Spoilers ST Lower Decks - Starships and Technology Season One Discusssion
- Thread starter Mark_Nguyen
- Start date
Indeed. That's why I am so impressed with the starship design thus far.
I imagine they are using the familiar to support exploring more out there designs.
But as we know, those may be decisive on the fate of mankind and the Federation.
Perhaps obscure starships are way lower down the totem pole than certain ground and station assignments?It's fun to think of TOS, TNG and DS9 as different artistic takes on how our heroes "really" go through their lives: they swear and spit a lot more than the Kirk we see, they punch folks a lot more than Picard, and they lighten up far more often than Sisko, but the three are at their most entertaining when portrayed as slight caricatures of themselves.
What I dislike a priori about these characters is that they are the Trek variety of "Lower Decks": junior officers all. Why not go lower still? These folks are obsessed about moving up in rank and position, supposedly. People at the enlisted end of things would basically just be doing their fascinating space jobs, there being no pay grade incentive for moving up, and less in the way of command prestige even if they accumulated chevrons.
Then again, no doubt whatever fun the writers can squeeze out of characters, they will of these ones, regardless of rank or setting. But unfortunately the troupe of Ensigns ensures we won't be getting a look at the enlisted world here, either, so it's a built-in lost opportunity to do new stuff under the Trek title.
All that ranted, yup, I'll be focusing on the gadgets, too. And the obscure Okudagrams. Here's hoping they have the patience to do freeze-frame stuff for us there.
Timo Saloniemi
A tie-in merch release gives a general overhead ortho view of the Cerritos:
https://www.startrek.com/news/star-trek-lower-decks-announces-exclusive-t-shirt-club
I can't screencap the twitter post, but an oblique view of the Cerritos shows what i thought were dorsal saucer phaser strips (port and starboard) are a heck of a lot more raised than previously assumed. The ventral ones look more like recessed holes than strips too. Perhaps the Cerritos has barely any weapons to begin with?
More recent sneak peeks shows that margaritas and lint rollers are now canon in the TNG era. Also a Ferengi pops up, and the Argo-type wheeled vehicles are shown in use, so they're NOT just confined to the ship's MSD.
Mark
https://www.startrek.com/news/star-trek-lower-decks-announces-exclusive-t-shirt-club
I can't screencap the twitter post, but an oblique view of the Cerritos shows what i thought were dorsal saucer phaser strips (port and starboard) are a heck of a lot more raised than previously assumed. The ventral ones look more like recessed holes than strips too. Perhaps the Cerritos has barely any weapons to begin with?
More recent sneak peeks shows that margaritas and lint rollers are now canon in the TNG era. Also a Ferengi pops up, and the Argo-type wheeled vehicles are shown in use, so they're NOT just confined to the ship's MSD.
Mark
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The four recesses on the ventral side seem devoid of any phaser features - there's a debate on them over at the LDS forum, but it seems the indentations exist solely to provide cabins with wall windows instead of inconvenient skylights or floorwells.
I'm expecting the very narrow light blue arches, inboard of the yellow pennant paint on the ventral side but well outboard of it on the dorsal, to fire up with phaser energy. And for torpedoes to emerge from the lengthwise boxes on the dorsal side, and shuttles from the thickened aft quarters elements.
Timo Saloniemi
I'm expecting the very narrow light blue arches, inboard of the yellow pennant paint on the ventral side but well outboard of it on the dorsal, to fire up with phaser energy. And for torpedoes to emerge from the lengthwise boxes on the dorsal side, and shuttles from the thickened aft quarters elements.
Timo Saloniemi
Yeah I was one of the ones that thought those ventral insets were phaser strips early on when the first promotional art came out. I genuinely thought the artist of that poster mis-painted them and my first draft at orthos erroneously reflected that. I was definitely wrong on that count, as well as the flat alignment of the main sensor.
I do find the insets with windows looking at each other a bit odd, but the underside of the Defiant also had big undercuts on either side of the hull where we had windows looking at each other, and the catamaran design of the Akira also presented a similar design choice. It is a strange thing to do, but not without precedent.
I do find the insets with windows looking at each other a bit odd, but the underside of the Defiant also had big undercuts on either side of the hull where we had windows looking at each other, and the catamaran design of the Akira also presented a similar design choice. It is a strange thing to do, but not without precedent.
Technically, it's a pretty safe bet to say that the vast majority of windows on Earth only ever provide a view to other windows.
That is, the vast majority of windows are in the densest parts of the big cities, with only a smattering in suburbs and virtually none in rural regions...
Space I guess is as rural as it gets. But vertical walls are really at a premium on starships. (Personally, I'd fix that by placing all the saucers on their sides. It's not as if any interior facility we see would actually need a lot of continuous floor space, and everybody moves by turbolift anyway.)
Timo Saloniemi
That is, the vast majority of windows are in the densest parts of the big cities, with only a smattering in suburbs and virtually none in rural regions...
Space I guess is as rural as it gets. But vertical walls are really at a premium on starships. (Personally, I'd fix that by placing all the saucers on their sides. It's not as if any interior facility we see would actually need a lot of continuous floor space, and everybody moves by turbolift anyway.)
Timo Saloniemi
I never understood the penchant for suburbanite house builders to install facing windows on walls on two neighboring houses that are less than 10 feet apart (based on a region's building/zoning code allowances). For some of those constructions, you can barely squeeze a lawn-mower down in between them. One person's kitchen has a view of another person's bathroom. I recognize that the blueprints call for it, but seems a tad-bit il-conceived when the bigger picture is taken into account.
Older suburbs usually have a little more space than that. My house does not have windows facing my next door neighbors, either. The backyard is lined with mature trees and bushes making it feel very secluded. It's nice.
That is nice! Many new builds these days are pretty much what I described, although some of them admittedly at least had some forethought when it came to window placement in situations like that. Every so once in a while, though, you will find a bunch of houses that can easily do Grey Poupon advert reenactments and just makes me shake my head ruefully.
Seems to be the thing these days - massive million-dollar 3-story 5-7000 square foot McMansions on postage-stamp sized plots. I honestly don't get the appeal, but different strokes, I guess...
Seems to be the thing these days - massive million-dollar 3-story 5-7000 square foot McMansions on postage-stamp sized plots. I honestly don't get the appeal, but different strokes, I guess...
In TAS art, the interiors of Kirk's ship seemed more spacious than ever, there being little point in drawing narrow corridors for essentially 2D action. The LDS art so far doesn't appear to make the hero ship unduly less cramped than Picard's, corridor- or shuttlebay- or whatever-wise. Possibly the backgrounds are actually based on a 3D model for effortless reproduction of all possible angles, even though we didn't see any rotating pans yet?
Timo Saloniemi
Timo Saloniemi
I'd expect they're doing the same thing as Archer, where sets are frequently modeled in 3D for reference and consistency, then painted over to match the show's aesthetic. You can then project the painting back onto the 3D model, and get it to look 2D while animating it in 3D (which doesn't appear to be what they're doing, based on the shots of the ship moving in 3D).
A new interview with the showrunner gives details on the thought processes behind certain technologies and how they fit into canon.
https://www.ign.com/videos/star-trek-lower-decks-team-on-canon-costumes-cameos-and-more
I like the justification of the uniforms - that there are several types of uniforms in service concurrently, and some phase into and out of service depending on the preferences, suitability, and button weakness. Point being that it's a BIG universe, and while in live-action Trek there's little budget for all sorts of visible uniforms (except for Voyager, which seemed to have variants aplenty for specific episodes), there may be different daily uniforms in use between ships of different fleets, in different quadrants, and so on. It backstabs the concept of UNI-form, but as long as things are IN GENERAL consistent within any given show, I'm generally happy.
Mark
https://www.ign.com/videos/star-trek-lower-decks-team-on-canon-costumes-cameos-and-more
I like the justification of the uniforms - that there are several types of uniforms in service concurrently, and some phase into and out of service depending on the preferences, suitability, and button weakness. Point being that it's a BIG universe, and while in live-action Trek there's little budget for all sorts of visible uniforms (except for Voyager, which seemed to have variants aplenty for specific episodes), there may be different daily uniforms in use between ships of different fleets, in different quadrants, and so on. It backstabs the concept of UNI-form, but as long as things are IN GENERAL consistent within any given show, I'm generally happy.
Mark
I think throwback uniforms on LDS are probably the most justifiable outside of a change for change's sake rationale. The FC uniforms may look sharp, but for animation, having everyone dressed shoulder-to-toe in black doesn't give you a lot of clarity in the characters, especially when the arms are crossing the body.
I'm firmly convinced both sets of PIC uniforms, though, come mainly from a desire to make it 1992 again through science or magic. And I swear I wrote that before watching the segment in the interview where McMahan literally says priority number one was making the new uniforms evoke TNG, and priority number two was change for change's sake.
I'm firmly convinced both sets of PIC uniforms, though, come mainly from a desire to make it 1992 again through science or magic. And I swear I wrote that before watching the segment in the interview where McMahan literally says priority number one was making the new uniforms evoke TNG, and priority number two was change for change's sake.
Tonight’s awesome “warp sound effects” clip shows that most, if not all of the LDS Ensigns bunk together in a single room (or corridor) with no social space, tables or chairs to hang out in.
- This is actually not unlike today’s UN warships, where carrier crews bunk four-high and your non-eating off hours are spent there, in the mess hall, or in the hangar bay when there aren’t any flight ops.
-And let’s not forget the bunk rooms seen on the Enterprise-A and Excelsior in ST6, although the latter adds apparent ready rooms for standby crew to chill out before being called to action (VOY “Flashback”). I’m sure this room is MEANT to be crew quarters, but it’s still incongruous with numerous other examples of a ship’s junior crew having whole quarters to themselves or with a single roommate.
- The room in the clip is dominated by a giant window with a view directly aft, so at least everyone gets a great view of anything the ship isn’t pointed at, reinforcing the unimportance of the main characters.
- Each bunk seems to have a small personal storage space. So where is Mariner gonna keep all the junk she got from the starbase?
- And the kicker is Boimler’s apparently uncanny impression of not JUST ANY Galaxy-class starship tooling along at warp four, but the Enterprise-D herself! One wonders under what circumstance would someone feel the need to record the sound of a ship lost a decade prior? Or maybe someone was able to isolate the background sound of THAT ship which happened to be going at THAT speed and shared it around, maybe from one of the countless personal logs people are supposed to record? And what kind of nerd does it take to do that?!
Mark
- This is actually not unlike today’s UN warships, where carrier crews bunk four-high and your non-eating off hours are spent there, in the mess hall, or in the hangar bay when there aren’t any flight ops.
-And let’s not forget the bunk rooms seen on the Enterprise-A and Excelsior in ST6, although the latter adds apparent ready rooms for standby crew to chill out before being called to action (VOY “Flashback”). I’m sure this room is MEANT to be crew quarters, but it’s still incongruous with numerous other examples of a ship’s junior crew having whole quarters to themselves or with a single roommate.
- The room in the clip is dominated by a giant window with a view directly aft, so at least everyone gets a great view of anything the ship isn’t pointed at, reinforcing the unimportance of the main characters.
- Each bunk seems to have a small personal storage space. So where is Mariner gonna keep all the junk she got from the starbase?
- And the kicker is Boimler’s apparently uncanny impression of not JUST ANY Galaxy-class starship tooling along at warp four, but the Enterprise-D herself! One wonders under what circumstance would someone feel the need to record the sound of a ship lost a decade prior? Or maybe someone was able to isolate the background sound of THAT ship which happened to be going at THAT speed and shared it around, maybe from one of the countless personal logs people are supposed to record? And what kind of nerd does it take to do that?!
Mark
...Although by choice or necessity? We'll see.
It's awesome the UN finally got those! (Are they painted white?)
Or even a room confiscated by Tuvok and pals from those poor enlisteds who crew their stations during the alert...
Might be there is an educational purpose to forcing the quartet to bunk together. Perhaps Garrovick Jr. in "Obsession" warranted a single bed because he was already a trusted officer, while our heroes here are too wet behind the ears for independent action or bunking.
Lovely! Although I'm anticipating cool chase scenes here, with our heroes doing the fleeing.
...Perhaps she didn't think it through?
But Picard had a supposedly non-collapsible, very physical saddle, and we never saw a single proper cabinet in his E-D quarters. Even if these ships don't have quantum storage, they might have decks dedicated to booths for storing personal knickknacks.
...Perhaps it is the famed sound of all the tuning LaForge uniquely was allowed to do, while other chief engineers either were on a tighter leash, or generally blew up their ships with their antics?
Timo Saloniemi
Late, but here are some tech observations that at least aren't covered here, even though the LDS forum has some of them. FINALLY seeing the episode shows the Cerritos in a level of detail we can properly scrutinize, and of course the MSD and other background stuff lend itself to great observations. They seem to have put around the same amount of rationalization into this ship design as a 90s Trek series, which is both refreshing and cool!
- The Cerritos has two upper phaser banks on the saucer, plus one ventral bank. This leaves a particular blind spot on the ventral aft arc, but there's probably something on the engineering hull that can cover it. Still no clear ports for the torpedo bays, and I'm hesitant to place them in those two dorsal fins a la New Orleans class (or not), but it's the most likely candidate short of somewhere in the lower hull we haven't seen yet.
- The Cerritos' bridge looks like it's on Deck 2! The location contains what looks like the tactical and other familiar consoles, it matches where the front window is, and there's a room of some sort on the deck above.
- The MSD pays particular attention to a large, 2-story room on Decks 3-4. There's no particular window or anything on the hull outside to match this room (assuming it's on the centerline, MSDs aren't particularly known for this kind of accuracy), so I'm guessing holodeck, stellar cartography room, or perhaps even cetacean ops?
- The showrunner has noted that the yellow trim on the ship is indicative of her specialization in the engineering division - not SCE per se, but a ship of this class which is focused more on setting up the infrastructure of Second Contact. This leads one to wonder if standard SC procedure means a new planet will be visited by one of each specialty, depending on the planet's assessment? That the Galardonians got the Cerritos first is great, but if a blue-clad California-class ship had popped by first, maybe they would have caught the zombie bug first?
- And while this is indeed a cool sort of implication, I'm not sure how awesome it would be to announce a ship's specialty to everyone who isn't color-blind. What if three Californias are ambushed by a bunch of savvy Romulans who are out to assassinate an ambassador? They'd know to aim for the red one, and not because the livery makes it go faster.
- The big mushroom starbase looks about the same from the outside, but from the inside the central spire is markedly different than the 1980s model / matte paintings established it in previous incarnations. There seem to be more "piers" which are shorter, and where the space between them can accommodate only one larger ship (instead of two, as in TSFS where Enterprise and Excelsior are berthed alongside different piers but with ample empty space in between. You COULD make the assumption that the "piers" are meant to be about the same size as before, but it could be pushing it; but we don't know the exact size of the Cerritos (or the starbase for that matter), so the purple haze of the animation style can take care of the rest.
- Also, the Cerritos is connected by umbilicals! They're markedly longer and snakier than the one connecting the Enterprise-D, which makes more sense given the wide variety of starships that they would connect to. Still makes for quite the jog for whoever ends up using them, effectively walking the length of the saucer to GET to the saucer. And I've walked the length of the USS Midway museum to GET to the museum, it's not a short walk.
- The Cerritos' bridge is in fact pretty square. It's not quite linear vs. circular, as all the stations are in familiar places. In terms of station placement, the perimeter Science stations are split between the aft starboard and port central banks, which is not unprecedented (The Enterprise-E Sci and Eng stations are scattered all over the place). Oddly, while this means the Cerritos has all the same stations as the Enterprise-D bridge, it also has FOUR nondescript extra stations along the sides of the room, some with "SYS <random number>" labels and others with no nomenclature. Two of them seem to be the kind you just walk by, but others have angled surfaces people would be expected to tap stuff into.
- The bridge has four doors, including one turbolift and one to the ready room. No idea what the other two are, but the MSD doesn't show a particular conference room space adjacent to the bridge. There SHOULD be plenty of room for one portside, which the forward port door can access; I think Tendi uses a lint roller on Freeman's chair in this room, so we know one exists even if it's not next door.
- The Cerritos' corridors feature active LCARS panels every couple of corridor segments. This is nicely busy compared to the on-demand (and annoyingly reflective for the camera crews) E-D corridors, and the effectively bare Voyager and Defiant ones. It's a better balance compared to the Discovery hallways, which basically has workstations on every wall surface! Kudos though for including entrances to the Jeffries tubes in the actual corridors and not tucked away somewhere on the sides.
- I yearn for the day that the shuttlebay on this ship is definitively established. I know the MSD makes it look like there's a drop-style bay on the aft ventral (recalling the NX-01), but there's no particular detail in that area. There are darkened shapes at the ends of the saucer's grey "wingtips" but the shuttles don't seem to head towards or away from them that we've seen so far. OTOH we haven't seen any torpedo launchers yet either, so...
- VISORs aplenty, yes; but LaForge has long since moved on to more humaniform implants. User choice? The 2380s sees big wearables come back into vogue?
- I love the arrangement of the shuttlebay, which actually USES the upper spaces to store cargo pods and the like. A typical TNG bay would have upper galleries but we see only a control room up there; the rest of the room is pretty clearly just empty space above floor level, and the bay door itself is rarely taller than the shuttle moving through it. Nevermind that there was never a practical ceiling on the set. In DSC we see cargo often stored on the decking but here the Cerritos keeps the landing spaces clear and moves (floats?) cargo up and out of the way.
- Has anyone noted the crewman with the turban in the shuttlebay? Here in Canada it was a big day when our national police changed its policy to allow Sikhs to wear a version of their headdresses, and this made me think of that.
- The replicator that Boimler is working on extends a fair bit further back into the wall than we've seen suggested before. Some TNG replication stations are simple platforms with nothing behind them ("Data's Day") but here it looks like a lot of the machinery is contained in a big unit behind what we normally see as a replicator.
- Boimler and Mariner are found in a sort of lower decks workshop or repair bay, which will be seen in subsequent episodes, so it's a "standing set" for this show. Notably, a shuttle is in pieces in the background (the nacelles are stacked up against the wall like surfboards), in what I'm sure is a sideways nod to the fan theory that the little people are forever working on crashed shuttles, especially on Voyager.
- Rutherford's implant is Vulcan. Does that mean it was not a replicated thingy and was simply "in stock", forcing them to use it - why? And if it's causing him problems, is there something in the nature of the implant preventing him from swapping to a more human-compatible unit somewhere down the line?
- Tendi doesn't know what sand is. There's no sand on Orion (I)? Or did she not go to the Academy on Earth, 'cuz if she spent four years there I can't imagine she never went to the beaches that are WITHIN CITY LIMITS?
- The large module that they're installing on the planet reads "<number?> COMM ARRAY - USS CERRITOS" on the side. Does that mean that EVERY comm array that they drop on EVERY planet has the name of the ship that delivered it emblazoned on the side?
- The Cerritos transporter room is as functional as her shuttlebay. Not only is there ample room for cargo to be handled on and off, there are large doors to get them elsewhere on the ship! We've seen cargo transporters on rare occasion, but here they wisely combine both as on TNG shows they generally use the passenger room for cargo as a cost-saving production measure.
- The bar is pretty cool too. The actual bar of the room is an island-style (but without an obvious place for the staff working there to get in or out - Staircase? Vaulting over the bar?) plus replicator pads built into columns extending floor to ceiling - cool. This allows self-service while the mixable booze is kept out of reach. Methinks this set designer actually worked in a bar at some point. Plus, the staff uniforms are definitely inspired from those of the E-D!
- When the zombie infestation begins, pretty much everyone EXCEPT the infected, Barnes and Rutherford are really quick to whip out phasers. NO ONE is seen carrying them holstered, and the animation designs show no unsightly bulges on any of the characters. This means that it was either an omission and everyone just carries a Type-II phaser on them, or the bar is quizzically also one of the ship's armories. (Edit - Boimler does later pull one out of his pocket on the planet. I guess THESE Starfleet uniforms just have pockets that are really, really slimming to the cut of the silhouette).
- When people beam up or down to the planet, there's a set of those useful pattern enhancers we've seen in the TNG era - but here they're used in a non-crisis situation. Furthermore, they disappear in the middle of the episode and reappear later on when Boimler and Mariner beam back up.
- I mentioned this elsewhere, but stuff like the Comm Array module and Argo trucks could have been simply beamed down to the surface; alternatively the module could have been floated or tractored down (escorted by the shuttles we see) containing the trucks.
- How did Boimler catch up to Mariner? He didn't take another truck, or else did they leave his transportation back at the spider farm? And for that matter, why were they on the planet anyway? At no point did they get orders to go down, nor was there any dialogue that supported them going there. I mean, it's clear that people were setting up the array, but it was mere seconds after their arrival that Mariner buggered off to donate stuff to the locals. Did she just sneak onto the away team, and Boimler followed her without asking?
- Sickbay! Some, if not all, of the biobeds seem to have an ENT-esque imaging chamber (and NOT a Quantum Leap-esque imaging chamber, I might add, fifteen years too late) into which the beds can retract. T'ana's equipment can disperse and aerosolized cure directly from the console, whereas in previous times Starfleeters had to do this they had to do it more manually, carrying pods of stuff around. Yay to learning to facilitate this sort of thing, given how often it tends to happen!
- Boimler's tighty whities have a Starfleet logo on them, furthering the wierd notion of Starfleet branding EVERYTHING they wear with that delta. And not that I look for this sort of thing all the time, but Mariner's bra allows for a certain amount of... gravitational pull when she's jumping around. Quite surprised they decided to animate that, honestly.
- People beam back up to the ship in the final act without requesting a transport. I guess this sorta explains the pattern enhancers, acting as a functional transporter and allowing them to more unilaterally beam someone up without checking on the receiving end. But you'd THINK that they should normally do so before beaming into a zombie apocalypse.
- The Cerritos has original uniforms, but use what look like late TNG phasers and late Voyager tricorders, even though both were replaced by the time of "Nemesis" at least a year before this episode. I guess this is a good example of a second-line starship NOT upgrading to all the latest tech, even though there's no reason they shouldn't, if a ship stuck in the Delta Quadrant with limited resources would do so anyway.
- I wonder what drove this animation choice, but when phasered, the zombies actually DARKEN to almost opaque. Maybe it's limited to this episode (Ransom didn't react at all when initially phasered in the bar) but a strange thing to explain nonetheless.
And from the trailer:
- That "guest starship" is of a design we haven't seen before (damn, I'd kill for an Akira!) and it's also not one of the backgrounders we've seen so far.
- In the far background of one show, we see what seem to be TNG Type-6 shuttles parked, complete with boxy nacelles.
Mark
- The Cerritos has two upper phaser banks on the saucer, plus one ventral bank. This leaves a particular blind spot on the ventral aft arc, but there's probably something on the engineering hull that can cover it. Still no clear ports for the torpedo bays, and I'm hesitant to place them in those two dorsal fins a la New Orleans class (or not), but it's the most likely candidate short of somewhere in the lower hull we haven't seen yet.
- The Cerritos' bridge looks like it's on Deck 2! The location contains what looks like the tactical and other familiar consoles, it matches where the front window is, and there's a room of some sort on the deck above.
- The MSD pays particular attention to a large, 2-story room on Decks 3-4. There's no particular window or anything on the hull outside to match this room (assuming it's on the centerline, MSDs aren't particularly known for this kind of accuracy), so I'm guessing holodeck, stellar cartography room, or perhaps even cetacean ops?
- The showrunner has noted that the yellow trim on the ship is indicative of her specialization in the engineering division - not SCE per se, but a ship of this class which is focused more on setting up the infrastructure of Second Contact. This leads one to wonder if standard SC procedure means a new planet will be visited by one of each specialty, depending on the planet's assessment? That the Galardonians got the Cerritos first is great, but if a blue-clad California-class ship had popped by first, maybe they would have caught the zombie bug first?
- And while this is indeed a cool sort of implication, I'm not sure how awesome it would be to announce a ship's specialty to everyone who isn't color-blind. What if three Californias are ambushed by a bunch of savvy Romulans who are out to assassinate an ambassador? They'd know to aim for the red one, and not because the livery makes it go faster.
- The big mushroom starbase looks about the same from the outside, but from the inside the central spire is markedly different than the 1980s model / matte paintings established it in previous incarnations. There seem to be more "piers" which are shorter, and where the space between them can accommodate only one larger ship (instead of two, as in TSFS where Enterprise and Excelsior are berthed alongside different piers but with ample empty space in between. You COULD make the assumption that the "piers" are meant to be about the same size as before, but it could be pushing it; but we don't know the exact size of the Cerritos (or the starbase for that matter), so the purple haze of the animation style can take care of the rest.
- Also, the Cerritos is connected by umbilicals! They're markedly longer and snakier than the one connecting the Enterprise-D, which makes more sense given the wide variety of starships that they would connect to. Still makes for quite the jog for whoever ends up using them, effectively walking the length of the saucer to GET to the saucer. And I've walked the length of the USS Midway museum to GET to the museum, it's not a short walk.
- The Cerritos' bridge is in fact pretty square. It's not quite linear vs. circular, as all the stations are in familiar places. In terms of station placement, the perimeter Science stations are split between the aft starboard and port central banks, which is not unprecedented (The Enterprise-E Sci and Eng stations are scattered all over the place). Oddly, while this means the Cerritos has all the same stations as the Enterprise-D bridge, it also has FOUR nondescript extra stations along the sides of the room, some with "SYS <random number>" labels and others with no nomenclature. Two of them seem to be the kind you just walk by, but others have angled surfaces people would be expected to tap stuff into.
- The bridge has four doors, including one turbolift and one to the ready room. No idea what the other two are, but the MSD doesn't show a particular conference room space adjacent to the bridge. There SHOULD be plenty of room for one portside, which the forward port door can access; I think Tendi uses a lint roller on Freeman's chair in this room, so we know one exists even if it's not next door.
- The Cerritos' corridors feature active LCARS panels every couple of corridor segments. This is nicely busy compared to the on-demand (and annoyingly reflective for the camera crews) E-D corridors, and the effectively bare Voyager and Defiant ones. It's a better balance compared to the Discovery hallways, which basically has workstations on every wall surface! Kudos though for including entrances to the Jeffries tubes in the actual corridors and not tucked away somewhere on the sides.
- I yearn for the day that the shuttlebay on this ship is definitively established. I know the MSD makes it look like there's a drop-style bay on the aft ventral (recalling the NX-01), but there's no particular detail in that area. There are darkened shapes at the ends of the saucer's grey "wingtips" but the shuttles don't seem to head towards or away from them that we've seen so far. OTOH we haven't seen any torpedo launchers yet either, so...
- VISORs aplenty, yes; but LaForge has long since moved on to more humaniform implants. User choice? The 2380s sees big wearables come back into vogue?
- I love the arrangement of the shuttlebay, which actually USES the upper spaces to store cargo pods and the like. A typical TNG bay would have upper galleries but we see only a control room up there; the rest of the room is pretty clearly just empty space above floor level, and the bay door itself is rarely taller than the shuttle moving through it. Nevermind that there was never a practical ceiling on the set.
In DSC we see cargo often stored on the decking but here the Cerritos keeps the landing spaces clear and moves (floats?) cargo up and out of the way. - Has anyone noted the crewman with the turban in the shuttlebay? Here in Canada it was a big day when our national police changed its policy to allow Sikhs to wear a version of their headdresses, and this made me think of that.
- The replicator that Boimler is working on extends a fair bit further back into the wall than we've seen suggested before. Some TNG replication stations are simple platforms with nothing behind them ("Data's Day") but here it looks like a lot of the machinery is contained in a big unit behind what we normally see as a replicator.
- Boimler and Mariner are found in a sort of lower decks workshop or repair bay, which will be seen in subsequent episodes, so it's a "standing set" for this show. Notably, a shuttle is in pieces in the background (the nacelles are stacked up against the wall like surfboards), in what I'm sure is a sideways nod to the fan theory that the little people are forever working on crashed shuttles, especially on Voyager.
- Rutherford's implant is Vulcan. Does that mean it was not a replicated thingy and was simply "in stock", forcing them to use it - why? And if it's causing him problems, is there something in the nature of the implant preventing him from swapping to a more human-compatible unit somewhere down the line?
- Tendi doesn't know what sand is. There's no sand on Orion (I)? Or did she not go to the Academy on Earth, 'cuz if she spent four years there I can't imagine she never went to the beaches that are WITHIN CITY LIMITS?
- The large module that they're installing on the planet reads "<number?> COMM ARRAY - USS CERRITOS" on the side. Does that mean that EVERY comm array that they drop on EVERY planet has the name of the ship that delivered it emblazoned on the side?
- The Cerritos transporter room is as functional as her shuttlebay. Not only is there ample room for cargo to be handled on and off, there are large doors to get them elsewhere on the ship! We've seen cargo transporters on rare occasion, but here they wisely combine both as on TNG shows they generally use the passenger room for cargo as a cost-saving production measure.
- The bar is pretty cool too. The actual bar of the room is an island-style (but without an obvious place for the staff working there to get in or out - Staircase? Vaulting over the bar?) plus replicator pads built into columns extending floor to ceiling - cool. This allows self-service while the mixable booze is kept out of reach. Methinks this set designer actually worked in a bar at some point.
Plus, the staff uniforms are definitely inspired from those of the E-D!- When the zombie infestation begins, pretty much everyone EXCEPT the infected, Barnes and Rutherford are really quick to whip out phasers. NO ONE is seen carrying them holstered, and the animation designs show no unsightly bulges on any of the characters. This means that it was either an omission and everyone just carries a Type-II phaser on them, or the bar is quizzically also one of the ship's armories. (Edit - Boimler does later pull one out of his pocket on the planet. I guess THESE Starfleet uniforms just have pockets that are really, really slimming to the cut of the silhouette).
- When people beam up or down to the planet, there's a set of those useful pattern enhancers we've seen in the TNG era - but here they're used in a non-crisis situation. Furthermore, they disappear in the middle of the episode and reappear later on when Boimler and Mariner beam back up.
- I mentioned this elsewhere, but stuff like the Comm Array module and Argo trucks could have been simply beamed down to the surface; alternatively the module could have been floated or tractored down (escorted by the shuttles we see) containing the trucks.
- How did Boimler catch up to Mariner? He didn't take another truck, or else did they leave his transportation back at the spider farm? And for that matter, why were they on the planet anyway? At no point did they get orders to go down, nor was there any dialogue that supported them going there. I mean, it's clear that people were setting up the array, but it was mere seconds after their arrival that Mariner buggered off to donate stuff to the locals. Did she just sneak onto the away team, and Boimler followed her without asking?
- Sickbay! Some, if not all, of the biobeds seem to have an ENT-esque imaging chamber (and NOT a Quantum Leap-esque imaging chamber, I might add, fifteen years too late) into which the beds can retract. T'ana's equipment can disperse and aerosolized cure directly from the console, whereas in previous times Starfleeters had to do this they had to do it more manually, carrying pods of stuff around. Yay to learning to facilitate this sort of thing, given how often it tends to happen!
- Boimler's tighty whities have a Starfleet logo on them, furthering the wierd notion of Starfleet branding EVERYTHING they wear with that delta. And not that I look for this sort of thing all the time, but Mariner's bra allows for a certain amount of... gravitational pull when she's jumping around. Quite surprised they decided to animate that, honestly.
- People beam back up to the ship in the final act without requesting a transport. I guess this sorta explains the pattern enhancers, acting as a functional transporter and allowing them to more unilaterally beam someone up without checking on the receiving end. But you'd THINK that they should normally do so before beaming into a zombie apocalypse.
- The Cerritos has original uniforms, but use what look like late TNG phasers and late Voyager tricorders, even though both were replaced by the time of "Nemesis" at least a year before this episode. I guess this is a good example of a second-line starship NOT upgrading to all the latest tech, even though there's no reason they shouldn't, if a ship stuck in the Delta Quadrant with limited resources would do so anyway.
- I wonder what drove this animation choice, but when phasered, the zombies actually DARKEN to almost opaque. Maybe it's limited to this episode (Ransom didn't react at all when initially phasered in the bar) but a strange thing to explain nonetheless.
And from the trailer:
- That "guest starship" is of a design we haven't seen before (damn, I'd kill for an Akira!) and it's also not one of the backgrounders we've seen so far.
- In the far background of one show, we see what seem to be TNG Type-6 shuttles parked, complete with boxy nacelles.
Mark
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