USS Enterprise (eventually) on Discovery?

Everything is hardwired. That's why every time one transporter goes down they all go down.

 

Re: Holocomms and over all aesthetic

I never had a problem with the holograms. I couldn't care less whether they fit into canon.

I accept that this is how the 23rd century looks in Disco. I don't need everything to fit neatly with TOS. That was Trek then. This is Trek now.

After all, we aren't watching documentaries of actual life 200-some years from now. And I like to keep it simple.

 

/thread

 

It's Gul Dukat!

 

Hardwiring a communication system seems a security risk.

 

Starfleet is not known to have the best security.

 

When did we first get multiple transporter rooms, plus cargo transporters on the Enterprise? Was it non-canon novels?

 

No later than:
TAS "Mudd's Passion" - transporter room four
TAS "The Terratin Incident" - transporter room three

 

Which makes sense given that 430 officers and crew served on the ship and it would probably be a wise idea to have more than one transporter room and a few shuttlecraft sitting around in case the Enterprise needed to be evacuated. Since TOS gave us no indication that the Enterprise came equipped with escape pods the best we had to go with at least onscreen was one transporter room that would be crammed with panicking officers pushing one another to be the next one on the transporter pad and maybe half a dozen shuttlecraft which could at best service, oh, a hundred or so people if you crammed them into the shuttles like sardines.

The existence of multiple transporter rooms and even cargo transporters deep in the lower decks would be a huge help in evacuating the ship in the event of a disaster. TAS made the right decision even if it came a few years late.

 

The Making of Star Trek (1968) posited altogether eleven personnel and cargo transporter stations: four regular six-person rooms, two cargo units, and five 22-person emergency types (p.192).

 

A shame the series itself never showed any of them to us.

 

I love how folks drop "visual reboot" like it's an established term with precedent and not just something that didn't exist before six months ago.

"It's a visual reboot. Obviously. What, you didn't know that? Of course you should know that. We all know that's what it is."

 

The 1975 Trek Tech Manual was the first time most fans got a visual inkling of the number of transporters.

 

Yeah, those types and the types in the Booklet of General Plans (the Enterprise blueprints, which came out about six months before the Tech Manual) are evidently derived from the description in TMoST (and from TOS).

 

Well, TOS "Dagger of the Mind". TPTB took pains to make the room there different from the previously seen ones, with all-new wall elements unique to this use of the set, and had the action take place down below Deck 14 or whatnot, with van Gelder making his way up from there to the bridge.

In contrast, we never got explicit reference to there only being one transporter room. Whenever action involved a transporter room, its identity was not in question - it was the one where the heroes or villains were, or were headed, without ambiguity.

And when transporting got put on ice, it was because of a poorly understood phenomenon that would jeopardize transport, rather than a malfunction that knocked out a transporter. If a jet falls from the skies, all jets of the type get grounded, even though just that one jet fell. Same here.

OTOH, when the two Kirks manage to destroy a key bit of machinery that knocks down transporters for good, it's a bit not even located anywhere near a transporter room...

As for "everything is hardwired", this is a prerequisite for those moments where everybody's bacon is saved by a character "rerouting" stuff by issuing commands to software through keypresses. Yes, it allows for abuse such as Spock tapping into the internal visual comms of an enemy spacecraft to get a view of his estranged uncle. But it's a price well worth paying, when a mile-long starship has but 100+ crew who cannot go "rerouting" the way Burnham unplugged and replugged physical cabling in "Brother" to save everybody in plot-allotted time.

But yes, Pike having the holocomms ripped out just paints him as a luddite weirdo, which we already got confirmation for in "Point of Light". Which IMHO is good, because we have already seen a wide range of character attitudes towards holotech. Some use holomirrors, others don't. Some use full-body holocomms, some use flat panels with the face of the conversation partner bulging out, some use flat panels, some use audio only. And everybody is fine with that. Luddites are very much a thing in Star Trek of all eras, after all.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Word says this type of thing a whole lot considering we never actually see him follow through with his big scary Klingon thing.

 

You mean because of the engineering circuit board thingie? Maybe...

But on the other hand lots of rooms in the ship change throughout the series, from the bridge on down. It's not meant to be a new bridge every time that set changes. And there isn't a line of dialog I know of that indicates multiple transporter rooms, and yet a zillion times when they refer to "the transporter room," no matter what ideas Roddenberry had that went into The Making of Star Trek.