That may have been the design, but it didn't really come off that way on camera--the open space was mostly lost, and the chairs couldn't have been all that comfortable if the tactical officers weren't put off by not having one!
You don't
want the tactical officer to be comfortable. You want the tactical officer to be alert.
Another idea what the Sovereign class nacelles on this planet could mean: In Destiny Book 1 some captain sacrified his sovereign class ship and flew directly into a borg weapon beam directed onto some planet. The beam destroyed the ship, hit the planet and killed most of the people on it, they were talking about a few thousand survivors. Maybe the stardrive section of this sovereign class ship crashlanded on this planet and Picard/Worf are there to evacuate surviving people of that planet and maybe the ship.
Or maybe it could mean that the cover is symbolic and does not represent an actual scene from the novel. In fact, didn't Bill already state earlier in the thread that that's exactly the case?
Well, this is true, but also I have two computers: a laptop for carrying back and forth to work (I teach high school) and a desktop I use at home. The desktop has two very large monitors, and a case the usual size for a desktop, and that's the one I use when I have anything important to do because having two monitors greatly increases my flexibility when doing just about anything.
But is your desktop covered in hundreds of multicolored blinky lights? Mine has two colored lights, only one of which blinks. There's also one non-blinky light on the monitor. And does your desktop make lots of bleepy noises every time you hit a key or click a mouse button? Mine doesn't.
And are your monitors built into a huge metal-and-plastic wall unit in your home? Or are they just sitting on a piece of wood or glass furniture?
And, in fact, as the volume necessary to house the computer's core components has decreased, computer screens have actually become LARGER over the past couple of decades, and more detailed and high resolution. Not the monitors, which have become thinner and lighter, but the 2D space of the screens themselves. My roommate, who does computer graphic design, has an ENORMOUS monitor almost three feet wide. I imagine that before I die that most of us will be using large, responsive touchscreens larger than Enterprise consoles just because if you're managing that much stuff at once, there has to literally be someplace to put every program or process you're using so you can see it. And given how much visual information they process on the show, having big screens to see it on, like my roommate's, makes clear intuitive sense.
To be sure. But within a decade, we'll be able to make such a screen be just part of the wall or window, becoming completely invisible when it's turned off. In fact, with recent advances in flexible screens, circuits, and chips, we'll be able to install computers in clothing or furniture or anywhere else. You could have all the most advanced computers and home video and gaming systems installed in your living room, but when they're turned off, it would look like there's no high technology there at all. Because it would be completely integrated into the space. It wouldn't be a bunch of big intrusive metallic boxes covered in blinky lights.
But if the consoles had fewer functions, or fewer simultaneous functions, then you'd want them to be smaller. Which is the only reason I can think of that Data has about 2 square feet of console, and Kim has about 8.
That's assuming the old-fashioned approach where there has to be a physically separate key or panel for each function. Think of it more like a programmable touch screen of the sort that's becoming available now, where you can call up any set of command operations on the same single screen. Any function you're not using at the moment can be minimized; what would be a whole big control panel in the old sci-fi console model could be reduced to a single icon, then expanded to fill the screen when you need it.
Come to think of it, though, I'm forgetting something important. Big consoles loaded with lights and buttons may be less advanced technologically, but that doesn't make them useless, especially in a spaceship's control room. I mean, consider the cockpit of the Space Shuttle, which is full of dozens of consoles with thousands of buttons and lights. And most of them aren't needed to operate the Shuttle. They're emergency backups for when the much simpler-looking, more streamlined computer control systems fail.
So I stand by what I said about the TNG bridge looking more futuristic than the VGR bridge. But futuristic isn't always better from a practical standpoint. It's possible that the
Galaxy class went too far in embracing aesthetics over functional redundancy, that a cruder design with lots of buttons and lights and consoles is important to have as a backup system in case the high-tech stuff fails. Still, though, under normal circumstances, it should be possible to operate the ship without needing to use most of those consoles, just as with the Space Shuttle.
