Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

[wm cheng]

3 hours ago, sh9000 said:

I like the added ships to the opening credits.

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Yes those were Q and I immediately recognized de Lancie's voice.

 

Hey I'm glad someone noticed!  If you mean these extra ships in the opening credits...

I designed those in the 2nd season, but it never made it to screen due to budget, but I'm sure glad to see them now!

That's why I haven't been building too many Macross models lately, I've been busy in this world 😛

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, wm cheng said:

I designed those in the 2nd season, but it never made it to screen due to budget, but I'm sure glad to see them now!

 

That's why I haven't been building too many Macross models lately, I've been busy in this world 😛

 

I quite like this one.  It feels like a very natural evolution of the pre-Federation Earth Cargo Service freighters from Star Trek: Enterprise and a nice sort of middle ground with the TOS/TAS-era Antares-type.

[tekering]

4 hours ago, wm cheng said:

I designed those in the 2nd season, but it never made it to screen due to budget, but I'm sure glad to see them now!

They're all fantastic, and I hope they're eventually produced as miniatures of some kind.

What an honour it must be to contribute to this legacy! 

[Thom]

23 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Saw a news piece the other day which said that Strange New Worlds aims to end the series with the transfer of command from Captain Pike to Captain Kirk, essentially making a direct segue into TOS.

I have to admit, I rather like the idea.

Will be cool to see it happen. I just hope they keep the modern aesthetics for the ship. 

And I haven't seen the new episodes yet, but those are some great designs! That last looks like a modernized Crossfield!

Edited Friday at 03:47 PM by Thom

[wm cheng]

2 hours ago, Thom said:

Will be cool to see it happen. I just hope they keep the modern aesthetics for the ship. 

And I haven't seen the new episodes yet, but those are some great designs! That last looks like a modernized Crossfield!

Yes, the last one was a Crossfield saucer section mixed with my own original design for episode 1 of the second season where there was a rogue fraction building their own "look-alike" Federation Starship to start a war.  This was an initial design option, we ended up with an inverted secondary hull and downward nacelles version in the actual episode and there was actually a TrekYards video 

discussing it and an article talking about how this fixes so many things wrong with Discovery :P!!!  (they asked me to work years ago on Discovery but I refused)

https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/did-star-trek-just-fix-discoverys-biggest-mistake.html

I wished they had done a little research and asked me about the design instead of guessing on their own articles. 

The script called that we were to shoot the scenes on the Discovery Set (for budget they didn't want to build a new ship interior for just 1 episode) so they scripted a call out that it looks like a Crossfield class (not my favourite saucer design) but I had to follow script!  I'm glad they took an older option and made it real/canon in the opening sequence now.  

Edited Friday at 05:28 PM by wm cheng

[Seto Kaiba]

Caught the first of the new episodes last night - Part II of "Hegemony" - and I have to say I still hate what Strange New Worlds has done to the Gorn.

Spoiler

I'm gonna come right out and say it.  Whoever on the creative team is behind this iteration of the Gorn must absolutely LOVE Ridley Scott's Prometheus.

The juvenile Gorn we've seen in previous seasons are essentially just Great Value brand Legally Distinct(TM) Xenomorphs.  Not even the properly scary "It can think!" xeno from the original Alien, they're the "just a dangerous animal" kind from the sequels.  They breed parasitically from people who come in contact with dangerous goo, they're born by bursting out of the host like the Neomorphs, screech non-verbally, and hide out in the vents when they're not mauling people to death.

The adults we see in "Hegemony" Parts I and II are basically just the Engineers from Prometheus.  They're giant, silent, implacable men who wear organic-looking space suits on asymmetrical organic technology spaceships and just try to maim the protagonists with their bare hands instead of using anything like a weapon.  They never speak and are not seen engaging in any behavior that isn't murderous violence, so the only real indicator that they're not also mindless horror movie monsters like the juveniles is that the scenes with them mainly take place on their ships.  There's little sense that the Gorn are intelligent, let alone a spacefaring culture that has a substantial interstellar civilization that can tangibly threaten the Federation.  

The resolution has to be the weirdest part... a fake solar flare in their home star system is enough to make every Gorn everywhere forget what they're doing, pack up, and go home?  It's enough to even make ones that haven't been born yet pack it in somehow.  Seems like the third or fourth NuTrek case of writers forgetting that these other major powers have more than just one planet to their names.

It seems like we will now never mention the Gorn again, so thank goodness for small favors.

 

[sh9000]

On 7/17/2025 at 8:58 PM, wm cheng said:

Hey I'm glad someone noticed!  If you mean these extra ships in the opening credits...

I designed those in the 2nd season, but it never made it to screen due to budget, but I'm sure glad to see them now!

That's why I haven't been building too many Macross models lately, I've been busy in this world 😛

You do great Macross and Star Trek work.