Discovery Starship and Klingon design panels at Star Trek Las Vegas

The design side of Discovery got some love at the Star Trek Las Vegas convention, with panels focused on creature and starship design. Continue below for the latest news and artwork from those discussions:

At the creature design panel there was of course much talk of the Klingons, and TrekMovie has excellent coverage of the panel. Neville Page outlined the brief he had from former showrunner Bryan Fuller, to give the Klingons an enriched culture and aesthetic:

The words that he used were “The Klingons are self-ware estheticians, and I want them to appear less brutish and more conscious.” He made references [to] baroque and samurai [styles] in terms of armor because there is this whole suit [Torchbearer].

Page went on to describe how he took that and ran with it, to envision a culturally diverse empire:

The empire is very big. They don’t all grow up on Kronos. They don’t all live on the same planets and certainly those different planets would have different environments. So how would the cultures have evolved differently?…We tried to come up with cultural axioms for each house so each looks different and they bear a cultural patina like our cultures do here on Earth.

But of course we are also getting a new take on the Klingons biological variations in Discovery, with so far them all appearing to be bald. Page again had put much thought into this, even designing Klingon skulls (which feature repeatedly on the Klingon apparel in the show). The designers now envision the Klingons having extra-sensory receptors running along their skull ridges and down their spines, which drove the shape of the skull and the lack of hair (to not interfere with those senses).

Also of interest was discussion of how the prosthetics are designed around the actors, as this image of Doug Jones' laser scanned face, with the Saru design built around him dramatically illustrates:

You can see and read about much more from the creature design panel on TrekMovie.

Meanwhile at today's starships panel, among the Eaglemoss news, a bevy of new concept artwork for the USS Shenzhou was shown, TrekCore was there to take photos, including these:

Star Trek: Discovery is due to start this September, and it will be distributed almost everywhere in the world on Netflix, except for the US where is will be available on CBS All Access, and Canada where it will be on Bell Media channels and services. To keep track of all the latest details from the new show, visit my Star Trek: Discovery guide page.