Who designed spacedock and what else...

[Ryan Thomas Riddle]

The Enterprise is a good visual design for a fictional ship in that the assembly of the parts suggests some functionality - "here, the engines are out here where they're safe" - while addressing and incorporating no actual engineering considerations whatever. It's art design, not science.

Surprisingly like the new movie. 'magine that.

 

[trevanian]

And that's a very good example of how they ignored all the advice, so that not a bit of it ever made it to the episodes. Nothing in TOS indicates that the ship would have been put together in space, after all.

When you put something like that in the bible, you don't need to put it in the ep;

Don't be ridiculous.

Just trying to live up to the high standards of the unwarnables round here. you should know exactly what i mean, you set the bar.

Nice molesting job you did on my part of the text. Trying to turn MY posts into one-line snipes? Of course if that kind of thing works so well for you and yours in the AbramsForum ...

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

The Enterprise is a good visual design for a fictional ship in that the assembly of the parts suggests some functionality - "here, the engines are out here where they're safe" - while addressing and incorporating no actual engineering considerations whatever. It's art design, not science.

Surprisingly like the new movie. 'magine that.

Yeah, ain't that something?

 

[Timo]

^ Gonna be a loooongg time before spacewalks go away.

Dunno. They might have been a stillborn idea all along; it may prove to be impossible to design a well-functioning spacesuit within the next fifty years, whereas robotics might take leaps and win the obvious competition hands down, thereby condemning spacewalks to oblivion.

Or then somebody figures out how to build a real spacesuit but robots never take off as a valid tool for anything much, and that settles the trend for future history.

It's not as if today's submarines have much use for diving or swimming personnel. If such personnel are used, they perform jobs unrelated to the submarine itself. Trek starships might very well be independent of any spacewalk needs, so spacesuits are only used in the rare case when there's something worth exploring that floats in space. Might explain why the TOS suits looked so useless.

Other kinds of protective wear for other applications, including poisonous or missing atmospheres on planets, are of course a different matter. One wouldn't expect those suits to see use in repairing the ship, though - the two applications would be quite dissimilar.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[USS Jack Riley]

^Another option is that the shirt sleeves environment is only for internal workings. Space walks are only necessary for major repairs (replacement of hull plating for example). Standard repairs for plumbing or other environmental systems happen within the ship itself without having to go outside to unplug the drain into space after chili night.

Think of Apollo 13 when Tom Hanks expels urine ("Constellation U-ri-on") into space. If the urine freezes agains the drain, that is one heck of a ong trip to the moon and back without a space walk. If the system is contained within the ship, however, the technicians can get to work in a shirt sleeve environment without a space walk. that is probably the intent here.