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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Guardian 2000: [QB] [QUOTE]Originally posted by Siegfried: [qb]Time to hijack this thread for the better... As far as I can tell, The Original Series use of the helm and navigation stations was always a mish-mash of stuff. It seemed that either person sitting their could pilot the ship on their own. Of course, I think it was always up to the helmsman to engage the flight. Plus, it seemed that fire control duties were under the helmsman's and navigator's jurisdictions. And again, either person seemed capable of firing the weapons. As far I can tell, it seems that the helm and navigation stations were more like a jack-of-all-trades set of stations. The helm had that pop-up sensor viewer that could mimic some of the science station's duties. Tactical, flight control, and security were routed to the same stations as well. The only stations that haven't really been mimicked there are communications and engineering (at least that I know of). I wonder if this was simply a set of stations used for training command-track officers. After all, most of the time we only saw gold-shirts sitting there (although, in "Errand of Mercy" there was a red-shirt at helm and blue-shirt at navigation).[/qb][/QUOTE]There was definitely some of the reconfigurability referred to by Okuda in the TNGTM . . . I'm thinking it was "Balance of Terror" where Uhura was ordered by Kirk to man the navigator's station. She hopped up and sat where Stiles had been, but when Kirk asked for hailing frequencies to be opened, she did it right there, and didn't need to go running back to her own comm station. Sulu definitely had the nifty pop-up tactical display, but without special effort I doubt it provided much more than what you'd basically need for combat. I recall also that Chekov's navigator station had some engineering elements to it . . . he got a "red light" on one of the impulse vents in "Obsession", which would seem to have been a warning better suited to the Engineering console. Naturally, a measure of redundancy is a good thing, not to mention reconfigurability . . . but it still seems damn peculiar for Mayweather to be sitting there all by his wee lonesome. :) [QUOTE][qb]I had hoped that the area at aft on Enterprise's bridge was a navigation area. Considering the limited nature of the ship's navbanks and star charts (hell, even the Vulcan's maps were missing stuff), there has to be a lab onboard where the stellar cartographers are sipping coffee, eating donuts, and making maps. The TNG tech manual made several references to navigation laboratories onboard, an episode of Voyager had Paris altering commands from a navigation center, and I have a vague recollection of something similar being mentioned in TOS (but I may be wrong).[/qb][/QUOTE]That's a good idea for what it probably ought to be, though it can be darn near anything. I'd imagine that, especially on older ships, the bridge stations weren't necessarily rigged for direct control of things, but were the order-giving and information-sharing interface, if that makes any sense. Hmm . . . it probably didn't. Let's use an example . . . while Spock is cool and the Enterprise computers no doubt were fabulous, I doubt that he was the one poring over every single bit of information the sensors provided. I would think that underlings at other stations throughout the ship were looking over their little bits of information and flagging them to be sent along. Spock, or someone else along the way, could get the bright idea of "Hey, this could be a so-and-so reading", and either just send it along, or get more information out of the underling working with his particular sensor. This would, if nothing else, help explain what the hell everyone else is doing all the time. Generally during red alert situations, we see everyone in every colored shirt go running around like they are doing something, but we usually only see the bridge crew, engineers, and sometimes the security people doing something worthwhile in alert situations. [QUOTE][qb]The thing that gets me most about the Enterprise's bridges is the problem of the magical disappearing and reappearing weapons console. Enterprise has one. The Original Series does not. Movies 1 through 3 have one. Movies 5 and 6 kinda sorta have one. The Next Generation has one. I give ST5 and ST6 a questionable status since the tactical station(s) (one in ST5 and two small ones in ST6) seem to be unmanned like the Master Situation station. In Star Trek 2, weapons were fired by Sulu at the helm except for one instance when Chekov fired torpedoes from the weapons station. In Star Trek 3, Scotty fires the torpedoes from navigation. In Star Trek 6, Chekov fires the weapons from navigation. I would say that the launch of the Enterprise-B seemed to stabilize the dedicated weapons console, but I can't think of where how weapons were controlled on the Enterprise-C.[/qb][/QUOTE]Unless I'm mistaken, Yar took over the tactical station, which was placed where Ops would be aboard the E-D. Of course, given the damage to the ship, any dedicated tactical station may have been down, leading Costillo to reconfigure Ops for tactical duties (since he kinda figured they were about to go get into some shit). [QUOTE][qb]Another thing about bridges in general is that they seem to be doing a crescendo-decrendo. Enterprise's bridge has five manned stations. TOS Enterprise's bridge had, I believe seven or eight. In the TOS movies, there are about ten stations. In TNG, there are eight stations but only three of which are constantly manned. The Defiant had five stations (as did Voyager) that were always manned. But I think the Enterprise-E ruins this effect by going back to eight stations.[/qb][/QUOTE]Just to add another wrench to the works, Generations showed the Enterprise bridge with ten stations, with at least five (including the two new ones) constantly manned. Another peculiar aspect about the E-E is that the conn and ops stations are so frickin' tiny. The E-D ops station, for example, had the large flat area, with auxiliary controls running down the left-hand side. The E-E ops station appears to have even less control space than the flat panel area on the E-D, and worse yet, it's all wrapped around, 180 degrees of wee little things to look at. Then, of course, there's the ops station on Voyager, which not only has the space of the E-D, but a little side area and a whole huge wall area for Harry to play in. Makes the tiny E-E ops station seem even more silly. No wonder, then, that the E-E needs more stations. You've gotta break up the workload among more people when you replace everyone's desktop with a handheld PDA. :) [/QB][/QUOTE]
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