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You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.You should upgrade or use an alternative browser. Bridge location on Enterprise?

• Thread starter telerites
• Start date Nov 19, 2015

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telerites

Commander

Red Shirt First let me say I am a huge fan of 1701 design but was curious if anyone thought the bridge location was not the best as it appears to be very vulnerable, especially if shields fail or are weakened. It is not like they physically looked out in space as they used the view screen. Seems like it could have been more secure in the dead center of the saucer section. Granted it l9ks cool in top bubble especially for the film shots looking down from outer space and zooming into the bridge but strategically the ship could have been commanded and operated from anywhere. Thoughts?

Paradise City

Commodore

Commodore Yes, it's a stupid place to put the bridge. True.

Kor

Fleet Admiral

Admiral I think it was based on the bridge position on navy ships. Kor

A beaker full of death

Vice Admiral

Admiral

Kor said: I think it was based on the bridge position on navy ships. Kor Click to expand...

Yep. We have to bear in mind, they were writing for a general public that had never seen anything like this. A lot was borrowed from the USN just to give people a frame of reference -- after all, a huge percentage of the general public was familiar with naval ships and military life at that time.

StarCruiser

Commodore

Commodore I like one explanation - it wouldn't make much difference if the bridge was in the middle of the saucer hull as once the shields are gone, the ship can't take much damage. The bridge is on top partly out of tradition and as a convenience since it can be swapped easily when needed... Anyone even know why it would be called a "bridge" at all? Old sailing ships didn't have a "bridge" - that concept came about during the late 19th century as an actual -bridge- was built across the ship to allow officers to see more clearly past the gun turrets in use at the time. It was later enclosed for better protection from the elements and then the conning tower was developed to protect the officers in battle... Maybe starships should have conning towers instead of bridges?

GNDN18

270

Rear Admiral Buck Murdock: We'd better get to the tower, Lieutenant. Lt. Pervis: We have no tower, sir. Buck Murdock: No tower? Lt. Pervis: Just a bridge, sir. Buck Murdock: Why the hell aren't I notified about these things?

Wingsley

Commodore

Commodore StarCruiser is definitely onto something here. If a Federation starship's defensive screens and shields are deactivated or weakened, it would not make much difference where any vital ship's facility is located. (Witness how easily the Engine Room was damaged in TMP2.) The bridge's placement on a starship is more than likely related to necessity of upgrades; it's probably a relatively easy affair to decouple a bridge module and pluck it off the top of the saucer, allowing it to be taken away for repairs, replacement or refit/recycling so it could be brought back fairly quickly. This would suggest that the bridge module is really an interchangeable "mission module", which would mean that different starships use different modules, depending on whatever mission they would each be assigned to. If you stop and think about it, given the catastrophe we saw in TNG's "Cause and Effect", the best way to possibly disable or destroy a starship would be to score a direct hit on a nacelle. Each time the Bozeman collided with the Enterprise-D's starboard nacelle, BOOM! No more Enterprise-D.

Zaminhon

Captain

Captain Most flying saucers as depicted in the movies at the time had a domed command center on top otherwise they would look like an ordinary plate, or saucer - kind of boring.

Richard Baker

Commodore

Commodore GR wanted to have a very identifiable location s for the bridge where the audience could see it and have a feeling of size. They tried to relocate the bridge to inside the center of the primary hull for TNG but he moved it back on top. As to being unprotected, he reasoned that any place in the hull would be equally protected with the shields. IIRC several times on the different series and in a movie we have seen the enemy deliberately target the bridge of a Federation ship, sometimes with great effect (like what happened to the NX-01) and in DS-9 we saw that even while shields were still up they can be overloaded to the point of allowing enemy fire to strike.

telerites

Commander

Red Shirt

dxdydxdy said: I did write something on that here, a while back. Basically there are in-universe and out-of-universe reasons that one can use to justify it. Click to expand...

Thanks and I thought this may be taken as dumb question when I posted. Nice perspectives you have penned in your article. Plus I knew nothing about the website - I'll dig around there more

Mr. Laser Beam

Fleet Admiral

In Memoriam Also since Starfleet ship's bridges are replaceable on the fly, it may be easier (for that purpose) to put them where they can be easily accessed. A bridge that's deep inside the hull would be harder to replace. T

Timo

Fleet Admiral

Admiral

Maybe starships should have conning towers instead of bridges? Click to expand...

The funny thing is, when the various navies created armored conning towers for their skippers and admirals, they found out that said officers refused to use them, instead directing their battles from the patently bullet-unproof bridges that offered better visibility and, even more importantly, better "feel" of the battle (all that shrapnel flying through your liver must have "felt" especially good...). Why protect the bridge? It's not as if losing the top officers would be tactically all that crippling, and history shows they want to die anyway. The engines of a starship are factually far more vulnerable, and the place to hit if you want to destroy the enemy. Or if you want to disable him, too.

Starfleet ship's bridges are replaceable on the fly Click to expand...

How so? We've never seen one replaced. Oh, the contours changed between the TOS pilots and the actual show, but how was that "on the fly"? Redecorating the interiors doesn't imply replacing the entire structure. And we have seen all sorts of interiors redecorated, not just the bridge (even if that's the one set they, the film industry, use the most and for that reason also redesign the most). Timo Saloniemi

Zaminhon

Captain

Captain

The engines of a starship are factually far more vulnerable, and the place to hit if you want to destroy the enemy. Or if you want to disable him, too. Click to expand...

Factually? That is until someone writes a script that includes a super-shielded engine impervious to all weaponry. Now that's a fact. F

FormerLurker

Rear Admiral

Rear Admiral Until the shields go down.

Mr. Laser Beam

Fleet Admiral

In Memoriam

Timo said:

Starfleet ship's bridges are replaceable on the fly Click to expand...

How so? We've never seen one replaced. Click to expand...

We may not have seen it actually happening, but we know it has happened. For example, the 1701-A bridge from the end of ST IV vs. the one in ST V.

StarCruiser

Commodore

Commodore

Timo said:

Maybe starships should have conning towers instead of bridges? Click to expand...

The funny thing is, when the various navies created armored conning towers for their skippers and admirals, they found out that said officers refused to use them, instead directing their battles from the patently bullet-unproof bridges that offered better visibility and, even more importantly, better "feel" of the battle (all that shrapnel flying through your liver must have "felt" especially good...). Why protect the bridge? It's not as if losing the top officers would be tactically all that crippling, and history shows they want to die anyway. The engines of a starship are factually far more vulnerable, and the place to hit if you want to destroy the enemy. Or if you want to disable him, too.

Starfleet ship's bridges are replaceable on the fly Click to expand...

How so? We've never seen one replaced. Oh, the contours changed between the TOS pilots and the actual show, but how was that "on the fly"? Redecorating the interiors doesn't imply replacing the entire structure. And we have seen all sorts of interiors redecorated, not just the bridge (even if that's the one set they, the film industry, use the most and for that reason also redesign the most). Timo Saloniemi Click to expand...

Yep - the conning tower was very restrictive. You can't see very much of what's going on outside...

cgervasi

Commander

Red Shirt Did they ever mention using the window in the ceiling or why they would use it? Was it for aesthetics or some function?

A beaker full of death

Vice Admiral

Admiral

cgervasi said: Did they ever mention using the window in the ceiling or why they would use it? Was it for aesthetics or some function? Click to expand...

That was just one shot to show they could do it; don't take it literally.

scotpens

Professional Geek

Premium Member

A beaker full of death said:

cgervasi said: Did they ever mention using the window in the ceiling or why they would use it? Was it for aesthetics or some function? Click to expand...

That was just one shot to show they could do it; don't take it literally. Click to expand...

Yes, I always figured the zoom-in-on-the-bridge shot in "The Cage" was to show the location of the bridge and the relative size of the ship. The redone CGI shot in the remastered version portrays a literal transparent dome over the bridge, which is silly. T

Timo

Fleet Admiral

Admiral

We may not have seen it actually happening, but we know it has happened. For example, the 1701-A bridge from the end of ST IV vs. the one in ST V. Click to expand...

That's just it - we don't see the bridge look any different in those different movies. We see the interiors look different, but that's just redecorating. ITRW, that interior is built of modular wedges that are easily moved around. This is probably true in the Trek universe, too. Replacing or rearranging the consoles is no more difficult than what NASA does with the ISS, moving new full-height wall racks in through that narrow docking hatch - in suitable pieces. And no, moving turbolift stations should not be any more difficult than moving the science console or the tactical pulpit. Turbolifts move sideways, and there's bound to be a horizontal shaft just below the bridge anyway so that both of the two bridge lift stations can be efficiently served; the stations can no doubt be mounted at any position above that shaft. Or at least at any position in the aft half of the bridge. Incidentally, any position other than the very aftmost one (the one used originally in ST:TMP) means the bridge interior must be sunken at least half a deck below the level suggested by the (this time definitely opaque!) exterior dome. Since the other movies did use other positions, the sinking is a confirmed feature. And that in turn allows not only free turbostation placement but also the switching of interior wedges by horizontal pulling out... Was the TOS bridge similarly sunken? It must have been, or else the turbolift could not exist (and no, this is not related to the issue of whether the turbolift lies directly aft or is offset by thirty degrees or whatnot). The interior set already nicely fills up the top dome, especially in both versions of "The Cage" opening shot, meaning the turbostation must be either outdoors, invisibly in the vacuum beyond the wall, or then suitably belowdecks (something the "The Cage" shots sort of allow, as neither of them really aligns correctly with the rest of the ship and thus leaves room for interpretation).

Did they ever mention using the window in the ceiling or why they would use it? Was it for aesthetics or some function? Click to expand...

We sort of get the exact opposite of a mention. In TNG the bridge did have a transparent top - in addition to various glimpses during the episodes, we see it cracked after the crash in ST:GEN. However, in the episode "Justice" LaForge is told to take a direct look at a thing outside, with that nifty VISOR of his, and he goes to a crew lounge and looks through its wall window to achieve that. Why not through the skylight right there on the bridge? Is that skylight "figurative" somehow, rather than "literal" (despite the telling imagery from ST:GEN)? Of course, the "Justice" rationale might have been that Picard didn't want to tip off that alien entity by maneuvering his ship so that the skylight pointed at the entity, so LaForge had to wander through the ship looking for a porthole that already pointed in the right direction... In TOS, we get another sort of un-mention: in "Requiem for Methuselah", the villain shrinks the ship and places her on a tabletop, but when Kirk peers in, he does so horizontally, not through the top of the bridge. Similarly, the shrunken sidekicks don't look up to see the giant Kirk (or at least the top of his wig) - they look at the main viewer which shows a horizontal camera angle. But Kirk would simply be making a gesture there - it's not as if he could hope to actually see anything meaningful inside the ship, as the scale of miniaturization is too extreme for that. And looking from the side, after bending down a bit, is "polite", while looking at the ship from atop would be "rude". After Kirk has made that choice, of course the sidekicks then point the camera at his face and look at that, rather than settling at looking at the top of the wig. We have seen skylights galore on TNG era ships - most of the portholes are of that type. The TOS ship appears to have four large rectangular lights on the saucer edge, one of which remains dark (the model had lights below three of those, but not below the fourth). It would be much easier to treat those as skylights (with one room randomly darkened because not in use or indeed because in stargazing use) than as vital sensor components or whatever (with one broken and never repaired). Timo Saloniemi

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