Star Trek Life Support

[Uraniun235]

The ship has force fields for windows, or E-E did anyway. I figure when they loose life support power the windows slowly start failing and all the air leaks out... or something. Maybe they have a shitload of liquid hydrogen or a similar cold liquid on-board that steals all the heat?

There's one scene in First Contact where Picard opens a spacedoor and there's a forcefield on the other side (gee, kinda like the shuttlebays??), therefore all the windows must be forcefields?!

There's a scene in TNG that has Data explicitly state that the windows are made out of transparent aluminum.

There was a solid door which slid up to reveal said force fielded vista. You can see it recessed in this screenshot here.

That was a docking port. There's numerous mentions of them in the technical manuals.

I'd forgotten about that panel! None the less, I'm pretty sure this was what Sea Skimmer was talking about. I haven't read the tech manuals myself. Docking port, you say? I'll buy it, but is there any mention of why they make their docking ports too short to walk through without bending down?

Neither is there any mention of why they made a room that you have to crawl to get to.

[Sea Skimmer]

Why would a door be so wide, angled and yet shorter then a man is tall? Doesn't make much sense for that role, makes perfect sense for a window. Anyway we are talking about people who's safety systems don't work the only times they are needed, I don't put anything past them design wise.

[Swindle1984]

Considering that they had to crawl through Jeffries tubes to reach the room with the forcefield door, it's probably not designed for people to enter on a regular basis. Nor for cargo. Instead, it's likely designed for when they're docked and the station is doing all kinds of maintenance, running cables and hoses into the ship, decontaminating funky shit (like the instant-death forcefield in the episode with Tuvok getting hit by Picard's saddle while Picard plays Die Hard), and other things. Not a part of the ship that's regularly visited or used, just designed so technicians can access it enough to do whatever it is they need to do.

Then again, isn't this the Enterprise that also has a bottomless shaft for villains to fall into? Which replaced the Enterprise that was apparently 90% empty space in the saucer section (for "future expansion") and had an arboretum, dolphin tank, and other shit aboard? And aren't Federation starships infamous for exploding for little or no reason?

I'm guessing Ship Design 101 gets glossed over at the academy.

[Eternal_Freedom]

I know PIcard and Lily had to crawl through Jefferies tubes to get there, but has it occurred to anyone that the room might have had a normal door, but they didn't use it to avoid the Borg?

[Eternal_Freedom]

Actually, they go from Picard meeting Lily in the jefferies tube, to her demanding a way out, to Picard leading her to the random room/door/window thing. They may even still be on Deck 16, which was Borg controlled at the time.

At any rate, I find it difficult to believe that SF engineers, madly incompetent as they are would design a room like that that has no purpose and has to be accessed solely by crawling through access tubes.

[Uraniun235]

They shouldn't have built a bottomless pit at the bottom of the ship either, but that's what we see in Nemesis.

[Stofsk]

Who did the internal design for Enterprise-E?

[DaveJB]

In the real world it would have been Herman Zimmerman, who was the set designer on pretty much everything Star Trek related (including the movies) between 1987 and 2005. In the Star Trek universe though, no idea. The writers only ever seemed interested in the people who designed the warp cores (and occasionally weapons) on Starfleet's ships, none of the other designers ever got a look-in.

[Stofsk]

Yeah uh... I meant 'real world'. I thought it might have been John Eaves, but Zimmerman might be a contender too.

I just want to know who's responsible for that goddamn stupid 'bottomless pit at the very bottom of the ship' thing in Nemesis.

[DaveJB]

As far as I recall, Eaves did the ship's exterior design (possibly along with Rick Sternbach) and Zimmerman did the interior sets. There was probably some overlap in their roles, but that's officially how the responsibilities were divided up.

As for the bottomless pit, well, look no further than the pen of John Logan. See, kids, this is why "no rewrite" clauses are a bad idea!

[Connor MacLeod]

They shouldn't have built a bottomless pit at the bottom of the ship either, but that's what we see in Nemesis.

Voyager put Jeffries tubes in the Delta Flyer (rather than extra weapons and defenses) so why should we be surprised there are huge gaping pits

Then again Imperial ships also have huge gaping pits so maybe the ST engineers watched too much Star Wars

[Rossum]

Maybe Federation life support systems actually have millions of little transporters beaming oxygen molecules and stuff into peoples bloodstreams and beaming out waste. That way nobody has to use the bathroom and... I dunno... it makes it more prone to catatrophic failure.

That way everyone on the ship has a 100% need for the life support system to function 100% perfectly at all times for their bodies to function! If the life support system ever gets damaged, then the ship can no longer support life.

Or maybe they have huge holes in the ship that blows all the air out constantly and they just have the replicators make new air forever. That'll make constant life support a necessity.

[Batman]

Voyager put Jeffries tubes in the Delta Flyer (rather than extra weapons and defenses) so why should we be surprised there are huge gaping pits

Wait. What? That thing's about the size of a shuttle. It doesn't have room for Jeffries tubes.

[Uraniun235]

Who did the internal design for Enterprise-E?

I doubt that pit was in there to begin with. It was probably just the writer going "well, they're down near the bottom of the ship because that's where the bad guys beamed in from. and then riker fights the dude and they wrestle around! and then they're on a bridge over a bottomless pit! YEAH!! *snorts another line of coke*"

[Prometheus Unbound]

Then again, isn't this the Enterprise that also has a bottomless shaft for villains to fall into?

A bottomless shaft, on deck 29... of a 24 deck starship.

Why yes, yes it is.

For the sake of :scifi: I'd be willing to accept a "bottomless" pit that was, like, near the bridge that fell down to the bottom of the ship or something. But this was specifically mentioned to be on deck 29.

The ship only had 24 decks.

[Prometheus Unbound]

Voyager put Jeffries tubes in the Delta Flyer (rather than extra weapons and defenses) so why should we be surprised there are huge gaping pits

Wait. What? That thing's about the size of a shuttle. It doesn't have room for Jeffries tubes.

Runabouts have one...



Anyway:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gz1PBiq-2OE&t=5m20s

[Rommel123]

Then again, isn't this the Enterprise that also has a bottomless shaft for villains to fall into?

A bottomless shaft, on deck 29... of a 24 deck starship.

Why yes, yes it is.

For the sake of :scifi: I'd be willing to accept a "bottomless" pit that was, like, near the bridge that fell down to the bottom of the ship or something. But this was specifically mentioned to be on deck 29.

The ship only had 24 decks.

Maybe Sovereign class has some mechanism allowing it to be bigger from inside than from outside?

[Eternal_Freedom]

I watched STFC again last night, and in one scene on the bridge, I think shortly before the "The line must be drawn HEAR!!!!" bit, one of the security officers reported the Borg had overrun three security checkpoints on Deck 26.

And no one calls him on this, even when Picard earlier explicitly stated "There are 24 decks. Almsot 700 metres long."

[Stofsk]

I watched STFC again last night, and in one scene on the bridge, I think shortly before the "The line must be drawn HEAR!!!!" bit, one of the security officers reported the Borg had overrun three security checkpoints on Deck 26.

And no one calls him on this, even when Picard earlier explicitly stated "There are 24 decks. Almsot 700 metres long."

The worst part of some of these mistakes is that they were done by people who should have known better, like in the first video there's a clip from Generations, with the contrasting clip from TNG's 'Relics'. Ron Moore wrote both.

but they are funny though

[Eternal_Freedom]

I loved reading the rationalisation in the Mike Okuda text commentary. "Picard must have been intentionally deceiving Lily, as it's inconceivable that he doesn't know how many decks are on his own ship."

[Stofsk]

To be fair, Moore probably had a lot of ideas bouncing around in his head over the... what, 4 years between them? It's easy to forget details over that time in general, and even more so if you have a lot of similar ideas in your head at the same time.

Yeah but Generations was so shit I like to blame Moore for it (and Braga too I 'spose, but blaming him is a given). Besides, there were heaps of continuity errors in those videos which are pretty bad, yet comparatively few from TOS, which I think speaks volumes on the different production staff. The big ones from TOS are like Khan recognising Chekov, but that's something I think is overstated (just because Chekov wasn't a part of the cast until season two doesn't mean he wasn't onboard the Enterprise at the time, just not a bridge officer). Things like - Data has no breath in 'Insurrection' but does when he's talking to Bashir, or like he's afraid of a guy with a phaser on stun in one episode, but in the episode where he's possessed by that ghost he's not afraid at all and even gets shot and it has not effect - shit like that just bugs me. It's just sloppy. The guys who wrote for TOS just had more of a handle on these things, albeit they weren't perfect either (Vulcan has no moons! Oh wait, it does).

EDIT:

I loved reading the rationalisation in the Mike Okuda text commentary. "Picard must have been intentionally deceiving Lily, as it's inconceivable that he doesn't know how many decks are on his own ship."

See this is the problem with looking for in-universe rationalisations to explain inconsistencies all the time. It doesn't always work and sometimes the explanation is worse than the error itself (like now Picard's a liar, or Data's an idiot or Spock doesn't even know whether the planet of his birth has moons or not)

[Stofsk]

Yeah, some of it is petty 'haha lets laugh at them' mistakes, but they're a symptom of a larger problem. If they can't be arsed to keep the small details in check, then the larger, more important details have a bigger chance now of being ignored. Voyager, and Enterprise, are outright messes because of this kind of sloppiness. Like over the whole show's run how many shuttles did Voyager lose? How many torpedoes did they fire? Had to be more than 40, and Janeway said in 'Dreadnought' that they had no way to replace them once fired. And these are all factors of the show's premise which is supposed to drive it - they're out there all alone, every photorp counts, every shuttle that gets destroyed is one they'll never replace. Every crewmember who dies is someone they're never going to be able to replace either.

Stuff like that can actually drive future stories. Imagine if after one particular battle, Tuvok goes 'like, we're down to half a dozen torpedoes' and then they have to puzzle out a solution. Can they replicate the materials and construct replacements? Can they find a weapons dealer and try to adapt DQ munitions to their launchers? Same goes for the shuttles. Although the Delta Flyer is, I suppose, a way of dealing with that issue, but what would have been better is if they just found or bought new shuttlecraft after counting how many the ship had and how many it had lost. If I was doing Voyager I would have set up a huge chart on the writer's wall of every member of the crew. I wouldn't give them names or whatever, but I'd say 'ok security has x number of dudes, here's how many are starfleet and maquis' and do the same for engineering, science, etc. Then as you go along and write the scripts, you gradually flesh out the crew - this week we'll have some guy from security, give him a name, etc. Next week it might be from science who's helping Ensign Kim solve the Riddle of the Week. Then when you kill him off, he stays off, and suddenly you've got one less position on the board. Bit by bit this will add up, and it can drive story-telling. Have one scene in a later season where you have guys doing double shifts because over the whole course of the show guys have died due to battles and shit, so the survivors have to do twice the work and it's having consequences. The ship loses efficiency as a result of the shit it goes through, so they have to find some solution to it.

[Gandalf]

Curiously, some writers were aware of the fact that Voyager should be getting run down. The episode Retrospect featured Voyager trying to buy arms from what I'm pretty sure was a planet of arms traders. It was just there to lead into the main plot, but someone thought to put it there.

Interestingly, one of the season seven showrunners (Braga, I think) was discussing that the ship and crew would be showing signs of wear. Apparently Janeway was to have an arc where she considers just what her decision to stay in the DQ has cost her crew.

[Skylon]

Curiously, some writers were aware of the fact that Voyager should be getting run down. The episode Retrospect featured Voyager trying to buy arms from what I'm pretty sure was a planet of arms traders. It was just there to lead into the main plot, but someone thought to put it there.

Interestingly, one of the season seven showrunners (Braga, I think) was discussing that the ship and crew would be showing signs of wear. Apparently Janeway was to have an arc where she considers just what her decision to stay in the DQ has cost her crew.

After his very brief stint on VGR, RDM was quite vocal that SOD was taken way too far in regards to things like photon torpedoes, shuttles etc. In some ways nBSG seems like RDM's direct counter to VGR...like he was saying he could do the lost in space scenario better. On a show where the crew did regularly deal with supply issues, lack of personnel and ultimately the ship itself falling apart.

I thought some of the VGR writers really did want to do a "Year of Hell" season but were overridden.

[DaveJB]

Yeah, that was the original idea for Season 4. After First Contact was a hit in cinemas though, they made the Voyager team retool the show and bring in the Borg as the main recurring villains (along with introducing 7 of 9) to try and shore up the falling ratings.