What Archer's wearing is definitely more functional-looking than today's clumsy spacewalk or surface-action suits. It seems lightweight and easily donnable and removable. It's clearly a "softsuit", with lots of flexible material and with small tube-joints on the knees and elbows. Only the very uppermost torso, from nipples up, seems rigid.

Some minor external tubing is visible, as well as some breastplate controls. A separate or at least protruding airtank/purifier backpack is used. The compact simple helmet is a separate unit. A funny crotch harness may be part of the attachment system for the backpack, or then just a futuristic codpiece.

The impression I get from all this is very different from current American or Russian suits, or from derived designs, and closer to the old Mercury suits or TOS softsuits. The shiny brownish color strikes me as a step towards the aluminum shine of the TOS suits, too. Of course, the suit also reminds of the classic 2001/B5 design, but there is far less of that tight wetsuit-like tubing and more of the saggy foil.

The TOS movie suits with their rigid torso pieces and huge helmets seem to be a different sort of beast altogether. They are fine for spacewalks and long-duration work, but they seem awfully clumsy for work under gravity. One would think that the TOS movie suits would have had a lightweight surface-action counterpart, but ST2 went and ruined that theory. Or then there was some weird technobabble reason for why Terrell and Chekov did not don the special surface suits.

In contrast, the ENT suits seem to be better applicable for surface use, even if they may have poorer visibility, less endurance, etc in spacewalk applications. I see no EVA amenities like hardpoints for tools, or attaching rings for safety ropes.

As with all the other Trek suits, there still isn't any apparent external coding (rank- or person-specific colors or patches or markers). However, there may be some nonsystematic color variation, as there was with the TOS movie uniforms.

I don't think a single element was carried over from the ST:FC suits as such. And the materials used seem very different. Although the hard parts are probably the same sort of plastic in the real world, even they look completely different with that coppery finish.

This is not a hyperrealistic spacesuit, mind you. It's neither a hardsuit (with hard limbs and joints and a constant inner volume for maintaining a steady 1 atm pressure), like a "Jim" diving suit) nor a skinsuit (with tight wetsuit-like structure to create the pressure directly, without the need of air between the suit and the body). It's a big balloon, and those arms and legs should expand to uncomfortable proportions once the suit is inflated with air. It seems a given that we will not see such an effect in the actual show, so perhaps we are to assume that there is some futuristic technology at play.

It looks cool, though.

Timo Saloniemi

[ August 21, 2001: Message edited by: Timo ]

Anyway...the EVA suit does look pretty cool. I'm glad they went with the copper color instead of the standard Starfleet grey that we've seen in the "future" series.

[ August 21, 2001: Message edited by: The Mighty Monkey of Mim ]

Looking at the TV Guide cover, the clear face plate looks like it stretches back further than the TMP clear face plate. It also looks like the front of the Enterprise helmet has a steeper slope than the TMP helmets. Also, the connection at the breast plate looks rounder and larger on Archer than it does on Kirk and Spock.