That is my thing as well. I always felt like Engineering was too small at times for the type of reactor supposedly used. I personally really like the Kelvin Enterprise design, including Engineering.
I generally looked at engineering in TOS as simply a control & monitor room, with the actual later called warp core being elsewhere. Depending on what theory of the TOS Enterprise you subscribed to, all the big hardware was either in the nacelles or in multiple locations throughout the ship.
That's been "about 30 years away" for at least 30 years now One of these days I'm going to build a Farnsworth fusor just so I can say I have a nuclear reactor at home.
It's kind of hard to say though, especially regarding speculated future technology that hasn't been invented in the real world. That's like saying ENIAC is obviously more powerful than your cellphone because there's no way a cellphone that size can process that much data. We know it's the other way around though. A smaller warp core is also presumably easier to jettison. Also keep in mind that sometime between 2236 and 2254, a "time barrier" as mentioned in the Cage, some sort of warp limit, was broken and this was touted by Jose Tyler as a massive breakthrough. Engineering would have had to go through some sort of refit to accomodate this, resulting in constantly changing engine rooms possibly.
Yes, of course, it is hard to say. I'm just stating that based upon my limited understanding of reactors that the larger size appeals to me.
I always liked the small but cramped engineerings where the warp core was, well, a core. The Defiant (and the first use from the Ent-E) and Voyager are my favourite sets. Like a Fusion reaction, where you can be in the same room with it, or like on a submarine, where the control center is directly next to the reactor itself. I always imagined the big, Willy Wonka-style machinery to be in the actual warp nacelles. Multiple decks and hundreds of meters of length of just bonkers powerfull magic engines. But engineering with the warp core itself? Should imo more be like a control room/science center.
I think what we see is actually pretty accurate. In a Nuclear Reactor the fuel rods and housing are not that large, what takes up all the space is all the piping and controls to manage the temperature of the rods and heat the water which is used to power the turbines. After all a Nuclear Reactor is really just a big radioactive kettle. So all the pipe work that we see in both Discovery and Star Trek 2009 onward is pretty spot on as something similar would be required to carefully control a warp cores temperature, they wouldnt use water but I would expect a coolant of some kind would be needed. Not to mention the piping required to transport the warp plasma to where it is used. Plus everybody needs to visit the oval office every now and then, even a Starship needs plumbing.
I’ve mentioned this before, but as my buddy and I were walking out of ST’09 he commented, “That’s the first Enterprise I’d believe had a working toilet.”
Yeah but the entire rest of the ship looks like a science centre. If they go for the grungey below-decks feel (or whatever the Discoprise is trying for), you get more visual interest on the ship than another room that might as well be the bridge except for a warp reactor instead of a viewscreen.
Engineers love to change things in any case... That the time barrier would have something to do with propulsion specifically is not established, though. All we know is that "Our new ships can - ooo, forget about ships, how about a 'ship? I mean, right now, like!". Yet we know of no sudden jump in the accessibility of warp factors between ENT and TOS, or of a sudden increase in the reach of Earth's spacecraft. Perhaps Tyler can get the Columbia survivors to Earth faster than said survivors would expect because the new and stronger ships can fly there through the Time Barrier, no longer having to take the long route around it? Timo Saloniemi
I don't know. I believe ships in what I call "present day futurism", like nuBattlestar Galactica, or the Alien universe, where everything works essentially by technology from the era the show is filmed in, have a good old plumbing-pipe system. For a show as fantastic as Star Trek, with beaming, force fields, replicators, holograms, phasers and hover devices, something more futuristic is appropriate. Hell, the present day space station ISS uses technology more advanced than in ST09, re-using their wastes essentially immediately after producing, directly on site. I just think the idea of a starship with "plumbing" is a weirdly retro-futuristic/archaic idea, and not exactly science- or technologically progress-driven.
It's too bad they chose to go such a wild direction with it, given how they have tried to make other ares of the Discoprise at least look a little similar to their TOS counterparts. Plus, I always felt that THIS (the Engineering lab in Discovery): Was very evocative of the TOS Main Engineering - especially because of the mysterious red-ish glowing pipes and stuff in the background behind a big screen that both share versions of: So I was hoping we'd get something just a bit similar-ish for the Discoprise.
Full agreement. Honestly, I expected that if we ever saw the engine room of the Enterprise, it would be a redress of the spore lab. It wouldn't take much. But I think I can live with it.
I'm hoping that what They showed us, is the area just below what would be the room in that pic... That the round cap-like thing at the top is essentially in the same place as in TOS.
Mrs. Whittaker's Doctor is such a refreshing change in attitude on such matters! That said, I do look forward to seeing how the Discoprise cutaways end up looking...