of the mission.

>profile supposedly designed to take all attacks from head on
>defensive nature

Nevermind the fact that the shield is a big bubble kinda negates all that, considering if one gets hit by whatever took the shields down, after they are down, yer boned.

I wonder if they ever came up with a techbabble excuse for drama-shields. I can't even think of how such a system would work, where the shields get weaker as you pour more energy into em.

This

Pic related. You may not like it, but this is what the ideal space battleship looks like