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DS9 engineering

madman

Ensign
Newbie
I always felt we missed something great by not seeing the main engineering sections of DS9.

What do you all think it should look like?
 
I always felt we missed something great by not seeing the main engineering sections of DS9.

What do you all think it should look like?

I think there is one episode (civil defense??) where you see the main reactor control... but the station is not going to have massive warp engines like a ship will.
 
Yeah, I have my doubts that the station would have a really impressive engineering section. All they would really need is a big central generator, no warp core to provide visual interest.
 
As i understand it, there is nothing "special" about a warp core, in regards to capability for warp flight, it is just a VERY powerful reactor. Ive seen many articles which mention that warp core isnt really the best name they could of used for it. I always preferred the name Gravimetric Field Displacement Manifold, which more accurately describes how it generates power, rather then merely the main component of the ship that it powers.

So yes i do believe that a station as big as DS9 would have some pretty hefty power requirements, with an equally hefty engineering set-up generating it.

I always felt it would be great to see such a mammoth engineering facility, although i can understand budgetry reasons for not including it.
 
Right. The fusion reactors centrally mounted at the bottom of the station core. That's it. So we did see the engineering section.

And that reactor core is an external mounting, possibly without habitable access. So there wouldn't necessarily be a grand engineering section, just a control room maybe not much different from Ops. The fusion reactors themselves are an external structure which we can see at the bottom of the station and that's it. Yes?
 
As i understand it, there is nothing "special" about a warp core ...
Yes it really is the "core" of the system. The warp core is the central engine of the ship, what out in the nacelles is just the equivalent of a modern ships propellers, with the plasma conduits being the drive shafts.
 
The entire Terok Nor space station would appear to be a massive piece of, well, engineering. Most of it is bound to be machinery of some sort - not residential areas, command facilities or weapons installations, but machinery for refining the ore being mined on the planet's surface and for loading it into ships bound for Cardassia.

"Civil Defense" (and, after a fashion, "Crossover") gave us a tiny glimpse into this machinery, which our heroes were in the process of dismantling since ore no longer was coming in or going out. But odds are, they didn't have the time or incentive to remove a major percentage of that machinery - just enough to make room for necessary upgrades. If DS9 ever were revisited by the camera, we might well get a CGI glimpse into these vast volumes of complex gadgetry... Or then they might get portrayed by a suitable industrial location.

Timo Saloniemi
 
seeing an 'engineering' would probably mean people technobabbling on about neutrinos and plasma. so i'm glad they didnt have one.
 
As i understand it, there is nothing "special" about a warp core, in regards to capability for warp flight, it is just a VERY powerful reactor. Ive seen many articles which mention that warp core isnt really the best name they could of used for it. I always preferred the name Gravimetric Field Displacement Manifold, which more accurately describes how it generates power, rather then merely the main component of the ship that it powers.

Gravimetric field displacement is a fancy term for how the nacelles warp space to let the ship travel faster than light, so it's just as bad as "warp core."

If anything, the best name for it is "matter/antimatter reactor." because that's how it works.

So yes i do believe that a station as big as DS9 would have some pretty hefty power requirements, with an equally hefty engineering set-up generating it.

The big red glowy bits at the bottom of the core.

I always felt it would be great to see such a mammoth engineering facility, although i can understand budgetry reasons for not including it.

It would have been, but I guess that there wouldn't be much in the way of habitable space down there, apart from access tubes.
 
...In contrast, much of the refining activity seemed to be labor-intensive, down to and including hand-pushed carts for the Bajoran workers to operate! There could have been impressive vistas down there.

Timo Saloniemi
 
...I wonder why they dropped the idea of having big transporters on the Promenade, as shown in the original set plans. The Promenade was the stage for many a dramatic entrance, via the internal airlocks; a beam-in could have been equally dramatic, but perhaps it was decided that the rolling doors were a vastly cheaper way to achieve the impact than the transporter VFX would have been?

Timo Saloniemi
 
And I think it would have been troublesome to have, "Okay, let's beam aboard that derelict spaceship. QUICK! Everyone to the Promenade!" They would have needed a transporter in Ops as well, so why have two when one would do?

And it hardly seems fitting to beam aboard some dignitary to Quarks.
 
If it helps, we "see" more of the engineering locations in the Relaunch novels - specifically the first duology Avatar and the SCE crossover Cold Fusion. A number of set pieces happen in the areas of the station around the giant power core attached to the bottom of the station, and in fact the ejection of the power core is a major story point.

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