Why is the Bridge on top?

[regemet]

Well if you go back all the way to Ancient Phonecia the Phonecian Triream had three banks of oars wth benches . The overseers and officers all walked on a bridging plank above the benches so it was known as the command bridge often abbriveated to the bridge hench why even today the upper cmmand deck is called the bridge and it continues into star trek starships.

 

[Timo]

...More recently, the need for bridgelike structures onboard ships came with the introduction of steam propulsion, which created all sorts of deck obstacles to prevent the ship from being commanded from where it traditionally had been.

For centuries if not millennia, ships had been factually commanded from the poop deck, the aftmost top surface of the ship, where the steering oar or wheel would most conveniently be placed. There was extremely little variation between ships of different purposes on this; every seafaring culture eventually settled on such a configuration, on large sail-powered vessels at least if not on all types of seagoing craft.

Suddenly, in the mid-19th century, warships began to sport long catwalks that would connect the various corners of the ship, in a futile attempt to provide visibility past the ugly smokestacks and paddlewheels and gun turrets and whatnot. The deck of a warship was a complete mess for the better part of a century, what with everything from auxiliary boats to ventilation and illumination hatches having to be relocated to accommodate the new technologies. A transverse navigation bridge was required to allow visibility to both sides of the ship; a longitudal catwalk would connect the various steering and engineering locations with the one spot where forward visibility was possible.

Today, ships only require a transverse bridge located at an arbitrary (but generally high and dominant) part of the ship, for visibility to the sides to enable efficient port handling. The steering wheel can be placed in this arbitrary location easily enough, which was not the case for the past century or so. Longitudal bridges or catwalks exist mainly for the needs of cargo handling, but the current term "bridge" as associated with navigation essentially stems from the structures introduced a century and a half ago to cope with the sudden change in deck arrangements.

Might a starship need a specific placement of the navigation center for reasons of visibility? Perhaps so: if shields really protect everything, and armor protects nothing, it would be very nice to have a transparent bubble dangling from somewhere to provide failure-proof visual access to the environment. But just placing the bridge on top of the saucer doesn't quite do that trick, because the saucer itself blocks the view to just about anywhere relevant. Unless, of course, the ship is supposed to be flown top first when coming to port, in which case a skylight-type window would be nice indeed. Alas, we've seen that this is not how starships maneuver in port...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Psion said:
If one has weapons that can punch completely through the hull after shields fail, does it matter where the Bridge goes for tactical reasons?

No, it doesn't.

It's not the job of the hull to provide 'cover' for the bridge. That's what shields are for. Any weapon powerful enough to punch through a ship's shields will also get through any amount of hull that might be built around the bridge.

So having the bridge deep within the ship will effectively be no more secure than having it directly on top.

In shows like B5 and nuBSG, it makes sense to 'hide' the bridge, since they don't have shields. But in any show where shields exist, the bridge location is, by definition, irrelevant.

 

[Christopher]

^^I wouldn't say that, because any competent designer builds redundancy into a system. They wouldn't just build a ship so it would have no protection if its shields failed; they would include backup systems like hull armor. (Also keep in mind that NX-01 had no energy shields but still had its bridge on top.)

So Psion's right. The key issue here isn't the shields, it's the penetration power of the weapons.

Well, he's kind of right. In Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda, the producers developed a more realistic model of starship combat than is usually seen in TV/film, one with no energy shields. Combat mostly involved kinetic missiles that travelled at extremely high, even relativistic velocities. At those speeds, there is no physical armor in the universe that could block them; they just vaporize on impact and the high-energy plasma cloud burrows straight through the ship and out the other side. The only defense is size and space; the ships are large and the crews are concentrated in certain sections, with the remainder of the ship's interior being vented to vacuum so that there's no air to transmit the heat and shock of impact to inhabited sections. If the impactor does penetrate an inhabited section, they're dead, and there's nothing that can be done about it; but because those sections constitute a minority of the ship's volume, the odds of an occupied section being hit are reduced.

But in the Andromeda universe, ships did keep their command centers deep inside the ship. In the mind of the JPL propulsion engineer who was the show's science consultant, the position of the command deck did make some difference to its odds of being hit, even with weapons that penetrated clear through the hull. If nothing else, it's harder to aim for if you can't see where it is. Presumably the precise location of the command center in a given ship design was highly classified.

 

[Vanyel]

Well maybe, in the case of a Galaxy class starship, if the sensors went out, someone could get up on a ladder and see where they were going or what was happening through the little dome?

 

[Mr_Closet]

Slappy The Vulcan said:

Christopher said:
^^Yeah, I seem to remember that -- didn't a Cylon heavy raider crash into it or something?

A raider tried to crash into it...but was blown up by a viper at the last second. You may be thinking of the heavy raider crashing into the landing pod.

I thought the original question was actually refering to the old BSG series. In one episode, the President of the Colonies is killed onboard the flagship during the Cylon attack when the bridge windows are blown out and most of the crew are sucked into space. We see the President holding on to the command console while his white robes flap around him as the atmosphere blows out of the breach.

Given that this was made in the late 70s, early 80s, I always thought that particular shot was very effective.

 

[seekertwo]

I disliked the bridge being on top (in the most visible pimple on the ship) less because of external vulnerability and more because it was easy to isolate it from the rest of the ship. If it were inside the ship (like Aux Control in TOS), you could have multiple points of escape (even cutting through bulkheads) to prevent situations like "Space Seed" and "Day of the Dove". Also, your connections b/t the Bridge and other systems would be shorter and better protected from minor damage & sabotage.

Also, I think the current Bridge location would make a great weapons emplacement or sensor position.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

seekertwo said:
I disliked the bridge being on top (in the most visible pimple on the ship) less because of external vulnerability and more because it was easy to isolate it from the rest of the ship. If it were inside the ship (like Aux Control in TOS), you could have multiple points of escape (even cutting through bulkheads) to prevent situations like "Space Seed" and "Day of the Dove". Also, your connections b/t the Bridge and other systems would be shorter and better protected from minor damage & sabotage.

Also, I think the current Bridge location would make a great weapons emplacement or sensor position.

Well, let's look at what's normally done in REAL LIFE for "high security installations" (as the bridge unquestionably will be).

They usually have VERY limited access, and every way in or out (for power, atmosphere, data, or personnel) is tightly controlled.

Yes, having just ONE way in or out, ala TOS, was probably not all that great of an idea. I, personally, like the idea of a big bolted-down plate on the floor just forward of the helm console that can be used, in an emergency (and with significant effort unbolting it!) as a secondary escape route to the deck below.

In fact, didn't they actually put something like that in the TMP set? (Not sure if it stuck around when the bridge was set up for TWOK and TSFS, though)

The "easy access to everything" rule sounds good... but it's really a philosophical issue. Do you make the bridge more vulnerable yet more efficient, or more protected but less efficient? Trek has always taken the "less efficient" route, making it less vulnerable to the only form of attack you can REALLY protect against... one from inside the ship.

If we're talking OUTSIDE attacks... ie, phasers and photon torpedos... well, if the shields are up, it doesn't matter where the bridge is. And if the shields are DOWN, it STILL doesn't matter where the bridge is. A few layers of sheet metal and insulation aren't going to provide much of a deterent to the sort of weapons fire we know gets exchanged in Trekdom.

 

[FalTorPan]

Cary L. Brown said:
In fact, didn't they actually put something like that in the TMP set? (Not sure if it stuck around when the bridge was set up for TWOK and TSFS, though)

To my knowledge, the hatch feature has been mentioned only in Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise. Although it's an excellent idea, given the apparent lack of non-turbolift exits from the bridge, I suspect that no hatch panel or suggestion of such a panel was actually built on-set.

 

[philbob]

in the inshow universe....its probably a nod to Federations maritime pass

 

[DumbDumb2007]

very poor location for the bridge. during the dominion wart i am sure command was changed on many ships to the Battle Bridge/ aux control room.
on teh Galaxy ships, the battle bridge must have been used 24/7

 

[hellsgate]

I've always wondered why no-one's asked the mods to make an art challenge to design a Starfleet ship (post-"Nem"/TNG era) with an embedded bridge, buried two or three decks beneath its traditional place. (Such as the Dauntless "NX-01-A" from Voyager.)

[*] I've always wanted to see the Connie Refit (U.S.S. Enterprise-A) in the TNG era with a Defiant-Class bridge used as the new standard "battle bridge" somehow edited into the structure of the engineering hull along with some Ronin-Class phaser cannons installed in the neck (instead of that Miranda-type "adam's apple" torpedo launcher thing.)

Dual torpedo/pulse phaser launchers in the forward lip of the Connie Refit (Enterprise-Class)'s saucer section a-la Jim Marin's Defiant Pathfinder-Class concept.

[*] More escape pods, a phaser strip embedded around the edge of the deflector dish (with one probe/torp launcher on each side of the deflector dish,) & an upgraded set of impulse engines embedded in the nacelle supports.

[*] A singular aft-facing pulse phaser emplacement and/or torpedo launcher just above or beneath the Connie refit's shuttlebay.

 

[Timo]

To my knowledge, the hatch feature has been mentioned only in Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise. Although it's an excellent idea, given the apparent lack of non-turbolift exits from the bridge, I suspect that no hatch panel or suggestion of such a panel was actually built on-set.

For a moment, I wondered if the rare zenith shot of Kirk's toupé in ST:TMP (as the ship departs Earth, and Kirk prepares for warp) showed floor detail. Alas, the shot is cropped so that the helm console isn't visible, let alone the floor in front of it. But anyway, the bridge flooring is all grillework in that movie, or rubber-mat imitation of grillework, made of many pieces with prominent seams. So we could always argue that some of those seams denote hatches...

Timo Saloniemi