I love the brewery notion. And I really liked the room with the big tanks (antimatter pods?) that Kirk found Uhura in to ask her if the transmission was in Womuwan. And I like the *look* of GNDN pipes everywhere, but some of the Engineering sets were just too big to really look like they would be practical on a starship. I mean, there just looked like a lot of empty space which you wouldn't expect on a vessel where interior volume would presumably be at a premium.
Save the Enterprise Brewery!
- Thread starter F. King Daniel
- Start date
DontFeedPhil
Fleet Captain
At first I didnt like the design at all. I could tell it was a factory right off the bat. And I never knew that the Enterprise was built using good old' cement blocks like I have in my basement. There were a couple times where I could plainly see cement blocks. That goes a long way for the argument that they needed to dress the set up a bit. A few walls and a few strategically placed units and it would have been much better. Too bad they couldnt have shot it in a collider complex. Now that would have fit in as an engine room...
As it was...Visible Cement blocks on a starship = FAIL
As it was...Visible Cement blocks on a starship = FAIL
Did anyone stop to think that fresh beer improves crew morale?
In all seriousness, I think the brewery scenes are great. Engineering aint pretty panels and pushbuttons, and its about time a starship reflected that. Its a bit big, but Abrams couldnt build his own piping system, so he used what he had.
In all seriousness, I think the brewery scenes are great. Engineering aint pretty panels and pushbuttons, and its about time a starship reflected that. Its a bit big, but Abrams couldnt build his own piping system, so he used what he had.
I still say there wouldn't be all those hand turned valves in a warp drive engine room. Pull tabs yes, hand turned valves no.
Maybe so...but there's a fine line between "industrial" and "ludicrous." This engine room crosses the line. It's like something you'd see in a darkened plant in Gotham City in an old Tim Burton BATMAN flick.
Shit, even the Firefly's engine room in SERENITY and the Fox series looked ten times better than this monstrosity.
I've seen the movie four times, including once on IMAX, and I was focused on the characters so much I never saw a single concrete block. Maybe I'll see them on the DVD but is it any worse than salt shaker medical scanners, with visible salt and pepper holes, in TOS? Kirk's moving bloodstain in ST II? Dodgy whale fluke action in ST IV?
That's exactly the problem.No engineering space on a modern ship looks that 'neat'.Any plausible engineering bay on a 762 meter long starship capable of FTL speed is gonna need some basic elements,like coolant tanks,water tanks,computer rooms(or farms),batteries,plasma conduits,and the warp reactors themselves.Plus you have the environmental systems like oxygen generators,HVAC systems,water supply,heating and cooling elements.All that stuff is gonna need to be connected to the other 'stuff' somehow-the coolant has to get to the core,the antimatter has to get to the reaction chamber,the power has to be transferred from the chamber indirectly to the devices that need the energy,the Bussards I'd imagine generate heat and require cooling -all the above need to be tied in,and you do that using pipes,joints,and conduits.Seeing as how you'd need a LOT of energy to run the Enterprise,in turn you need a lot of everything else to make the ship liveable,and to keep it from blowing itself up via overheating.
This desire for a 'clean' engineering bay doesn't work-its like opening a car's hood and wanting to see just the motor,without wanting wiring or coolant lines to exist.
This desire for a 'clean' engineering bay doesn't work-its like opening a car's hood and wanting to see just the motor,without wanting wiring or coolant lines to exist.
THAT much coolant?
Yowza. Starfleet must have designed the alternate-timeline Enterprise's warp core on a budget...or a dare. Maybe both?
Ever seen a nuclear reactor? Those great big gigantic concrete towers? Cooling. And a Matter-Antimatter reactor is going to run a lot hotter than that. Even allowing for centuries worth amazing advances in engineering, it seems about right.
As for the Brewery, I don't mind the pipes, but I would like to see a couple of things in the sequel:
1) Throw up some green screen or some fake walls in the background to suggest the curvature of the hull, instead of a rectangular building on the ground
2) throw some rubber mats on the floor so you can't see the concrete (seriously guys, you can buy them by the square foot at Home Depot)
3) Mock up some warp cores they can walk past - nothing too TNGish, just some rows of tubes that look like they are containing more than beer.
4) Don't use the set for scenes that make no sense, like say, going to find a communications officer hanging out at a terminal sitting between some tanks.
None of this would be terribly expensive, and would vastly improve the believability of the new engineering.
Wanting the sets to be real is one thing, but filming them on practical locations is another. I 'never' looked at any Starship in the federation as some navy vessel or heavy factory where the offices were clean but the work station was rugged. Those types of facilities are more primed to earth logic, not space logic. With all the stresses a starship must endure in space, you think they're gona make the Engineering facility out of concrete, steel beams and steam pipes?
And making the engineering sets practical does take away a lot of potential cool moments that made the sets so awesome to begin with. They had tunnels you could crawl into and fiddle with the mechanics, they had Jefferies Tubes that lead from one section to another, they had clear positioning of the warp core instead of CGIing a beer vat and making it be the core and it was consistent with the over all look and feel of the ship. Of course you will say that engineering looks more realistic as a brewery, but why do you want realism in that department?
Abrams needed this movie to relate to an audience oblivious to Trek-and to the layperson the nuTrek engineering look more like an 'engineering' room than the sanitized warp core+computer terminal jobs of the past.In any instance,this brewery would have worked 100% had Abrams done things to make the brewery appear more compact-not necessarily smaller,but look more like a more efficient use of space.
I personally think the set looked very cheap and junky looking.
I think the TOS Engineroom and the Engineering in the Virtual Dreadnought Elite Force mod or some mix between the TOS Engineroom and the Enterprise (NX-01) reactor-room would have probably been the best set-up.
You'd want a lot of floor-space -- very good for an engineering room. But still, I wouldn't make it really any bigger than the engineering-spaces in TOS.
As for a comment made in this thread about one of the features they liked was the multiple warp-core set-up, I should note in the TV-series the ship had three-reactors...
While I am at it though, I don't honestly know why the reactors need to be jettisoned, so much as the anti-matter tanks... That is the biggest danger, not the reactors itself, all you'd have to do is cut off the M/AM to the reactor and the reaction dies right there.
CuttingEdge100
I think the TOS Engineroom and the Engineering in the Virtual Dreadnought Elite Force mod or some mix between the TOS Engineroom and the Enterprise (NX-01) reactor-room would have probably been the best set-up.
You'd want a lot of floor-space -- very good for an engineering room. But still, I wouldn't make it really any bigger than the engineering-spaces in TOS.
As for a comment made in this thread about one of the features they liked was the multiple warp-core set-up, I should note in the TV-series the ship had three-reactors...
While I am at it though, I don't honestly know why the reactors need to be jettisoned, so much as the anti-matter tanks... That is the biggest danger, not the reactors itself, all you'd have to do is cut off the M/AM to the reactor and the reaction dies right there.
CuttingEdge100
That's what I'm thinking: The basic TOS & TAS layout-- where you have a control center and the really major dangerous parts on the other side of the grate, bashed with the NX-01s look, with a lot more open grates and catwalks instead of solid bulkhead panels. Keep the angular modules on the other side of the grate, CGI in some sort of "reaction" between them.
