@Michael: Yeah, that's another alternative I considered, might be standard on smaller ship classes like the Oberth.
@cardinal biggles: The lack of continuity between interior and exterior is what lead me to think of the external pod idea, as the whole back end of the bridge module would essentially detach, explaining the open space behind the bridge.
I had a specific bridge concept for an Oberth-Class bridge in my head for a while, and given the recent Hermes commission I was motivated to finally start it. Well, sort of...
See, my idea was simple, take the Enterprise-A bridge aesthetic
from the end of The Voyage Home, apply it
to an oval shaped bridge; and it would be perfect for the USS Copernicus, which also appeared in The Voyage Home. It could be a realistic reuse if for whatever reason the interior of that ship needed to be seen during the movie.
Thing is, I don't have any of the specific models from that era already modeled, and I certainly wasn't gonna tackle such a big project now, given that I have several commissions to get back to, so I'll leave the USS Copernicus idea for another time.
For now though, I really wanted to do an Oberth bridge with that clean look, particularly because I've been meaning to have another personal project ship like the USS Potemkin, so that I can then do sickbay, engineering, shuttlebay, etc, and thus experiment more in this era of Trek. Just like with the Potemkin, I wanted to take a name from canon and build upon that, instead of just inventing my own ship (that both helps with making my work more discoverable, and with my OCD tendencies of wanting to add to what's already canon). Problem is, other than the Grissom, Oberth and Copernicus, there aren't any other canon Oberth-Class ships from the era. I toyed with using the USS Banting from Starfleet Academy, as I have a lot of fond memories of that game, but as mentioned before I wasn't entirely comfortable with that because it wasn't from canon.
In the end, I went down a rabbit hole for an alternative. On TUC there's the USS Helin NCC-1692, named after US astronomer Eleanor F. Helin. The ship was just listed in some okudagrams, it wasn't seen or mentioned, but according to Memory Alpha, "In an issue of Bjo Trimble's Space-Time Continuum, it was mentioned that Eleanor F. Helin was given a model of an Oberth-class ship which bore this name." So it was promising, but I wanted to find proof of this. After some research around NASA sites, I ended up finding a photo of a dedication plaque for the USS Helin from the Helin Family Estate, indicating that it was given to her "by the Star Trek franchise" in honor of the naming of this ship. Bingo! It might not be exactly canon, but the USS Helin being an Oberth-Class was intended by the powers that be. Thus I decided to make that ship my Oberth project (and yes,
I updated Memory Alpha with this seemingly new information).
So, here's what I've got so far. The bridge is oval shaped just like the Grissom's, while using a latter visual style (a mix of TVH and TFF), plus the Enterprise-B Captain's chair, just because I LOVE that thing. I decided to add some steps and rails, to make it more visually interesting than the Grissom. The station chairs colors are taken from
the prototype from the Thunder Bay Museum (now that I think about it, it was listed as 'Star Trek chair', so maybe it has those colors on purpose to match the Enterprise-A from the end of TVH?). Other than that I'll be designing this one as I go, and it might not be finished right away, but still, I wanted to share what I had.
