"Why the Enterprise-D Was Badly Designed"

[Ottens]

Ed Whitefire, one of original designers, told me that on a Galaxy class ship with a crew of one thousand you could walk all day and never see another crew member. It works out to over a football field of space for each of the crew - that is just habitable decks, not counting hardware and infrastructure

Small correction: Ed wasn't one of the ship's designers. Andrew Probert was the only designer. Ed drew the original deck plans based on Andy's designs, which were supposed to become the official versions, but that project was canceled (not sure why) and Rick Sternbach ended up creating the licensed deck plans.

 

[Ottens]

I have a set of Ed Whitefire deck plans which show a more appropriate interior for such a giant ship. The front section of the saucer has a huge mulit-deck recreation area with suspended walkways and a place at the front with the hull windows behind it, for an orchestra.

You can find a cutaway here:
https://forgottentrek.com/the-next-generation/the-unseen-enterprise-d/

Scroll down to "Mall".

 

[shivkala]

I know they used the Ten-Forward set for concerts, but was it actually supposed to be Ten-Forward in-universe? If so that really sucks for the crew! On a ship that size too!!!

Memory Alpha lists concerts in "Sarek", "In Theory", "Lessons", "Second Chances", and "Inheritance" as all taking place in Ten Forward, so I'm going to go with, yes. However, later on, it does say it was redressed for the concert in "Sarek," as well as a theater in "Nth Degree" and "Frame of Mind." The latter sticks out as a time we all knew it was the Ten Forward set, but they seemingly wanted us to believe it was not.

 

[JesterFace]

Is Ten Forward the only place on the ship that looks like Ten Forward?
It might be possible there are other locations on the Enterprise that look exactly the same, for example quarters are identical across the ship. The "bar" itself could be larger but we only see a part of it on TV. There are more of those big windows in front of the ship, there could be more rooms like that.

 

[DonIago]

If anything I think it would be silly to assume there aren't plenty of other lounges throughout the ship, though perhaps not ones with the same level of prestige.

Even the refit connie had the massive rec deck.

 

[Richard Baker]

It makes sense that the Enterprise would have extensive recreational areas- it had families and not everyone was a busy crew member. Holodecks were available but were limited in number and could run only one program at a time.

 

[publiusr]

It took awhile, but I have warmed to it over the years.

 

[Ottens]

Is Ten Forward the only place on the ship that looks like Ten Forward?

The window configuration means a room like Ten Forward could only exist on Deck 10.

If anything I think it would be silly to assume there aren't plenty of other lounges throughout the ship, though perhaps not ones with the same level of prestige.

Of course. In fact, Andrew Probert designed all the large windows on the saucer for lounges. He told Trekplace:

That whole rim space was allocated for observation decks, both on the primary hull and on the secondary hull. That's why you see numerous black windows going around each of those, what I call "belly bands," the midpoints of those hulls. Having such a large ship with families, singles, lovers, and loners aboard the ship, who are gonna need their own space from time to time, I designed those decks as a nice comfortable place where they could simply go and relax. They were simply lounges, and they were different-sized, ranging from a two-person lounge to a fourteen-person lounge, where you could have family gatherings or parties, and they would all be very darkly lit, so you wouldn't get gross window reflections, allowing you to see outside a lot easier.

The show made an effort during Season 1 to show different lounge and recreation areas. In "Justice", crew quarters were remodeled as a Starboard Lounge. "Haven" showed a dining room. "Heart of Glory" and "The Neutral Zone" revealed a guest lounge, using the set that would later become Counselor Troi's office. Details here.

 

[JesterFace]

The window configuration means a room like Ten Forward could only exist on Deck 10.

I haven't gone through the blueprints but by looking at the front of the Enterprise-D it looks like there are many windows similar Ten Forward has.

 

[Macintosh]

Ten-Forward not being big enough could have been solved by making it an "Officer's Only" club, instead of the main bar/entertainment set for the entire ship. Of course that would mean it wouldn't be as multi-purpose, so it wouldn't have been used as much. The various concerts have to have some place to occur!

I've often thought that making Ten Forward as we see it in the show something more like a senior officer's lounge than a social hub for over a thousand people – Two Forward, perhaps? – would have worked better.

 

[Macintosh]

Ed Whitefire, one of original designers, told me that on a Galaxy class ship with a crew of one thousand you could walk all day and never see another crew member. It works out to over a football field of space for each of the crew - that is just habitable decks, not counting hardware and infrastructure

I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation for this once. The Enterprise-D would have something like 1,100,000m²/11,800,000ft² of deck space in total – or around 1,000m²/11,500ft² per crew member. That's actually about a fifth of an American football field each. And it doesn't take into account that some of the deck space is going to be full of machinery or non-habitable areas, and there's going to be a lot of duplicated crew facilities in the secondary hull that will be not used/accessible unless the ship is separated (like the battle bridge, Picard's spare quarters, the second sickbay complex etc). But even assuming, generously, that half of the deck area is unavailable to the crew, that's still about double the floor space of the average US family house per person.

 

[Ragitsu]

I would want my "Ten Forward" to feature at least two levels situated on a gently sloping incline, different types of lighting (depending on location), lounge seating (some out in the open and some tucked into the walls for privacy), possibly an aquarium and various creature comforts.

 

[Macintosh]

I would want my "Ten Forward" to feature at least two levels situated on a gently sloping incline, different types of lighting (depending on location), lounge seating (some out in the open and some tucked into the walls for privacy), possibly an aquarium and various creature comforts.

Have you seen this by @Rekkert ? He calls it "Two-Three-Fore" since it's the crew lounge at the front of decks two and three on a Nebula-class starship. It's much more in line with what the "social hub" of a ship the size of a Galaxy-class should be. If this were Ten Forward I'd imagine it having two rows of windows for the full saucer rim.

 

[Rekkert]

Worth mentioning that the 'Two Three Fore' lounge wasn't actually designed by myself but rather by a client of mine, I just "brought it to life" in 3D.

His idea was that unlike the Galaxy-Class with its canonically established dozens of lounges (which @Ottens did such an amazing job researching on his site), the Nebula only has one massive lounge. The shape of the set was inspired on the TMP rec room, which highlights the issue of why Ten Forward was so small, it needed to be done on the cheap (it was created for season 2 with very little money) and fit in a corner of a single Paramount stage. Having spoken with several Trek creatives at work, you'd be amazed at the amount of times the ideas were far bigger than the budget/space available and had to be scaled down.

 

[Richard Baker]

Like how that cool Probert designed shuttle got replaced with a reworked movie prop and those Yugo shuttlepods...

 

[Ben]

That kind of reminds me of my old college dining halls, complete with the giant screen TV on one side. I imagine it playing the 24th Century equivalent of the Today Show while the crew gets breakfast.

 

[Ottens]

My Unseen Enterprise-D contains some renderings of a Two Forward and a Nine Forward lounge on the Galaxy class. They're by Stage 9, who were in the process of creating a 3D walkthrough of the Ent-D when they were shut down by CBS.

 

[Rekkert]

@Ottens: Worth pointing out that while Stage 9 did work on those areas (I was one of the main devs on that project), the screenshots you're showing for the lounges are mainly from a second Enterprise-D reproduction done pretty much at the same time called Enterprise-D Construction Project, it gained notoriety before Stage 9 (even making it to TV news in some places) and was quickly shut down shortly thereafter. On the 'Observation Lounge ramp' section you have one render from that project at on the left, and one render from Stage 9 on the right, that's why one was a ramp and the other a staircase.

Here's a surviving rendering of the Stage 9 version of Two Forward, and below one from Nine Forward. Mind you, both areas were somewhat unfinished when the project got canceled.

 

[drt]

Main Engineering does look a little ridiculous for its ostensible purpose (something more like Voyager's would have been nice to see). I wonder whether having it built for EaF was ultimately a mistake, in that if they'd waited they might have had more of a budget to dedicate to it. OTOH, it's just as possible that if it hadn't been built for EaF then it wouldn't have been built at all, and that would have been deeply unfortunate.

They should have done something like the Utopia Planitia set or the Spore Drive Engineering set in Disco, forgone the somewhat dinky warp core prop and used the space as a bigger control room with a window looking into a much larger space containing a giant reactor.

 

[shivkala]

They should have done something like the Utopia Planitia set or the Spore Drive Engineering set in Disco, foregone the somewhat dinky warp core prop and used the space as a bigger control room with a window looking into a much larger space containing a giant reactor.

TMP and TWoK did a good job of showing how dangerous engineering could be. I get safety standards improve and everything, but something that powers the ship through matter/antimatter should probably be kept behind some protective barrier, both for the safety or the crew and for the safety of the engines.