No, you don't understand.
If it's at a funny angle of 35 degrees or so, the bridge would be always wanting to fly off in that direction. The inertial dampeners must be constantly correcting it to fly straight!
Is the bridge at a funny angle?
- Thread starter Mike Doyle
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If it's at a funny angle of 35 degrees or so, the bridge would be always wanting to fly off in that direction. The inertial dampeners must be constantly correcting it to fly straight!
And for the umpteenth time, only three chairs on the bridge face the screen. So why is that a problem? "Front" doesn't matter, because if that inertial compensation system fails in any way beyond "the Seaview shuffle" level the crew are going to be smears on a wall regardless of where the big TV is or which way their chairs face.
Everything would have to be set up so the crew (and the audience) can forget they’re at an angle. The viewscreen would show the actual forward view, not that off-center view. If the inertial dampers are strained so that everything on the ship keeps moving in the direction of flight (like when a car suddenly brakes), a built-in redirection would have to be made for the bridge crew so they’d move towards the screen.
The main question is why the bridge should be at an angle on this particular ship design only. There are all kinds of interior/exterior inconsistencies that require viewers to pretend that everything makes perfect sense, even though it wouldn’t without changing a miniature or a set.
The main question is why the bridge should be at an angle on this particular ship design only. There are all kinds of interior/exterior inconsistencies that require viewers to pretend that everything makes perfect sense, even though it wouldn’t without changing a miniature or a set.
I'm as nitpicky and pedantic as you can get with some Trek minutae but this doesn't even begin to bother me. If it's positioned at an off angle and the crew doesn't face straight ahead at the actual bow of the ship it doesn't make me lose sleep nor does it reaffirm my faith in Trek's producers if they do. It's just one of those fun and weird oddities that makes Trek more interesting.
Tell you what. If the inertial dampeners are so strained that the crew is feeling an acceleration, then they're going to be too strained to "correct" the angle of that acceleration on any part of the ship. If you can feel the acceleration at all, then it's because the inertial dampeners aren't working perfectly, because they're either approaching or beyond "the red line" when they're going to let acceleration bleed through that could injure crew members. But, yeah, the fact that they would design the bridge in the first place with chairs that can tip over and that most of which most of the time are facing directions besides forward, it pretty much proves that the design depends on the inertial dampeners not normally giving the feeling of acceleration, period.
The ship can travel faster than light. Dissemble people at the atomic level and reassemble them in another location without killing them. Protect itself with shields and deflect the tiniest space hazard.
The bridge being offset is not a biggie and doesn’t destroy any sense of disbelief needed to enjoy the show.
The bridge being offset is not a biggie and doesn’t destroy any sense of disbelief needed to enjoy the show.
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But we don’t know that the bridge is offset. That’s just Franz Joseph’s overly creative solution to a problem he ran into, introduced without the benefit of knowing how franchise design would develop over the next fifty years. As with all kinds of interior/exterior inconsistencies, the fix is to imagine that the Enterprise in continuity isn’t identical to the eleven-footer, which is what was done for DSC:
The team also tackled the issue of Jefferies’ Enterprise having a turboshaft directly behind the bridge on the centerline, while the bridge set placed the turbolift doors off to an angle. This discrepancy had led many fans to speculate that the bridge was positioned at an angle, rather than facing directly forward.
“A cool thing that Schneider did that you’ll never see,” says Eaves, “was to make the turbolift work. He came up with the idea that you get in the turbolift and it rotates in the tube, and then drops.”
Schneider adds, “You have an elevator shaft on the centerline and two standby elevators off to the side. So one would slide back and over and go down the tube and another one would come in. This is why you could get an elevator so quickly because there’s always at least two standing by and that explained why there is a center shaft.”
The team also tackled the issue of Jefferies’ Enterprise having a turboshaft directly behind the bridge on the centerline, while the bridge set placed the turbolift doors off to an angle. This discrepancy had led many fans to speculate that the bridge was positioned at an angle, rather than facing directly forward.
“A cool thing that Schneider did that you’ll never see,” says Eaves, “was to make the turbolift work. He came up with the idea that you get in the turbolift and it rotates in the tube, and then drops.”
Schneider adds, “You have an elevator shaft on the centerline and two standby elevators off to the side. So one would slide back and over and go down the tube and another one would come in. This is why you could get an elevator so quickly because there’s always at least two standing by and that explained why there is a center shaft.”
At least twice we're given onscreen evidence it's not forward facing.
"The Cage" opening scene.
Monitors in Star Trek: The Motion picture show the off set bridge schematic.
The good thing about that original 1964 graphic from "The Cage(TOS)" is that it demonstrates that the black rectangle on the outside of the bridge module isn't a window viewscreen since it doesn't line up with where the characters on the bridge are looking. 
For what it's worth it's a sensor pallet that feeds information to the viewscreen display on the bridge interior.
For what it's worth it's a sensor pallet that feeds information to the viewscreen display on the bridge interior.
The vidcap from “The Cage” is not evidence since you can see that the turbolift is not where FJ’s fix wants it to be, while the redesigned bridge display is simply showing his Constitution blueprints from before the redesign, whatever that illustrates in the context of the film (most likely, the layout of the current bridge for TMP viewers, who weren’t supposed to analyze the schematic).
The point we've been making is that there would be no issues, were it offset. The attempt to show it's not possible for it be offset because of supposed issues isn't working.
How is it not working and how are there no issues if you don’t have an explanation for why there is no offset on other bridge designs? What made Starfleet introduce that particular offset? We’re not in the 1970s any longer, and there’ve been so many other ship designs since then. Things have to make sense in a wider context, including what I just quoted about DSC (unless that isn’t supposed to be the same Enterprise in story continuity).
Because it's not necessary to address spurious or irrelevant concerns.
The point is that there's no technical reason the bridge can't point any which way, since most of the seats on it each face a different direction, direction of flight clearly doesn't matter. Whether the main viewer does or does or not align with the bow of the ship is a separate question.
It’s spurious and irrelevant why this makes sense for Starfleet on this particular ship design?
I can say it’s irrelevant if the miniature doesn’t fit the set because there are so many examples of miniatures not fitting sets that we really need to look for evidence in story continuity also, which we haven’t found so far.
For example, in story continuity, Ten Forward is on Deck 10, and that’s a fact regardless of how the windows fit whatever miniature or CG model happens to represent the D.
No, what that means is that these issues do not need to be addressed in order to conclude that the bridge faces a funny angle. In no way, shape, or form would not knowing the answers to those made-up questions about a made-up universe stand in the way of reaching the conclusion. But, as I've agreed, we don't know which way it faces.
Right.
But it’s important to fit a made-up bridge into a made-up exterior, then stop without thinking about the implications because some things are more made up than others?
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At least twice we're given onscreen evidence it's not forward facing.
"The Cage" opening scene.
This was declared to be non-literal, meaningless, invalid, and non-evidence in this thread before
There's nothing "showstopping" to the idea of an offset bridge that's implied by these considerations.
Ship classes have unique features not shared by other classes in the real world. Heck, there's individual variation in the real world between ships in the same class.
There's no in-universe technical obstacle to the offset angle.
In the day of TOS, there's no canonical evidence contradicting the offset angle, and afterwards in the TOS films (which went further and canonized the FJ plans, including the offset) and TNG-era, there's still no evidence of original intent.
As pointed out way upthread now, the "Phase II" Enterprise explicitly had two structures near the bridge to indicate the two elevator shafts, and they were symmetrically placed [https://blog.trekcore.com/2018/04/review-eaglemoss-star-trek-phase-ii-uss-enterprise-concept/]. So, not only is there no issue, because of the "Phase II" Enterprise, there's bona fide evidence supporting the premise that it was understood that the bridge had to be offset on the TOS starship. Of course, you could also interpret the "Phase II" Enterprise arrangement as simply an effort to improve the match between interior and exterior, and in that case it would be silent on the issue.
We're just back to "don't know," where we've always been.
This thread is now offset by 35 degrees.
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