Budweiser Factory Enterprise, Good or Bad Idea?

[Jeyl]

The TMP engine room was a Big Blue Lava Lamp!
With midgets in mini spacesuits to make it look bigger!
At no point did I think "brewery". I thought "Wow this ship is HUGE!"

It wasn't a lava lamp. It was a tube that used a very unique method of lights and reflections that were controlled depending on the needs of the scene. It would be slow and steady in one scene, but when you want to go to warp, it'd be fast and bright. Nice touches in detail. Star Trek 09 had the freaking lava lamp of doom in the form of Red Matter, complete with a water filled tube and drifting blobs.

Oh, those engineers were kids, not midgets. It's an old school tactic that even JJ used in the new Trek movie. Plus JJ actually used a midget in his movie, so all your arguments are more in line with Trek 09 than they are with TMP!

And I could care less about how big the ship is. I would rather sacrifice the sense of scale and have a sense of perspective. Say what you want about TMP engineering room, but at least you could piece together where it fit in the context of the ship. It starts in the neck, extends down the secondary hull and than splits up at an angle into the warp engines. Not only do I get a sense of how the ship works, but I know exactly where they are inside the ship! That is more awesome than just thinking "Wow. Big ship.", cause that should go without saying.

 

[F. King Daniel]

FWIW, you could tell exactly where engineering was in the new ship - it started behind the hanger deck (whose location was quite plainly established), and you could see exactly where the intermix chambers were by seeing where they shot out during the core ejection.

And I wouldn't sacrifice the sense of scale in the film for anything - the hanger, the brewery, the bridge deck, the tiny people at the giant windows when Kirk's pod launched...I thought it was awesome. YMMV.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

And I wouldn't sacrifice the sense of scale in the film for anything - the hanger, the brewery, the bridge deck, the tiny people at the giant windows when Kirk's pod launched...I thought it was awesome.

Agreed.

 

[I-Am-Zim]

The TMP engine room was a Big Blue Lava Lamp!
With midgets in mini spacesuits to make it look bigger!
At no point did I think "brewery". I thought "Wow this ship is HUGE!"

It wasn't a lava lamp. It was a tube that used a very unique method of lights and reflections that were controlled depending on the needs of the scene. It would be slow and steady in one scene, but when you want to go to warp, it'd be fast and bright. Nice touches in detail. Star Trek 09 had the freaking lava lamp of doom in the form of Red Matter, complete with a water filled tube and drifting blobs.

Oh, those engineers were kids, not midgets. It's an old school tactic that even JJ used in the new Trek movie. Plus JJ actually used a midget in his movie, so all your arguments are more in line with Trek 09 than they are with TMP!

And I could care less about how big the ship is. I would rather sacrifice the sense of scale and have a sense of perspective. Say what you want about TMP engineering room, but at least you could piece together where it fit in the context of the ship. It starts in the neck, extends down the secondary hull and than splits up at an angle into the warp engines. Not only do I get a sense of how the ship works, but I know exactly where they are inside the ship! That is more awesome than just thinking "Wow. Big ship.", cause that should go without saying.

Agreed. The TMP engine room was the best. It actually looked like something from the 23rd century. What I hate about the brewery is that it looks like a brewery. It doesn't look like what the engineering section of a possible 23rd century starship capable of warping space and travelling faster than the speed of light should look like. It should be clean, smooth, uncluttered, and pretty. But that's my opinion after watching hundreds of hours of Star Trek in my life and seeing what the engine rooms on starships look like in Star Trek. I kind of expected the sets in this movie to look like they were from Star Trek. Especially considering that the name of the movie was "STAR TREK". Unfortunately, the engineering set obviously looked like it was in a building, not a starship. And that bothered me. It did actually take me out of the movie when I saw it. It didn't feel like they were on a starship. It felt like they were in a big building with tanks and scaffolds everywhere. It looked wrong in every sense of the word.

 

[Sabataage]

I like this engine room, but even I will agree that the TMP engine room was fantastic.

Since its been brought up, does anyone have pics of the TMP engine room? I've seen the film several times, but the engine wasn't terribly memorable to me. In fact, none of the movie was (except the transporter scene).

Was it similar to the engineering in Wrath of Khan? I liked that one. Specifically because it was so big you could make out where it was on the ship based soley on set's shape. When the Reliant hits the secondary hull, the corresponding area of the engineering gets blasted to hell.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Was it similar to the engineering in Wrath of Khan? I liked that one. Specifically because it was so big you could make out where it was on the ship based soley on set's shape. When the Reliant hits the secondary hull, the corresponding area of the engineering gets blasted to hell.

Yeah, except that the place the Reliant gets hit is not the place that Engineering is.

It's essentially the same Engineering set in ST:TMP, ST:TWOK, ST:TUC and ST:TNG. They move a few walls around from time to time, and TNG replaced the TMP lava lamp with a new lava lamp. The structure stays the same, though.

 

[F. King Daniel]

A little random, but one advantage of the huge brewery is that they can have a transporter accident leading to a "Cloverfield monster in the engine room" scene. That would be fantastic. I can hear the catwalks falling now...redshirts sent flying...
Do that in the TMP engine room!

 

[Ryan Thomas Riddle]

They move a few walls around from time to time, and TNG replaced the TMP lava lamp with a new lava lamp.

Not so much a new lava lamp as painfully obvious neon lights stacked atop one another.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

They move a few walls around from time to time, and TNG replaced the TMP lava lamp with a new lava lamp.

Not so much a new lava lamp as painfully obvious neon lights stacked atop one another.

That's true. TNG simplified the "it sure doesn't look like it does anything but man does it look cool" light show.

 

[thumbtack]

Trivia challenge! Which Star Trek movie(s) did not show Engineering at all?

 

[F. King Daniel]

STIII and IV.

I always wanted to see the STV engine room from another angle when I was little. Now I realize that's all there was...

 

[Jeyl]

Trivia challenge! Which Star Trek movie(s) did not show Engineering at all?

They all did.

- Trek I: Entire set built.
- Trek II: Same set with added elements.
- Trek III: Redress of the chute that Spock climbs down from in Trek II.
- Trek IV: We have the Klingon Engineering complete with Dilithium crystals. Of course, if it's the Enterprise's engineering section you're looking for, than the Aircraft Carrier Enterprise's Engineering section.
- Trek V: Engineering a redress of the tubes in later scenes.
- Trek VI: Slight redress of TNG Engineering.
- Trek VII: TNG Engineering in full glory.
- Trek VIII: Brand new Engineering set designed in two different ways.
- Trek IX: Engineering in it's non-borgified version.
- Trek X: Same Engineering now with useless forcefields.
- Trek XI: Engineering shot in a brewery.

 

[Cyke101]

Better to have useless forcefields than useless breweries, I say!

 

[I-Am-Zim]

Yeppers!

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Better to have useless forcefields than useless breweries, I say!

If "useless" is the operative word, than neither is better than the other.

And no, during the brief sequences in Engineering I was not missing any of the various Lava Lamps that previous Trek designers favored. There were one or two details that jumped out at me in a nuisancy way the second or third time I saw it, but the floor wasn't one of them.

 

[I-Am-Zim]

What's with all the lava lamp references? I never saw a lava lamp in Star Trek. I saw a matter/antimatter reaction chamber and plasma transfer conduits and such. Now I have a very nice lava lamp on my desk at home. And it...is....mezermizing.......

 

[Jeyl]

And no, during the brief sequences in Engineering I was not missing any of the various Lava Lamps that previous Trek designers favored.

The only thing remotely resembling a Lava Lamp is the red matter containment containers in Trek09. Quit it the lava lamps. And if I had to choose, I would rather have a lava lamp looking warp core than a big steel beer vat.

 

[Cyke101]

Better to have useless forcefields than useless breweries, I say!

If "useless" is the operative word, than neither is better than the other.

Well, if the forcefield is supposed to keep me away from the beer, but the forcefield fails with their first shot, then it's good to be useless

 

[Nerys Myk]

And no, during the brief sequences in Engineering I was not missing any of the various Lava Lamps that previous Trek designers favored.

The only thing remotely resembling a Lava Lamp is the red matter containment containers in Trek09. Quit it the lava lamps. And if I had to choose, I would rather have a lava lamp looking warp core than a big steel beer vat.

Literal much?

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

In fact most of the Star Trek "intermix chambers" have resembled lava lamps to some extent or another - rather appropriate to the TOS era of the late 1960s, really, even though one was not featured in that series - so thanks to whoever came up with the comparison.