Why was Voyager equipped with only a helm station and not seperate helm and navigation stations like most other ships? They could've put Kim in the Navigation spot instead of whatever his spot was called. It usually seemed that he and Tuvok's roles were similar.
Why was their not a navigation station?
- Thread starter SignGuyHPW
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Technology keeps getting smaller and smaller.
The nav station seems to have been rendered obsolete by the 24th century. Remember that on the Enterprise D, the 2 forward stations were Helm and Con. Voyager's bridge design had the Con station in the rear, on the opposite side with Security.
Since the computer was sophisticated enough that it could pilot the ship on auto, the advancements made by Ent D's time made it unnecessary.
As for the much earlier NX-01, you could hand wave it away as the ship being smaller and with the slower engines, technobabble, etc...
Since the computer was sophisticated enough that it could pilot the ship on auto, the advancements made by Ent D's time made it unnecessary.
As for the much earlier NX-01, you could hand wave it away as the ship being smaller and with the slower engines, technobabble, etc...
You know what was annoying about Travis never speaking.. when he did speak he sounded fine. Actor was good, even managed to come out with his wide eyed yeehaw lines and it wasn't annoying at all. There was no reason to have him say so very little.
No, they were conn (meaning helm) and ops (meaning ship operations). On TNG, Data was the operations manager and manned the ops station; on VGR, Harry Kim held that post.
It's only on TOS that there were separate helm and navigation stations. In all the 24th-century shows and Enterprise, they were combined into the single conn station (though I think it was called the helm station in ENT).
It bugged me that Enterprise NX-01 didn't have one. Piloting a giant starship and FTL speeds should be a two-man job before it becomes a one-man job!
I always figured NX-01 only needed the one station because it was a smaller ship with a less complicated propulsion system. Or something. Maybe they started out assuming only one pilot would be needed, then realized that put a lot of demands on one person and it'd be easier to make it a two-person job, but then eventually the automation got advanced enough that only one person was needed after all.
So you wanna cut Mayweather's screen time in half? Poor guy. He'd be the Morn of ENT then.
''Ops!'' Thank you. I have no idea why I said conn. Khaaaaan!! And the moment I read your post, I can clearly recall VOY's pilot, where Harry assumes the Ops station.
My Trek Instant Recall Fu is weak indeed. I'm getting old.
The question therefore needs to be reframed as: why did designer Richard James choose to move ops to the back of Voyager's bridge, instead of it being a second station at the front like it had been on the 1701-D and 1701-E? Was it to make it easier for the directors to compose shots?
Sure it was. Tha same as every bridge set since ST V and VI implemeted those desks so Spock and Uhura not face the wall and shoved the turbolift doors aside.
Kirk's bridge was so that the captain had a view of most instruments from his chair. In Voyager not only the captain but even the very officers (Tuvok and Kim mostly) manning the stations had the screens at their backs. And bars.
Nah, have a transporter malfunction duplicate him and we can have side-by-side Mayweathers!
Both of them combined still wouldn't get as much screen time as one of T'Pol's breasts. Almost as many lines too.
Actually, they did. Kim's station was the Ops position, which, on the Enterprise-D was Wesley's station to the right of Data. The VOYAGER guys just put it at the back of the bridge.
So, technically, I guess you could say Kim was the Navigator.
No. One more time: Wesley's station was called Conn -- i.e. flight control, combining helm and navigation. Data's station was called Ops -- i.e. operations management, the coordination of ship's systems and allocation of its resources. Data and Harry were operations managers, which is why they wore gold, the color of the operations division. Wesley and Tom Paris were conn officers, i.e. pilots, which is why they wore red (just as Sulu and Chekov wore gold in the 23rd century when the colors were the other way around -- traditionally, flight controllers wear the command-division color).
So no, Kim was not the navigator. He was the ops manager and, like Data, filled the de facto role of science officer. (This doesn't make a lot of sense, but since operations management entails allocating sensor resources and coordinating crew reports and activities, it could be that an ops manager on a research vessel would be largely responsible for overseeing the ship's scientific activities and thus might effectively function as the science officer.)
Right. Helm and conn are interchangeable terms. But neither of them has anything to do with ops, Data, or Harry Kim.
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