The 1701-D Never Felt Like a City

I always got the impression that the show wanted us to feel that the ship was a space travelling city, & that was because it was a deep space ship on which people would live for years

But frankly, with the exception of the holodeck I guess, it never really felt that way. In fact, in many ways, it felt very much the same way as the Constitution class did. Mess hall, sickbay, cargo bays, transporter rooms, engineering, Bridge, offices, personal quarters

Clearly it was budgeting constraints, But it just seems like they could have vamped some of their sets the way they did some of the planet sets & maybe even tossed in some CG like they did with the Borg ship, to give it a vaster feel at times. I mean... this... is the arboretum. It's barely bigger than the one on the Constitution class


I mean, when I first heard the word arboretum in reference to the Galaxay class ship, I imagined a botanical garden facsimile

 

You can still imagine it that way. That one picture of the arboretum from the show is not mutually exclusive with the one you imagined.

 

I guess I always felt like the ship was meant to feel like a ship: roomier and with a few more comforts and a bigger crew than the old Constitution-class but built around the same principles and functions.

 

To me, there were parts that were a bit bigger and parts that were about the same as the Constitution Class design...but I never felt like it was akin to a "city"...and I do suspect, in part! it is like you say with the budget...

 

The reason they're so similar is because most of the TNG sets were slightly modified versions of the ones originally built for Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Going by interior sets alone, Voyager (which is supposed to be closer in size to the original ship) looks roomier than the TNG Enterprise.

 

This. It's crew complement was only around a thousand, just over twice that of Kirk's Enterprise.

 

Ed Whitefire's plans have huge open spaces, "malls" and the like. Couldn't they have gone somewhere like that place where they shot Caretaker's Ocampa scenes and filmed some stuff there? That was a real shopping mall, after all! All it would have taken was an establishing shot with some of the E-D's telltale long windows matted into the frame.

In truth though, the "city in space" concept was dropped after the early seasons anyway.

 

Very good observation! Already in "Encounter at Farpoint" they went outdoors for shooting. Did they even try to pretend the "outdoors" was inside the ship?

Nope. It was on a holodeck.

But that's the problem, IMHO. Who needs big and open city-like structures inside when you can recreate anyone you like inside a large holodeck?

Bob

 

In a city, there's more than only one bar, so the E-D is a space village.

 

I always imagined that the Enterprise-D was never maxed out as far as her crew complement was concerned. The ship could really hold several thousand if fully utilized, IMO. I think throughout all of TNG, the Enterprise-D was still a relatively new vessel and had been built with future crew and onboard facility expansion in mind.

 

I always thought the engine room (and antimatter reactor) was small, painfully desperately small. I also think that of the TOS and movies versions. I means look at the size of those ships and considering the relative size of the supposed-to-be-propulsion-units nacelles.

I also dont get malls aboard (and Dr Crusher buying cloth at pilot planet Farpoint). What about the replicators?

 

There's barely enough room on the Enterprise for Ensign Darwin, the ship's dolphin.

 

It was awfully nice of them to install water-filled Jeffries' tubes for him, though.

Anyway, I posit that the reason why the ship didn't feel like a city was because there was no bowling alley like on the Constitution-class.

 

Don't get me wrong. It was easily an accommodating vessel, but when you think about it, There's only 16 Holodecks, and that's a lot, but I'm sure they stay occupied fairly often. Guests, dignitaries, & diplomats etc... would benefit from some open communal areas, which we were sort of led to believe existed, but in reality, all events took place in 10-F. And all performances, of any kind, took place in rooms like this...


With at least 1000 people on board, you'd think they'd have at least one auditorium which could seat a couple hundred

 

In the original Ed Whitefire blueprints there are some massive open spaces with suspended walkways in the saucer section.
Even with the series version of the ship, if they had only shown the Main Shuttlebay you would have really gotten the size of the vessel- it was like an airport with storage coves and a center core several decks high in the center. Instead we just saw the dinky garage sized #2 & #3 which made the ship feel smaller than a Connie...

 

A real city has a 7-11 on every corner.

 

At least we saw a dedicated gift replication room (or whatever) at one point. :P

TNG was made at a time that extending a set via matte paintings (CG would come much later) was still an expensive thing. If you could afford one matte painting in an episode, you'd use it on whatever planetscape you needed that week. Eventually we did get peeks at the main shuttlebay and really large spaces like the nacelle tube, but even that was only seen fleetingly.

Where I think the balance had to be found, in addition to the TV budget and re-use of various sets, was also how big the various rooms of the place HAD to be. Structurally speaking, COULD you have a huge arborteum inside a starship and expect it to be structurally sound while in the middle of anomalies or battles? And how big do the hallways HAVE to be? People often complained that the E-D was like a cruise ship, but when I finally cruised in one in 2009, I couldn't find it further from the truth... The hallways and staterooms were cramped, and any of the actual open spaces like the upper decks, shops, etc. had no analogues on the E-D.

I think we were spoiled because in 1987, there was NOTHING else to compare it to on TV. Now that we've been through so much other stuff that not only does the TNG Enterprise feel dated, it feels small, when back then it was the king of space in size.

Now this, THIS is a starfaring city in space!

http://nopybot.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/falsesongstress01.jpg

Mark

 

I think some people are overestimating the size of a Galaxy-class starship. It's the largest type of Starfleet vessel of its era by a long shot, but there's only so much variety you can really fit into the ship outside the holodeck. "City in space" is probably Starfleet publicity more than anything.

Ed Whitefire's mall concept would have been cool to see, but there are already some real-life malls that would dwarf the public areas of the ship.

 

^^ ...excellent point, and, if I may say, Primo use of the word "dinky"!!!

 

Excellent point, and, if I may say, Primo use of the word "dinky"