So, no one remembers when Jellico was captain of the Enterprise in ST:TNG for a bit and went to a 4 shift rotation? Over the entire TNG run the off shifts were mentioned enough that you knew other people were running the ship the other +16 hours a day.
They are not Historical Documents? NOOOOOOOOOOOoo!
Get a Life, it was just a tv show. I did it as a lark.
Now I have! Beer me! Woo!
“I Grok Spock”
Don’t worry pal, Star Wars is:
So when @VeronicaConnor said:
How is it you feel you had to ‘correct’ her by saying “The actual reason is stage design”?
Stage design is all about presenting the show to the audience. In the case of a TV show, that means…it’s set up optimally for filming. You know, like she already said.
Well, what difference does it make which way they face-- it’s not like they are looking out an actual window at the front of the ship. [ETA: or were they supposed to be looking out a window after all?? A window that suddenly transforms into a TV viewscreen whenever they’re communicating?]
Anyway, these kinds of arguments are silly since there are hundreds of WTF issues with the science of Trek-- we’re talking about a ship that flies several times faster than light and takes several days to reach a distant location, but somehow can still communicate over some kind of wireless device immediately with people at that destination.
where’s the weed ?? i say , hand that borg a blunt !! or , a bong !! maybe both !!
Next Generation talked about this quite a bit, actually. They used a standard three watch naval rotation that we would recognize today, and things often took place at “night” when a skeleton crew was manning the bridge.
I didn’t notice until the third or fourth rewatching of the series, but they actual talk about their watch schedule all the time and work it into plots quite a bit. I was impressed when I noticed this!
Some people believed it was…
the bridge could be anywhere
If I recall the Galactica reboot correctly, their bridge was a “CIC” open-plan semi-dungeon of chaos and higgledy-piggledy people/screens, wandering around in the mandatory low lighting shouting at one another, that definitely seemed to be buried deep in the ship’s interior
Confirmed! I do recall correctly…
https://en.battlestarwikiclone.org/wiki/CIC
If you’ve never listened to the STTNG podcast Star Trek the Next Conversation, they had a great bit about him. Of course I hesitate to recommend anything that will cost you hundreds of hours to catch up on…
Yeah, I figured they probably mentioned it in passing, but I never paid that much attention. I also don’t remember a “night” watch plot point on that show. I remember various characters taking the command, albeit for other reasons.
Voyager stuck out because it was a specific plot point—Harry Kim was trying to gain experience so he could eventually be promoted.
I don’t know if this was mentioned farther up-thread, but according to some early Trek publication (Franz Joseph’s Starfleet Technical Manual, IIRC), there are three 8-hour shifts aboard ship. In “The Conscience of the King,” Kirk is wooing a passenger in the dimly lit and never-to-be-seen-again observation deck above the shuttle bay. He mentions that the lighting is like that because they try to mimic day-night cycles on the Enterprise. Of course, this fact is never mentioned again. You do often see other people at the helm, navigation, engineering, and comm console other than the regulars, implying shift work.
Assuming there’s some reason the turbolift shaft HAS to be in the center of the saucer and some reason the doors to it CAN’T be in the center of the bridge, it makes perfect sense to tilt the bridge. The view is through a screen with the camera or sensors or whatever pointing forward so they don’t see a difference, and the ship uses inertial dampeners so presumably they wouldn’t feel a difference either.
One reason I can think of not to put the doors directly behind the Captain’s chair (other than dramatic effect) is because if they did, the Captain and everyone at the navigation station would have to turn directly away from the viewscreen and their consoles in order to see who had arrived. With the door off to one side, everybody can turn slightly to view or speak to people arriving without completely diverting their attention from their duties, except for maybe Spock (who, not coincidentally, often seemed to be shown standing and facing away from his station when he wasn’t leaning over peering into that periscope-looking thing).
So instead the bridge is on a nipple on top of the ship, saved from constant disaster only by magic force-fields. So from a design perspective, they might as well have windows, because it wouldn’t change anything… except as a tv show, it’s a lot easier/cheaper to film a video screen instead of a window.
Wait… whaaat? Huh, a remastered scene from the pilot… though it’s not clear if that’s supposed to just be a camera transition through the hull (to show where the bridge is on the ship), or there’s actually a giant dome skylight there. Since they changed the set design between the pilot and show, and the show has an opaque ceiling, I’ll guess we’ll never know…
Did they ever show the complete ceiling from inside the bridge to show if there was still a skylight? I assume in real life there was probably a bunch of lighting equipment and stuff rather than a real ceiling, real or fake.
