@cardinal biggles: What bothers me is that there's nothing about it on any of the design drawings or annotations, nor in any of the technical memos I've read. It's just there because "it looks cool" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I redid the plasma streams to match the blue lights on the floor, and to me it looks a lot better now, so thanks for pointing it out @batboy853! I also added some more details to the standing consoles at the side of the core, plus edited the material of the matter stream on the core itself, I think it looks better now. On the walls where the plasma streams end, I replaced the bottom square-ish panel with a simpler mesh of straight vertical lines. The two remaining ones now have slightly different patterns of black tape, and they're mirrored on the other side of the warp core. All these changes make them now better match how they look on Voyager.
I think it all comes down to artistic licence and dramatic needs in story - Voyager's core, while a throwback to the TMP-era core design, seemingly lacks any kind of visible power transfer conduits that feed the nacelles, even in the blueprints and MSD (as does the Nova-class). From the pseudo-technical viewpoint, though, the conduit that ruptured in "Investigations" could have been part of a main EPS conduit that runs the excess by-product energy into the ship's systems, not directly part of the nacelle-feeding system. Something like the radiometric converters or transkinetic chamber B'Elanna mentions in "Night". Or it could have been plasma coolant, like in "First Contact", since it utterly vaporised Jonas... (Sorry if this is me being pedantic, but I LOVE me some technobabble!!)
To bring some confusion to the party here, and I know that this is a completely silly idea, but, the drawing for the Voyager's main engineering (the one available at EAS) shows the lighted strip on the floor extending both "forward" and "aft" of the warp core... What if the main engineering on the Intrepid class is not oriented fore-aft, but side to side, and the floor conduits (if there really are two, I couldn't find a screenshot for it) go to each side...? The warp core looks the same from each side, it's impossible to tell... As I said, a silly idea, just throwing a wrench in the works For what it's worth, I think that Orbing Master's idea about plasma coolant makes most sense.
^I was literally just about to suggest the same thing. Finding out the SNW engine room is “backwards” from how you expect really opened my mind about things possibly being oriented in other directions.
I was very surprised by that revelation as well. I wonder if it has its own TARDIS funhouse as well...
@Orbing Master: Yeah, it being some sort of coolant or EPS makes a lot more sense. As stated on a previous post Sternbach very clearly intended for the plasma conduits to be on the level below engineering, so I wonder why he didn't include them on the MSD. @tax1234: Indeed, I mentioned the lights going backwards and forwards in a previous post and considered the possibility of engineering being sideways. Technically it could be entirely possible, I mean the bridge could be looking backwards as well and functionality wouldn't be changed, but it clearly was not the intention. Plus for what it's worth the MSD and all similar official schematics show the room going through the centerline of the ship. @cardinal biggles: Oh god don't get me started on the shuttlebay. Even beyond the size and infinite number of shuttles, it's called shuttlebay TWO, yet there's only one of them!! Obviously not much time to work on this during the weekdays, but I got the ceiling lights and carpet pattern in place today. Now onto the LCARS, which given the amount of screens here might be the biggest challenge of this room...
@FormerLurker: That would be unusual to say the least, as it's not a bay for shuttles but a bespoke dock for a specific craft, which itself is not a shuttle. Plus, it wasn't listed as a shuttlebay on the Enterprise-D, where there were clear shuttlebays one, two and three. Started with some small LCARS and then tackled the glass panel today, as I wanted to confirm how readable it was or if I'd have to remove it. I based the graphic on a similar one from the Defiant engineering. I decided I wanted the ship to be pointing forward from both sides, so only the information displayed at the sides flips. The glass itself is tinted to ease with readability, otherwise the writing from the other side makes it way too confusing. For the bottom part of the graphic I'm just reusing the random numbers they used on the alternate Enterprise-D bridge from 'Parallels' where this glass partition was used.
@FormerLurker: lol, I wasn't sure Added a bunch more rectangles and circles and stuff to make the glass divider graphic more busy, I'm calling it done now. I started with the remaining LCARS keyboards but it's taking me a while as the space there is really limited so I'm doing several new elements, I'll show it properly when I have it further along. Rewatching some Voy scenes I noticed the Jefferies junction door on engineering is a bit shorter than the standard doors, not reaching the floor. This makes sense as it was that way in TNG as well, but I never noticed it before on Voyager, so I adjusted the Jefferies junction door here to match. Finally, I increased the intensity of the new rectangular ceiling light fixtures. Because of their warm color they balance out the blues from the warp core, giving the room a more neutral tone, and obviously making it overall more lit which was my main intention.
Thanks @Rory1707 and @The Green Monster! Took a rest from the Budapest engineering for a bit, though I'll be back at it soon. After looking at some data and thinking about where I wanted to take things, I modified my website quite a bit (again). First, I removed the full lists with all the ships listed alphabetically and chronologically. I thought they'd be more useful for people, but from analytics I can see they aren't very used, and they're a pain to maintain because of how ArtStation does things. Instead of having individual pages for each ship, I now have them for each starship class. This way if I have, say, multiple Excelsior-class ships listed, they all share a single place on the menu, under which they'll each have their little text descriptions and interiors. Plus it allows me to incorporate a single class description at the top. Plus this is easier to identify for most people, "Akira Class" is simply more well known that "USS Thunderchild", and so on. I took this chance not only to write descriptions for each class of ship I'm featuring, but also to do another pass at each ship and each interior's accompanying text, so it was a lot of work writing it all hahah. The drive for this change is that I intend to do several "quick redresses" relatively soon, for example taking the Potemkin interiors and redressing them for a TMP era Excelsior-class, that sort of thing. Unrelated to the website, and going back to the USS Budapest, working on its engineering room made me reconsider some aspects of its bridge, so today I did some modifications to it. Most notably I just moved the dedication plaque to a new area and added alert status indicators flanking the egress doors. Plus I changed the circuitry access panels (seen at the right on these renders) with the new version I did for engineering, which is more accurate to how they looked on Voyager. You can see more renders (and read up on the ship) in the new Norway Class page. Old: New:
That’s such a great looking bridge, and you can imagine it being the kind of thing that the production team would have been able to throw together as a ship of the week. Gives it that sense of authenticity.
First thought I got was the Prometheus shape but VOY features, which I guess was your goal all along. It feels too gray here, maybe put in ceiling or floor lighting strips to break up the color a bit? Shift the wall or floor tone slightly warmer to add a little contrast? I'm not really feeling this ship tbh but the artistic quality of your work is fantastic!!