Considering the pratical, on-set lighting effects, the Enterprises' engines never looked better tham TMP/TWOK. I was watching an early episode of VOY and that thing looks like a cheap ornament upscaled. Still better than the one used in TNG (and lamentably, ST6) looked nothing more than some I don't know, recycled old amusement park attraction. Did DS9 (and the Defiant) have a reactor? I don't remember seeing those. NX01's is ugly too. But the first one from TMP looked like real futuristic, super energetic fluids were flowing inside that tube.
Defiant had a reactor, they reused it for the Enterprise-E's reactor if I recall correctly. DS9 had a large fusion reactor that we saw it spark a few times. It was Cardassian in design. What ever happened to the TMP internix shaft part of the set?
I read a story years ago (don't remember where) about the two guys who came up with the intermix effect for TMP. IIRC, the inspiration for it was one of the guys was washing dishes and noticed how the sunlight reflected in the dish water.
I liked TNG's warpcore- it looked logical from an engineering perspective with the matter and antimatter being brought together in a controlled fashion and distributed. The swirly lightshow in TMP/TWoK/VOG looked pretty but odd- what exactly was it doing?
TNG, the device that held the dilithium didn't make sense to me, shouldn't the dilithium be in the center of the "central bulge" (for want of the real term) where the streams of matter and antimatter meet? Instead of off to one side. I don't remember Voyager having a dilithium chamber, they spoke of having dilithium, but where was it? > .
I think what we saw in TMP-TWOK was really just a big warp power transfer conduit. Which came up out of the unseen warp reactor several decks below. Several diagrams of the Refit/Ent-A show a big donut-shaped thing at the base of the vertical intermix shaft along with the Antimatter storage pods. The reactor room in TWOK where Spock died seems to indicate a reactor located below the engine room. During the first season of Voyager they showed that there were components located in the base of the warp core structure. Janeway is shown fiddling with some items that may be dilithium related. Once again the diagrams seem to indicate that we're only seeing the top half of the warp core. The Enterprise-E reactor actually looks like several reactors bundled together along with the reactor coolant tanks (convenient for Data). My only question is if the matter/antimatter injectors are located at the top/bottom of the warp core. They essentially shoot the reactants at each other targeting the dilithium inside the reactor. Why is the thing so fracking tall?
I think in different ways they all look fine, except JJ's beer factory and I don't remember the VOY one.
The Engineering set was a redress but the Warp Core was all new. The central housing was actually repurposed molds used for making the turbolift car ceilings.