I'm sure one day they'll make a 3D cutaway of the Discovery and Discoprise and fudge the Turbolift Funhouse into it somehow. They managed it with the brewery in the Kelvinprise, after all.
Spoiler: For a good time, click or tap There's a nice sense of scale and it hoesn't look half-bad, even with the usual cliche and unimaginative motif of blue/orange vomited across the set that seems to scream "Oi, you took me off the Star Wars backlot!" despite it all. Even TNG's big beige set seemed that much more authentic because it wasn't a paint-by-numbers palette. But beige is a less toned variant of orange... but it wasn't this needlessly blingy busy. What's the red flaming leakage in the lower right corner? If a component goes out toward the chamber smack in the middle, is there an extensible plank? Are these things socketed or soldered or, even more archaic (by human standards up to the 21st century), welded? Not that all production standards remain the same...
Only the resolution of the new imagery, time to create and scale the 3D objects, then to render them in 2K (since it's faster to render in 2K then upscale and the lack of sharpness won't be noticed as it's a background scene)... how big is the server farm, what's the wattage of the entire array under full load (which then begs other but too tangential questions), how much is the electricity cost, component cost, et, etc... it's not cheap but it's better to do that then some alternatives when it comes to set building.
It looks to me like some kind of Console with a crapload of Orange lights on it. You can just see the leg of the panel underneath. NOPE, I"m wrong. (again) I went back and rewatched the sequence. It's definitely the DOT droid in the foreground welding/cutting (?) something. That's a bunch of sparks flying. Also, I just noticed the DOT droid waaaay off in the background. (there's another one on the other side also) So this area is not only large from top to bottom but it's MASSIVE from front to back.
That makes the Twilight Zone seem like real life by comparison. I'm a bit surprised that the Great Space Coaster hasn't been photoshopped in yet... ...so here we go! Have a happy yellow/orange day!
You can whatever you want, but that cutaway was the first time I actually felt the engineering section on a starship made sense. When I see how much room there always seemed to be in the secondary hull on all those schematics, I always felt it was weird. The amount of space taken up by engineering, deutiriumsupply, impulse engines and all always seemed so little. Here, it feels right. To me anyway.
We should be so lucky! That tech is still not quite with us I'm afraid. The "warp core" in STID was actually a giant laser I think
It was a giant laser used to induce fusion reactions, at the Lawrence Livermore National Ignition Facility. It still hasn't managed to reach break-even, so it's not much use as a reactor, but it's definitely fusing things.
So I just went and looked this up and, Fusion reactors do, in fact, exist, and you can even build a Farnsworth reactor yourself. What they haven't achieved yet is a self-sustaining reaction that produces more power than it takes to keep the reaction going. They're hoping to achieve this with ITER, and there's a group in the UK trying to achieve commercial fusion power by 2040, but I'll believe that when I see it. The device featured in STID is the test chamber at the National Ignition Facility. edit: and I've been beaten to it
Fair enough - I was a little vague! What I meant to say is that there's no practicable fusion reactor available yet