Batman wrote:'Near'? The damned thing is at the very top of the saucer for no good reason. Hell this gets worse for nuTrek. Not only is the bridge still in that same stupid position but the main viewscreen is also a bigass window!
If there IS a reason for it to be there, then there is ALSO a reason to mount an extra set of shield generators right next to it, not so? Likewise structural integrity field generators. And sensor arrays, at least some of which should ideally be near the bridge to reduce signal latency.
Complaining about WHY DO THEY PUT THE BRIDGE THERE is a standard Bitching About Star Trek moment, and frankly the only real reason for that is because Gene Roddenberry wanted to do a cool camera zoom in on the
Enterprise bridge from outer space.
But if we accept as objective fact that the bridge IS in that exposed position, it makes it all the more likely that there need to be high voltage power lines behind the walls of the bridge itself. Which does pose some hazard to the bridge crew, yes- but it also
reduces hazard to the bridge crew by reducing the risk that the bridge will be destroyed by enemy action.
EnterpriseSovereign wrote:In which case, all you need to do is put vents in the sides of the consoles so that the gas can expand in a direction that doesn't involve the hapless operator. This is of course more difficult for the wall-mounted panels than the free standing type...
Blowout panels would be a logical design modification, yes.
On the other hand, plenty of
real weapon systems were engineered in real life without adequate blowout protection to save the operator in the unlikely, unlucky event of an explosion. So if the problem is "battle damage, once in a while, causes the
necessary high voltage power lines near the bridge to short out in a way that causes explosive release of energy through a bridge console..."
This is not a problem Starfleet has to be
unusually stupid to have not foreseen. Any more than it takes exceptional stupidity to design rifles that are too fragile to be reliable in infantry combat, or adopt experimental weapons that aren't fully debugged because it is 'necessary' to rush them into combat, or to forget to guard an important strategic position during a battle so that the enemy gains an advantage of position. All these are things that real people do, including qualified professionals now and then. So railing at Starfleet for 'stupidity' because
they do it is unfair.
Elheru Aran wrote:The plasma thing is still fricking dumb. You're basically running your computers off a high explosive? Something like that.
The fact of the matter is that they're using a highly dangerous method of computing, which is largely unnecessary for what they're doing, which means that frequently they're more or less literally exploding themselves in the foot.
Did you even READ the thread?
We don't know what the computational requirements of a starship are like. Are the bridge consoles and the machinery behind them just there so they can "push button, fire weapons?" Or do they actually
do computations? If so, how complicated are those computations? We know that the
Enterprise in all her incarnations has sensors that can pinpoint individual beings on an entire planet in a reasonable span of time, that can derive a variety of surprisingly specific information from planets at a range of light-hours or more. The ship has navigational systems that are intended to identify hazards light-years away while nestled inside an FTL drive that literally warps the fabric of time and space, and targeting systems that can lock on to all manner of strange and unknown sensor signatures to deliver weapons fire.
Meanwhile, the ship's computer continues to function the vast majority of the time, even when the ship is stuck in an energy-draining force field, being toyed with by alien gods, bathed in radiation from cosmic anomalies, or having nuclear weapons lobbed at it.
And we seldom if ever see the computer struggling or saying "it's going to take a while to finish these computations." We don't see little spinning hourglasses or whatever. Instead,
Majel Barrett the machine just up and responds with an answer to nearly every question put to it.
While it is
conceivable that all this can be done with low-power computers, it is far from certain. If the people on Star Trek say they need high-voltage power systems to run their computers, I believe them.
I can accept that the main computer of the ship may require such technology... in which case, insulate it strictly from the rest of the ship by layers of armour; the main computer should be well protected anyway. But simple piloting and weapons commands? No. You don't need a plasma conduit to tell the ship 'shoot a torpedo at this target'.
But that wouldn't be gee-whiz, now would it...
Is it even a good idea to have ONE main computer? Wouldn't that be an awfully specific weak point compared to a distributed network of computers? If they did design ships that way, and some episode had a bad guy show up and gut the ship's computer systems by destroying a single isolated system... wouldn't we be chewing THAT out as an example of bad design and "more Trektardedness" or whatever?
Again, if Starfleet says it needs
distributed sets of high power computers throughout the ship in order for the ship to perform its functions, I believe them.
And this doesn't even address the reasonable possibility that the thing that explodes in a 'console explosion' isn't even the computer console itself, it's an unrelated system that just happens to be physically nearby.
If a water main breaks and a huge jet of water shoots out of the ground under a mailbox, flooding the surrounding intersection, are you going to criticize the city for building a mailbox that "runs on" high pressure water?
Because when a power main breaks and power shoots out of the wall under a computer console, zapping the surrounding area, you just did criticize the engineers for building a computer that "runs on" the stuff in the power main.
Elheru Aran wrote:Still an example of terrible engineering. I get the existence of high power systems, but if they're *designed* to explode-- and after a few blown consoles they should damn well know what's going on-- they should explode *away* from the bridge. Shield generator protecting the bridge pops? Fine, have an explosion on the hull near the bridge... but people in the bridge shouldn't be having the equivalent of a hand grenade going off in their faces.
Consoles don't actually blow up very often. Not even once a season- in other words, less than once a year on ships that are being shot at by a variety of dangerous phenomena many times in that year. The consoles aren't designed to explode, and it happens on unusual occasions. For all we know, there
are measures in place designed to reduce the risk of this happening, and we only see the rare times when those measures fail. Just like how real tanks and warships have systems in place to reduce the risk of their ammunition magazine catching fire and exploding... but sometimes that still happens.
Borgholio wrote:We already do this with tanks and armored vehicles. Any shell hit that penetrates the magazine will tend to explode outside the back of the tank instead of inside where it will turn the crew into chunky salsa. It's just good design practice.
The Russians build tanks that are unusually vulnerable to magazine explosions compared to Western tanks, for reasons that seem good to them- for instance, it lets them design the tank with a smaller target profile, making it less likely to get hit in the first place.
They may be wrong to do that. But it's not in any way unrealistic stupidity to intentionally design a system with less-than-perfect safety measures to protect the crew from
admittedly unlikely catastrophic equipment failures.
But I guess that goes right along with hull armor, having a bridge exposed on deck 1, and windows large enough to potentially decompress a whole deck in minutes as designs that they just didn't feel were worth it for some reason.[/quote]
Prometheus Unbound wrote:Then the Intrepid - jesus christ. Every time something taps the ship, there's sparks, explosions, consoles blowing out, white smoke (is that meant to be the fire suppressant system?) flying out everywhere, obscuring views... and spraying into the faces of people using the consoles. Literally spraying in their faces sometimes. Other times it just slowly vents like someone's put too much dry ice in a container behind the computer monitor. Weird thing to do but there we go.
What the hell kind of design philosophy is this? Seriously.
Well, I can rationalize it, which is not to say there isn't a stupid design choice going on.
And the Galaxy doesn't escape. Installing that new bridge module for Generations seems to have introduced literal rocks into the bulkheads. Literally rocks are embedded into the bulkheads and explode all over people.
The following is from the first shots after the initial two torpedoes. At this stage, Engineering is fine (although a hit was nearby).
The BoP fires on Engineering again:
And so of course, the new station added to the right of Helm immediately blow up from the side
And propels him across the bridge to land in front of the captain. That's over 8 feet. And a somersault. Naturally...
The Helm station then spontaneously explodes, knocking out poor Lt Jae...
That's about 3 seconds into the battle. The battle lasts 2 minutes. I think I could keep doing this but you get the idea.
Note that this is, as I recall, a Bird of Prey that can shoot right through
Enterprise's shields as if they weren't there. And the bridge is in an exposed location on the hull of the ship. That's almost ideal circumstances for enemy fire to cause damage and casualties on the bridge.
Voyager can have shields up just fine and yet have explosions 5 feet from the warp core. It's mental.
I know why it's done, but even a cursory glance must make some people go "eh?" The ship is nearly a kilometer long. It's huge. A torpedo on the back is not ... sorry, should not make anything on the bridge do anything to throw people out their chairs, kill them or otherwise incapacitate them.
Honestly yes, the only ship we've seen that should be that vulnerable is the
Defiant which is just plain physically smaller. An
Intrepid is smaller than a
Galaxy but not by that much.
The thing is, while there is not a plausible explanation for literally every gratuitous bridge injury in the whole series, there IS a plausible explanation for how explosions can be a thing that happens when the ship is under fire, and for why some of these explosions can be on the bridge.