Ah, I forgot to answer your question. I don't have any immediate plans to model the HQ lounge from TSFS, but should I ever do a "Starfleet Headquarters" type project, you better believe I'll model as much of SFHQ as we've seen in the movies, and more.
Yeah...not looking forward to that! So, I spent the night creating the graphic for the food synthesizer and man....what a chore. I have no experience designing UI (just re-creating it), and I wanted to make sure it all made sense from both a UX and UI experience, given the existing display graphics and functionality of consoles we see in the early Kirk-era movies. This took HOURS longer than I thought it would. Here's what the general look is before I hit the sack; I'll give some detailed descriptions of how I envision it working tomorrow.
Mini-turbolifts zipping through all areas of the ship seems incredibly inefficient to me, but a more scaled back "dumbwaiter" approach has its merits: After all, how many food slots did we actually see in TOS? The ones we did were all located in Rec Rooms and it makes sense to cluster such rooms in close proximity. Hence, all you need is one food processing centre and a few vertical tubes connecting the facility to the Rec Rooms directly above and below it. The one oddity is of course that one of the Transporter Rooms has food slots in it. However, since we only see that feature in two episodes it's not too far of a stretch to suggest that this particular Transporter Room just happened to be close enough to the Rec Rooms for Scotty to tap into the network and have a "refreshment station". Until Spock smashed it that is The gizmo in Mirror Kirk's cabin is considerably smaller and is seen to do nothing more than dispense drinks.
It doesn't strike me as any more inefficient than an apartment building having water pipes running through its walls to every dwelling, or an old-time office building having a network of pneumatic tubes to deliver message cylinders from desk to desk. And using something as power-intensive as a transporter to deliver something a few decks away when you could just physically move it there with a mini-lift strikes me as incredibly inefficient and wasteful of energy.
But why consume space by having them in every part of the ship, instead of just a central hub? Not to mention that water pipes and even pneumatic message tubes are several orders of magnitude smaller than a food slot shaft would have to be. No argument here!
“But why consume space by having them in every part of the ship, instead of just a central hub?” Think of what the Theodore Roosevelt is going through right now. Or what Enterprise was experiencing in “Requiem for Methuselah”. You could have Yeomen Rand hand deliver your food - and I’m all for that. But it’s inefficient. If you need or want to isolate, you decentralize.
Who said they were? Presumably they'd be mainly in the residential and recreation levels, Decks 5-8. Note that they needed yeomen to deliver coffee or food to the bridge. And I don't think we ever saw one in engineering, though Riley had to get his poisoned milk from somewhere. "Several orders of magnitude?" An order of magnitude is a power of ten, and "several" means three or more, so you're saying that they're at least a thousand times smaller than a food slot. No way. The food slots seem to be about a foot wide; water pipes are typically in the range of 1 to 2 inches. So that's around one order of magnitude, at most. Pneumatic tubes, meanwhile, can be as much as 6 inches wide, which is fully half the width of a food slot and thus the same order of magnitude.
Zooming upon the full resolution render, one can actually read specific menu items collected into groups for Terrans, Vulcans and Andorians. all with a decent number of selections. I can imagine a "joke" menu for Caitians pared down to a single entry..."Raw Meat".
@Redfern Most of those menu items are taken straight from Mr. Scott's Guide. Nice tip of the hat, Donny.
The TOS shuttlecraft was larger inside than out. TMP has that impossible corridor running forward from engineering, and the rec deck can't fit in the saucer. And let's not get started on the Delta Flyer. This was a thing long before Discovery, though admittedly they take it to new extremes.
Well in a way, you did! You compared my statement about the inefficiency of mini-turbolifts going to every part of the ship to being no worse than the plumbing in an apartment block, even those each system is designed for different purposes. That same statement of mine also suggested grouping recreation rooms together, so if that's what you think the best layout of the ship is, I'm not really sure what your objection was in the first place. Fair point, that was definitely an incorrect use of the term on my part!
The wall thickness is estimated to be around 29 inches in the thicker areas. This wall thickness gives plenty of room for any tech you want to theorize on how food is dispensed around the ship. My main issue with whatever tech is used, is the speed an order is filled. Pick a card, stick it in slot, wait two seconds, listen for sound tone, door automatically opens, take out your hot/cold food and beverage on a tray. It stretches reality to think that most techs can deliver in that short of time. Turbos and transporters, at least for humans, take much more time to use than one or two seconds, then put the preparation time on top of it, this boggles the mind. I think the food is already prepared and behind the wall, so, all the system does is move it from a storage rack into the food slot. The menu is restricted to stuff-of-the-meal per the chef. This is how the food is served at my work, today. Example: lunch selection today is roast pork and potatoes. Take it or starve.
You literally used the word wrong. Wait-- How are we using literally these days? My vocabulary has been decimated by modern usage.
That's why I lean towards the food preparation machinery being extremely close to the food slots (i.e. directly beneath at farthest). Yes, I believe I said that: I said I used the term "order of magnitude" incorrectly. Much to my surprise, I recently learned that "literally" can be used in a metamorphical way and break no laws of English in the process. But that's living languages for ya!
Not so much objection, just looking at every possibility. One should always consider all the angles. A conversation should be an exploration, not a competition. When two considerations are opposed, we shouldn't pick sides, we should explore how best to balance them. In this case, on the one hand, there is no reason that a network of tubes no more than 30 cm wide couldn't extend throughout the majority of the ship; lots of buildings have heating ducts or steam pipes of comparable width. And on the other hand, just because it's possible doesn't mean it's required to go everywhere. What we want is to weigh both considerations and find the optimal balance between the potential to go everywhere and the efficiency of keeping the system more centralized. Say, a system that's largely concentrated on the residential decks but not entirely limited to them. I assume it's a mix of options -- some standard recipes (like chicken sandwich and coffee, or chicken soup) are regularly prepared in advance and kept ready for rapid delivery, whereas if you want to order something beyond that limited menu, you have to wait a bit longer while it's prepared.