The Cage ruined me, so I imagine it as a giant window (or, rather, a giant glowing translucent dome lit at the edges, so it's semitransparent at the top and yellow-white at the edges). Something like these, but, you know, a dome. Still, I like the inverted dome for evoking the artificial-horizon in the TMP bridge, but it does seem kind of lonely. Maybe not the whole Rolls-Royce hubcap thing from the movie set, but some sort of radial pattern might help set it off (along with making it smaller. Maybe not as small as the TMP one, but not big enough that it feels like a big Eye of Damocles waiting to come loose and crush Kirk, Sulu, and Chekov).
I actually like the TAS bridge--what with a ready room off to the side. That means the ship would have to be larger--but I like the huge TAS shuttlebasy as well. Spock also seems to hold on to a "shelf" at times--as if there is a doorway there as well. The continuous bridge looks..smaller.
When did TAS establish a ready room off to the side of the bridge? I remember them having a second turbolift, but that's it.
According to Franz Joseph, it was an access door to the space between the outer hull of the bridge module and the back-end electronics of the bridge consoles, which contained a small water closet and a gantry way down to B-deck. Makes more sense than an extra lift, IMO. It always bothered me that there was no way off the bridge in case the turbolifts died, trapping the senior officers in a time of crisis (which happened a couple of times during the series, IIRC). FJ put the little stairwell back there to solve that problem, and an easy-access bathroom to solve another. That's my head-canon and I'm sticking to it.
Honestly, that does make a lot more sense than putting a second turbolift shaft in shortly before moving it in a major refit. Makes more sense functionally also.
If the turbolift failed, couldn't you just shut down the gravity and float down the tube? That afterall is the default state of things in space. I never understood the need for a second turbolift. Just have handholds in that tube.
Well done,sir! So, after going through about 10 different designs for the ceiling, and realized I was getting too complicated with it and needed to scale everything back and use something minimally intrusive to the overall design of the bridge. I'd also toyed with just having a lit translucent bridge dome a la The Cage, but it just didn't feel right being able to look up into space from the deck of the TOS bridge. Too fancy. So I ended up going with the following design, demonstrated here in this fish-eye-lense screenshot:
I really like that - the minimalist look feels very TOSish (and mirrors the lower sensor dome) as well as matching up with the onscreen appearances of the Bridge ceiling.
I was afraid of that. The images look fine on my monitor at home but everywhere else they seem so dark. Struggling to get parity between my monitor and other screens. Ugh.
I wouldn't take my assessment as word, though; there are a LOT of images on this forum that are dark on my TV/monitor.
Beautiful design and render! I asked previously but didn't seem to get an answer on the one panel directly above the viewscreen that seems to be bumped out. I see that it exists in the set photos from TOS. Does anyone know what the reason for this feature?
Sorry no one ever answered! I honestly don't know of any reason it was there, especially since it was absent in WNMHGB.