New observations after home viewing...

[Kelso]

language labs located between huge vats with pipe fittings on them.

I had assumed that it was a temporary communications set-up in an out-of-the-way place to help coordinate the relief effort. As for the tanks/pipes/etc... coolant tanks, waste reclamation, water storage- there could be a number of uses for those tanks on a starship.

 

[Silversmok3]

Here's my thoughts:

1: Starfleet has like 5 different variants of the same basic shuttle design....which makes sense, one of those "why didnt they have it before" kind of things.

2:The USS Kelvin was dancing like Michael Jackson during the fight with the Narada, which might explain why it outlasted its decendents fighting against the same ship.

3: The warp speedo at the top of the wiewscreen is an awesome touch, and yes...i did lose an argument about it here.Nice how it accelerates from 0.00 to .99 right before the ship jumps from spacedock.

4:Sulu flight into Saturn looks so much better at home now.

 

[Trekker4747]

language labs located between huge vats with pipe fittings on them.

I had assumed that it was a temporary communications set-up in an out-of-the-way place to help coordinate the relief effort. As for the tanks/pipes/etc... coolant tanks, waste reclamation, water storage- there could be a number of uses for those tanks on a starship.

The ship is half a mile long, for all intents and purposes it's almost as big as the E-D. I'm sure they had some empty space somewhere they could've stuffed them instead of in a half-ass thrown together hallway between giant storange tanks.

 

[Silversmok3]

language labs located between huge vats with pipe fittings on them.

I had assumed that it was a temporary communications set-up in an out-of-the-way place to help coordinate the relief effort. As for the tanks/pipes/etc... coolant tanks, waste reclamation, water storage- there could be a number of uses for those tanks on a starship.

The ship is half a mile long, for all intents and purposes it's almost as big as the E-D. I'm sure they had some empty space somewhere they could've stuffed them instead of in a half-ass thrown together hallway between giant storange tanks.

What's half ass about it?Its an exploration ship, not a cruise liner.Im pretty sure no matter where you are on that ship, if those 'vats' fail its gonna ruin your day.Whats the difference if youre next to it, or in some paper-thin cubicle?

 

[Kelso]

language labs located between huge vats with pipe fittings on them.

I had assumed that it was a temporary communications set-up in an out-of-the-way place to help coordinate the relief effort. As for the tanks/pipes/etc... coolant tanks, waste reclamation, water storage- there could be a number of uses for those tanks on a starship.

The ship is half a mile long, for all intents and purposes it's almost as big as the E-D. I'm sure they had some empty space somewhere they could've stuffed them instead of in a half-ass thrown together hallway between giant storange tanks.

It would have to be an empty place that would not be needed (or in the way) during a planetary relief effort where they were expecting to take on a large number of refugees who would need to be triaged and cared for.

 

[M'Sharak]

But what bothers me more is the scene where Kirk and Scotty are trying to evade security. It is so obvious that it is a brewery that it does momentarily take me out of the picture.

I wish that they hadn't hadn't filmed the interiors in a damn brewery,

Why do I feel like I'm the only Trek fan on Earth who has no fraking idea what a brewery looks like?

Seriously, it looked more or less like a real engine room to me: lots of complicated machinery that does I-don't-know-what and elaborate plumbing that goes I-don't-know-where. Exactly what an engine room should probably look like.

I know what a brewery looks like. I've been in several, and you know what? Once they get to be larger than a certain size, a brewery, a milk-processing and bottling plant and a ship's engine room all start looking a lot alike, down to the miles of pipe and rows of large tanks.

Guess where these were taken (click to embiggen):



As far as the contention that it doesn't look like a starship interior goes, consider that what we've seen of Engineering in any series or movie amounts pretty much to the control room. But those controls connect to actual machinery and conduits and pipes and holding tanks and all the other stuff needed to connect a whole ship together into working systems which make it go. No matter how advanced a starship is, you're still going to have to have the things which perform those functions tucked away somewhere. Up to now, it's mostly been out of sight; this time, however, we got to see some of the workings behind the nice, neat panels and screen partitions.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it (at least until I think of something better.)

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Nevertheless, it doesn't look like a starship interior. With large, cavernous, spaces, huge tanks, metal catwalks and steep steps, exposed girderwork and language labs located between huge vats with pipe fittings on them. Sorry, doesn't look like the inside of a starship at all to me.

Now I'm really confused. I mean, I could understand that you somehow have intimate intuitive knowledge what the inside of a brewery looks like, but how do you know what the inside of a starship looka like?

 

[Crazy Eddie]

language labs located between huge vats with pipe fittings on them.

I had assumed that it was a temporary communications set-up in an out-of-the-way place to help coordinate the relief effort. As for the tanks/pipes/etc... coolant tanks, waste reclamation, water storage- there could be a number of uses for those tanks on a starship.

What makes you think it was a language lab? Uhura was a language specialist, but she was also a fresh cadet who hadn't even officially graduated yet. For all we know she was doing logistics work in the fuel lab when Kirk flagged her down.

I mean, if you're not the ship's chief communications officer, there aren't alot of reasons you'd be on the ship at all except to shuffle paperwork, format and review reports/forms/requests/protests/complaints/etc. She may be a talented linguist, but until the moment Pike tells her to mann a bridge console she's just a glorified secretary.

 

[Kelso]

language labs located between huge vats with pipe fittings on them.

I had assumed that it was a temporary communications set-up in an out-of-the-way place to help coordinate the relief effort. As for the tanks/pipes/etc... coolant tanks, waste reclamation, water storage- there could be a number of uses for those tanks on a starship.

What makes you think it was a language lab? Uhura was a language specialist, but she was also a fresh cadet who hadn't even officially graduated yet. For all we know she was doing logistics work in the fuel lab when Kirk flagged her down.

I mean, if you're not the ship's chief communications officer, there aren't alot of reasons you'd be on the ship at all except to shuffle paperwork, format and review reports/forms/requests/protests/complaints/etc. She may be a talented linguist, but until the moment Pike tells her to mann a bridge console she's just a glorified secretary.

That wouldn't make much sense, given her previous scene with Spock where she cites her communications achievements as qualifying her for a posting on the Enterprise. They both expected her to be using those talents during the mission.

A starship would need plenty of communications specialists to handle linguistics, decoding, translations, coordinating both between divisions on the ship itself and other vessels/space-stations/shuttles/planetary administrators, cutting through interference and de-scrambling garbled frequencies, etc. The chief communications officer is the chief of something, after all. A multitude of communications officers would be essential, especially during a massive planetary emergency.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I had assumed that it was a temporary communications set-up in an out-of-the-way place to help coordinate the relief effort. As for the tanks/pipes/etc... coolant tanks, waste reclamation, water storage- there could be a number of uses for those tanks on a starship.

What makes you think it was a language lab? Uhura was a language specialist, but she was also a fresh cadet who hadn't even officially graduated yet. For all we know she was doing logistics work in the fuel lab when Kirk flagged her down.

I mean, if you're not the ship's chief communications officer, there aren't alot of reasons you'd be on the ship at all except to shuffle paperwork, format and review reports/forms/requests/protests/complaints/etc. She may be a talented linguist, but until the moment Pike tells her to mann a bridge console she's just a glorified secretary.

That wouldn't make much sense, given her previous scene with Spock where she cites her communications achievements as qualifying her for a posting on the Enterprise. They both expected her to be using those talents during the mission.

What does her assignment have to do with anything? Farragut was going to Vulcan too, her talents would be used just as well no matter where she served.

Her complaint to Spock was that she was qualified to be on the Enterprise. Which, while good for her, doesn't mean anything about her assignment; Janice Rand was qualified to be on the Enterprise too and she spent most of the first season of TOS fetching the Captain's lunch.

A starship would need plenty of communications specialists to handle linguistics, decoding, translations, coordinating both between divisions on the ship itself and other vessels/space-stations/shuttles/planetary administrators

And it would have an even greater need for skilled and highly organized specialists who can handle their INTERNAL communications and coordinate communication with Starfleet. We don't know what Uhura's job was on the Enterprise, but considering how busy she was when Kirk found her I doubt it had anything to do with alien languages. She was probably in the middle of finalizing an extremely hurried status report from wherever-the-hell-she-was-assigned for the duty officer to sign off later (Enterprise was rushed into service alot earlier than scheduled, after all).

I actually thought that the place where Kirk found her was probably somewhere on the impulse deck, hence my belief it was probably the fuel lab. Those would be liquid deuterium tanks in the background, then; her work there involves alot of passing back and forth of daily reports and internal communications between the engineers on the impulse deck and the department heads elsewhere on the ship.

 

[Kelso]

And it would have an even greater need for skilled and highly organized specialists who can handle their INTERNAL communications and coordinate communication with Starfleet.

That's exactly what I just said.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

And it would have an even greater need for skilled and highly organized specialists who can handle their INTERNAL communications and coordinate communication with Starfleet.

That's exactly what I just said.

Right, but internal communications are seldom garbled, rarely coded, usually in the same language and never ever scrambled. Hence she probably wasn't in the "communications lab" or anything having to do with communications. Any random part of the ship is likely to have at least one communications officer to help coordinate with other departments; wherever Uhura was, that was probably her little desk in the basement.

 

[Cicero]

What makes you think it was a language lab? Uhura was a language specialist, but she was also a fresh cadet who hadn't even officially graduated yet. For all we know she was doing logistics work in the fuel lab when Kirk flagged her down.

The tanks might even have held drinking, cooking, or bathing water. Even spaceships have to keep their water somewhere (so long as they don't have repilcators).

 

[Kelso]

And it would have an even greater need for skilled and highly organized specialists who can handle their INTERNAL communications and coordinate communication with Starfleet.

That's exactly what I just said.

Right, but internal communications are seldom garbled, rarely coded, usually in the same language and never ever scrambled. Hence she probably wasn't in the "communications lab" or anything having to do with communications. Any random part of the ship is likely to have at least one communications officer to help coordinate with other departments; wherever Uhura was, that was probably her little desk in the basement.

But external communication would be just as vital as internal communications during a planetary emergency/possible evacuation involving multiple starfleet vessels and whatever civilian ships, vulcan ships, alien ships, government or military installations on the ground or in space that are in or near the vulcan system... those communications might very well be garbled, in another language, scrambled, or possibly even coded (if they're being broadcast from sensitive government or military installations in the vulcan system). A planet-wide disaster could quickly turn into a confusing clusterfuck.

You might be right, though. We're aren't likely to find out for sure. My point was that those stations tucked in between the large tanks is not a problem.

 

[Chrisisall]

It was a helluva lot better than the sets used in TOS

This is the part where I spank my big sis...

 

[Trekker4747]

And it would have an even greater need for skilled and highly organized specialists who can handle their INTERNAL communications and coordinate communication with Starfleet.

That's exactly what I just said.

Right, but internal communications are seldom garbled, rarely coded, usually in the same language and never ever scrambled. Hence she probably wasn't in the "communications lab" or anything having to do with communications. Any random part of the ship is likely to have at least one communications officer to help coordinate with other departments; wherever Uhura was, that was probably her little desk in the basement.

You're right. Uhura the highly qualified and specialized xenolinguist wasn't in a language lab. She was monitoring the pressure regulators for the ship's fuel tanks.

Whatever she was doing, having a row of computers stuffed along side a bunch of tanks with obvious pipes and valves coming from it doesn't a 23rd starship make.

Filming the Enterprise interiors in a friggin' factory was stupid. Because it looked like a damn factory not what one would expect a starship to look like. If something looks like what it is and not what it's supposed to be it takes you out of the movie. It's distracting to me to see Kirk and Scotty elude Cupcake et.al. by running through steep industrial stairs and narrow catwalks between large vats because it looked like a factory. Not a starship. The scenes with the Kelvin were worse with the concrete floors and the fadding paint on the damp floors. Please. It looked dumb.

It looked like a facotry, not a spaceship.

It reminded me heavily of the movie "Space Mutiny" which was pretty much filmed the same way. "Hey. this is a futuristic spaceship, but we're going to film the interior scenes in a factory!" The only thing this movie needed was some railing kills. To quote Tom Servo, "This spaceship has a huge basement."

This one of my biggest, and very few, gripes about this movie. Filming the interior ship scenes in a factory was dumb, it looked dumb, and it looked like a factory.

 

[Amaris]

That's exactly what I just said.

Right, but internal communications are seldom garbled, rarely coded, usually in the same language and never ever scrambled. Hence she probably wasn't in the "communications lab" or anything having to do with communications. Any random part of the ship is likely to have at least one communications officer to help coordinate with other departments; wherever Uhura was, that was probably her little desk in the basement.

You're right. Uhura the highly qualified and specialized xenolinguist wasn't in a language lab. She was monitoring the pressure regulators for the ship's fuel tanks.

Whatever she was doing, having a row of computers stuffed along side a bunch of tanks with obvious pipes and valves coming from it doesn't a 23rd starship make.

Filming the Enterprise interiors in a friggin' factory was stupid. Because it looked like a damn factory not what one would expect a starship to look like. If something looks like what it is and not what it's supposed to be it takes you out of the movie. It's distracting to me to see Kirk and Scotty elude Cupcake et.al. by running through steep industrial stairs and narrow catwalks between large vats because it looked like a factory. Not a starship. The scenes with the Kelvin were worse with the concrete floors and the fadding paint on the damp floors. Please. It looked dumb.

It looked like a facotry, not a spaceship.

It reminded me heavily of the movie "Space Mutiny" which was pretty much filmed the same way. "Hey. this is a futuristic spaceship, but we're going to film the interior scenes in a factory!" The only thing this movie needed was some railing kills. To quote Tom Servo, "This spaceship has a huge basement."

This one of my biggest, and very few, gripes about this movie. Filming the interior ship scenes in a factory was dumb, it looked dumb, and it looked like a factory.

Actually, in many ways, it reminded me more of an aircraft carrier, which makes perfect sense, really. For me, it added authenticity, something that a super clean ultra pretty veneered engine room could never do. Engine rooms, even at their cleanest, are complicated, messy places.

J.

 

[Jeri]

I've been in a brewery (used to live near Busch Gardens in Williamsburg, VA), and the most characteristic thing about a brewery is not in evidence in the film: the large, round fermentation vats that sit on the ground.

 

[Trekker4747]

Actually, in many ways, it reminded me more of an aircraft carrier, which makes perfect sense, really. For me, it added authenticity, something that a super clean ultra pretty veneered engine room could never do. Engine rooms, even at their cleanest, are complicated, messy places.

J.

Present day ships engines deal with gears and mechanical parts which means greases and oils. So yeah, they're going to be messy.

Starships built 300 years from now that run on crazy nuclear and particle physics and don't run from turbines or need greases and oils? No so messy.

 

[Silversmok3]

Actually, in many ways, it reminded me more of an aircraft carrier, which makes perfect sense, really. For me, it added authenticity, something that a super clean ultra pretty veneered engine room could never do. Engine rooms, even at their cleanest, are complicated, messy places.

J.

Present day ships engines deal with gears and mechanical parts which means greases and oils. So yeah, they're going to be messy.

Starships built 300 years from now that run on crazy nuclear and particle physics and don't run from turbines or need greases and oils? No so messy.

Eh, not so fast there.

Those airlock doors on the bridge need to be moved by something. That something either needs to be cooled ( as in a giant electric motor), or lubricated ( a mechanical lever attached to the door ) or both ( electric motor that moves a mechanical lever).

Those fluids have to come from somewhere.

Those 'fans' in the Bussard connectors have to ride on some kind of bearings. Those bearings need oil , or some 23rd century equivalent, to function.

The shuttlebay doors are also moved by some motor or device, and whatever that device is, it probably needs either or both coolant, and 'oil' to move the doors open or closed.

Again, those fluids have to be sourced from somewhere.

Let us not forget the reactors themselves. I sure hope for the sake of the crew that there is at least ONE redundant cooling system for the series reactors, so now that's at least TWO sets of pipes , pumps, links, valves, etc....

Bottom line, even a 23rd century engine room is gonna be messy.My Pontiac and the Space Shuttle do share this in common-both machines have pipes, fluids, and pumps.So will whatever ship we make in the next 200 years,unless youve discovered a way to move fluids around a 700 meter long starship in zero or low G environments, without using pipes ,tanks,and pumps...