Commentary

I've had some down time recently and have worked through a backlog of ship designs - my prior update predated Star Trek: Discovery! References from Certifiably Ingame (YouTube) and (of course) Ex Astris Scientia have been extremely helpful. Compared to the days of Star Trek: The Next Generation where us ship nerds were entranced by hazy pictures of new ship designs in aftermath of Wolf 359 and the Deep Space Nine "Frankenstein fleet", we've never had it better. So many new cool designs! And extremely easy access to high resolution images and orthographics of the ships, usually courtesy of the designers themselves.

But... compared to designs from the 1960s through the early 1990s, these translate very poorly into ASCII art, at least from the side and front views. 

Starting with the new designs by Alex Jaeger for Star Trek: First Contact in 1996 (Norway, Steamrunner, Saber, ...), and continuing through the designs borrowed from Star Trek Online for the later two seasons of Star Trek: Picard, newer ship classes tend to have a more "streamlined" profile, which blend parts of the ship together. No more chonky secondary hull with a prominent deflector dish, and the blade-like warp nacelles rarely rise above or dip below the primary hull. While these new designs are very easy to distinguish in top views, the requisite side and front views end up being a messy blur. And that's with a 100-character wide canvas! In contrast, the TOS and TMP variants of the Constitution-class are incredibly distinct at a mere 40-characters wide.

While frustrating for ASCII artists (all... uh... one of us?), one has to wonder: doesn't this potential confusion affect viewers of the shows as well? After all, Matt Jeffries crafted the classic Constitution-class with an eye towards making a ship that "read well" and was immediately identifiable from any angle.

I believe this is acceptable for the franchise for two main reasons:

1. With modern CGI effects, more dynamic camera angles are used more frequently than in the days of motion control. Views from angles other than the side are now possible, and so it's easier to produce sequences in ways that distinguish these new styles of ships.
2. There is a rule that secondary ships should never be confused for the hero ship. This likely guided Jaeger designs in the first place, especially as the new hero Sovereign-class Enterprise-E was introduced at the same time in First Contact. So in the grand scheme of things, it's okay if non-hero ships aren't distinct from each other, as long as they're are collectively distinct from the hero ship.

This doesn't plague all new ships. At least the California-class gets it right. (Lower decks! Lower decks!)