Shrooooooms....

[trevanian]

Which is not necessarily consistent (check the way the BOP changes size during SFS ... or for that matter, TVH) ... the arbitrary dot lights in the distance inside dock are indiscriminately placed, only for visual effect. I gotta go back to ILM's Bill George for his "continuity is for wussies" comment. With that coming from the art dept., you can't really expect anything that withstands the slightest criticism.

Which is irrelevant insofar as determining if there's a "giant warp core" or some such nonsense taking up the lower half of the spacedock, as was being discussed upthread. You may not like the windows, you may not like the motives of the modelmakers for putting them there, you may be able to make the argument that they're not "realistic" in some real-world way. But impugning the motives of the modelmakers doesn't change the fact that the windows are there, visible on-screen. And until we get some other in-universe evidence as to what the lower half of spacedock does, it makes the most sense to assume that windows=living quarters=habitation, just like with every other Starfleet and Federation ship and station we've ever seen.

I guess that means the top of spacedock is the world's biggest FM radio station, right? I mean, tons of antennae, they can't be anything else, right?

Honestly, I don't CARE what anybody thinks is in spacedock. It isn't credible to me in the slightest, so extrapolating from what seems to me to be bullshit would make for what? bullshit extrapolation. So I see you as proceeding from a false assumption.

(and no, I don't think there is a warp core the size of a blimp hangar in the center of it either.) It is just a big 20th century-earthside-minded construct that has none of the distinctive grace of most notions for a spaceframe or space city structure. It is just a big STAR WARS looking THING (which unfortunately manages to look okay from some angles.)

 

[Gepard]

I guess that means the top of spacedock is the world's biggest FM radio station, right? I mean, tons of antennae, they can't be anything else, right?

Yup. If they look like antennae, and we want to decide what some part of the spacedock does in the absence of any other evidence, then communications array is the most likely suspect.

 

[Timo]

it makes the most sense to assume that windows=living quarters=habitation, just like with every other Starfleet and Federation ship and station we've ever seen.

That's a pretty weird argument, seeing how there are windows on the warp engine pylons of the original vessel.

I'm all in the camp that treats windows primarily as a scale-establishing feature, because the Trek universe holds no other rigid logic that could be applied on those things. That is, of course the Trek engineers felt a specific engineering need to put windows on those ships and stations - but that specific engineering need is never related to whether the spaces are intended for habitation or not. There are windows in crew-accessible spaces, that's all we can tell for sure. (And the world's biggest warp core would probably have to be a crew-accessible space, for reasons of maintenance!)

An overriding concern here should be that since Spacedock is so large (and since the TNG mushrooms are even larger), we will never be able to figure out enough functions to fill it all. We already have difficulty with it when trying to populate the interiors of the Enterprise-D. In this situation, I think it a fairly safe bet to argue that these things can do just about anything when pressed, and that they don't specialize in anything that would be obvious from their layout (since nothing really is).

That is, we shouldn't be chasing after functions or roles, or presuming to second-guess the builders. These massive things are there, and that alone tells they are worth the effort somehow. They may not meet our expectations, but they are inherently incapable of meeting any sort of expectations anyway, due to their sheer size.

Timo Saloniemi