Enterprises battle bridge

[Mytran]

Ah Timo there you go, bringing realistic scientific predictions in to spoil our fun!

Phantom you are absolutely right; it would have been expensive, but wouldn't it have been grand? In terms of the civilian issue I imagined that the upper level (despite what was suggested in the article) would be a closed off gallery area. It could also act act a waiting area for visiting dignitaries. That way, the business area is kept strictly separate and private as needed.

 

[Leviathan]

When relieved of its bulk, the Enterprise becomes an exceptional weapon

...following from this line, the battle section should just be a Battle Bridge welded to the main impulse engine with a couple Type X phaser banks glued on.

...or just stuff a shuttle with antimatter and lob it at thy foe.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

And St. Picard did raiseth the battle bridge up on high saying, Oh Great Bird, bless this thy battle bridge, that with it thou mayest blow the Romulans to tiny bits, in thy mercy. And the Great Bird did grin, and the crew did feast upon the synthale, and the wine, and the hasperat, and the Shrimp Creole, and the plomeek soup, and the gagh, and the Tube Grubs...

(skipping a bit, brother)

First shalt thou doeth the Holy Facepalm. Then shalt thou count to Three. No more, no less. Three shall be the number of rank pips thou shalt count, and the number of rank pips thou countest shall be three. Once the number three (being the third rank pip bereached), then firest thou the Holy Phasers at thy foe, who being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it.

Amen.

 

[Lance]

When relieved of its bulk, the Enterprise becomes an exceptional weapon

...following from this line, the battle section should just be a Battle Bridge welded to the main impulse engine with a couple Type X phaser banks glued on.

Aka, the USS Defiant NX-74205.

 

[Galileo7]

My feeling was that 'Battle Bridge' is just a fancy new name for what TOS called 'Auxilary Control'.

Good point.

 

[nx1701g]

My feeling was that 'Battle Bridge' is just a fancy new name for what TOS called 'Auxilary Control'.

Good point.

That's what I always thought personally.

I think I read somewhere a long time ago that the Bridge we saw for the USS Odyssey in The Jem'Hadar was supposed to be the Battle Bridge instead of the main bridge. Though I'm not sure how true it is.

 

[Keith1701]

My feeling was that 'Battle Bridge' is just a fancy new name for what TOS called 'Auxilary Control'.

I agree as well.

 

[Lance]

I think I read somewhere a long time ago that the Bridge we saw for the USS Odyssey in The Jem'Hadar was supposed to be the Battle Bridge instead of the main bridge. Though I'm not sure how true it is.

I like that idea. Maybe the original ''battle plan'' for the Odyssey was to fly through the wormhole and then seperate the ship to take the battle to the Jem'Hadar in two seperate sections, but the Jem'Hadar ships engaged them in battle too quickly on the other side of the wormhole before they could decouple the saucer.

 

[Timo]

Why decouple when there are no "innocents aboard" any longer? The only time we hear there would be tactical advantage to not having the saucer is Worf's sales pitch in "Heart of Glory". But conventional wisdom seems to go against going to battle in two pieces - it's a special maneuver reserved for confusing the Borg.

That doesn't mean Keogh wouldn't have commanded the battle from his Battle Bridge, of course.

the Jem'Hadar ships engaged them in battle too quickly on the other side of the wormhole

That's a bit unlikely, because the system at which the battle took place must have been several lightyears away from the wormhole; the Odyssey and the runabouts would first have to emerge from the 'hole at impulse, then go to warp, fly to the target system, and then reach Nog and Jake's runabout. It's only after this that the Jem'Hadar respond!

We don't know exactly how far or near this system was to the wormhole's Gamma end. In the pilot episode, "the nearest system" according to Sisko's runabout computer is Idran, which never appears again in the show; possibly it never appeared, period, and was merely the nearest system the computer recognized, said device being unable to recognize the system the heroes and the wormhole mouth were in, or any of the other systems nearby. (And yes, the wormhole is inside some system or another, as in "Destiny" we see there's a star there that creates a nice long tail for a comet...)

Several systems are within very short runabout hop... In "Whispers", the Paradan system can be reached within one hour and 14 minutes at maximum runabout warp (which supposedly doesn't exceed or even match warp five). But in "Battle Lines", there's a planet just 0.35 lightyears from where our heroes took Kai Opaka to sightsee - and it wouldn't make much sense for them to warp for several hours into the middle of nowhere when they were intent on turning back and taking Opaka safely and swiftly home all along...

So much for astrography lessons, though - we have no real idea how far away the planet of "The Jem'Hadar" was from the wormhole mouth. In theory, it might be really far out in the sticks, with Keogh taking the runabouts within his warp field for some warp 9.2 travel, to cover in minutes what initially took Sisko, Quark and the boys several days at warp five or less.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Leviathan]

And St. Picard did raiseth the battle bridge up on high saying, Oh Great Bird, bless this thy battle bridge, that with it thou mayest blow the Romulans to tiny bits, in thy mercy. And the Great Bird did grin, and the crew did feast upon the synthale, and the wine, and the hasperat, and the Shrimp Creole, and the plomeek soup, and the gagh, and the Tube Grubs...

(skipping a bit, brother)

First shalt thou doeth the Holy Facepalm. Then shalt thou count to Three. No more, no less. Three shall be the number of rank pips thou shalt count, and the number of rank pips thou countest shall be three. Once the number three (being the third rank pip bereached), then firest thou the Holy Phasers at thy foe, who being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it.

Amen.

I now live in hope that someone, somewhere is working on a Holy Grail: The Next Generation.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

I can't cite anything at the moment, but the fairly well-known TOS design legend is that the nacelles (i.e., the engines) were placed as far away as possible from the main habitable area of the ship because of radiation. The idea was to minimize exposure. So, that's basically why the ship is divided into a primary hull and an engineering hull. Therefore, the bridge, i.e. the main control deck where the top officers spend most of their time, is on the saucer, the primary hull. All other hero ships (DS9's Defiant excepted) follow this pattern for the layout, even if not for that reason in-universe.

First off, this was sloppily written by me. I apologize for that.

But, I found the source quoting Jefferies about this that I was thinking of. From http://fsd.trekships.org/art/1701.html [from "DESIGNING THE STARSHIP ENTERPRISE" - FEBRUARY 2000 ISSUE 10 STAR TREK: THE MAGAZINE]:

"My thinking was, because of the ship's speed there had to be terrifically powerful engines. They might be dangerous to be aroun, so maybe we'd better put them out of the way somewhere, which would also make them what in aviation circles we call the QCU - quick change units - where you could easily take one off and put another on."

Although there were background extras wearing hazard suits in early TOS episodes, main engineering in TOS was a shirtsleeve environment. However, TMP reiterated the idea that engineering was less safe than the other parts of the ship, by introducing the radiation suits frequently worn in both TMP and TWOK. The design of the Ent-D doesn't radically depart from the TMP Ent at all, and the location and form of TNG's main engineering is clearly influenced by TMP. Even though main engineering is back to a shirtsleeve environment in TNG, there's a clear line that goes from TNG back to the beginning of TOS, in terms of in-universe ideas that influence why the ship is laid out the way it is, that includes the idea that the main bridge should be in a separate section of the ship from the engines because the engines are dangerous.

Does it make perfect sense? No, as pointed out by others, the distance from the saucer to the nacelles isn't really that far on the TOS Ent, but it is what it is.

 

[Timo]

Although there were background extras wearing hazard suits in early TOS episodes, main engineering in TOS was a shirtsleeve environment. However, TMP reiterated the idea that engineering was less safe than the other parts of the ship, by introducing the radiation suits frequently worn in both TMP and TWOK.

Then again, we never saw a warp core in TOS, nor did we see a control booth with control consoles in TMP.

For all we know, both the versions of the starship featured both of the facilities. And in both ship versions, the control booth was shirtsleeves, while the warp core area was strictly radsuit, and extremely seldom visited by anybody - except on maiden voyages and training missions!

It might well be the warp core that is a hazard to life and limb, not the nacelles. So the warp coils can be right next to crew quarters, but the engineering hull has to be located at a distance from both the quarters and the coils, both of which are sensitive to the invisible dangers of the core... Hence the configurations of the Enterprise, the Excelsior and the Grissom. This wouldn't explain the design of the Reliant, though.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[CorporalCaptain]

^ That's true, and there's nothing in the Jefferies quote that I can see that indicates that he was imagining the engines to be dangerous specifically because of the possibility of radiation exposure. That was my own conflation because of the rad suits in TMP. Yes, TMP suggested that engineering was less safe because of the rad suits. However, the danger Jefferies was imagining could have been something else, maybe the risk of explosions that don't necessarily release either radiation or radioactive material. No doubt breakdowns at speed that require nacelle replacement could cause casualties for a variety of reasons.

 

[Timo]

We might further muse that nothing in the movies actually suggests that the heavy coveralls would be radiation-proof or even radiation-resistant.

To the contrary, when radiation for a rare once does become an issue in ST2:TWoK, Spock ignores the coveralls as a solution for improving his odds of surviving till the conclusion of the crucial repairs. And he's in good company, as ST:TMP features lots of personnel in shirtsleeves even when select few don the bulky gear... It's as if Main Engineering (or the warp core room, whatever that's called) weren't a generally dangerous area at all; perhaps the coveralls would be needed if further diving into really hazardous spaces, hopefully normally separated by radlocks or forcefields?

Might also be that those are pressure suits, the exact equivalent of the silver spacewalk costumes of TOS: getting in and out of them would be cumbersome, so people tasked with occasionally visiting the non-pressurized parts of the secondary hull (!) would wear them even though stowing their helmets far away.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Well, the thing is, if something explodes, it could spew who-knows-what dangerous substance into areas that are normally safe to be in. I'm sure that in the TNG+ era, it would be called some kind of plasma, a lot of the time. So, when the risk of a seal breaking increases, it could be advisable to prepare for that possibility, even if you aren't going to be entering the really dangerous parts of engineering.

By the way, was there an analog to the TMP rad suit in TNG? I don't recall off the top of my head.

 

[Ithekro]

That makes me wonder. The shifting over to plasma relays and the like was to make it safer in terms of random radiation if something went wrong verse the older engine styles in the 2270s and 2280s. Just that the plasma relays are somewhat explosively touchy from the Excelsior-class forwards. Yet they allow the engineering crew to not need suits anymore.