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Bridges in Star Trek are always exposed?
gibbon1182
Member Posts: 0 Arc User
Does anybody know why in Star Trek the bridges on the ships are almost exposed especially with Federation and Klingon ships. The Federation having a nice little dome on top of the saucer and the Klingons always have theirs in the very front of the ship. Wouldn't it make more sense to have the bridge in the ships most interior section like how the CIC is in Battlestar Galactica?
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I'm more confused as to why there's no actual bridge on the bridge. Other shows had em. :P
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Makes more sense to just target main engineering (warp core = big boom) or the nacelles.
Because Gene was an idiot.
This. It was one of the four Roddenberry Rules. The only one that was never broken, in fact, despite the fact that the other three (all regarding warp nacelles) all had reasonable technical explanations.
A Romulan Strike Team, Missing Farmers and an ancient base on a Klingon Border world. But what connects them? Find out in my First Foundary mission: 'The Jeroan Farmer Escapade'
I'd imagine a space faring vessel would probably work best as a sphere in shape. And the bridge in the middle, controlling the ship outward from there. With sensors and viewscreens available you can still have these big clear window-like views all over the bridge. And be nestled in a less exposed position. And the sphere makes more sense for space travel. No friction. And really all 360 degrees of direction for navigation.
That being said, this is Star Trek. It is what it is.
While it is true the bridges are set high over the main hull and forwards, they are normally encased in the heaviest materials (which using for the rest of the ship would be too expensive in terms of resources) and secondary shielding. While this makes the Bridge tougher than any other part of the ship, these are normally not enough to withstand more than a glancing hit from modern weaponry (nothing short of Neutronium can do that, and using such super-dense material for anything like the kind of hardening needed would make the ship have the gravitational pull of a small planet).
To offset this, ships often put the Bridge in a small area of the hull that is difficult to hit under battle conditions, so that enemy fire that is not a direct hit will pass harmlessly without contact/secondary damage. Most of all, the placement above the hull means that standard battle attitude will place the target below the ship, putting the entire hull of the ship between the enemy weapons and the bridge. This affords much more protection than if the Bridge were in the midsection of the hull, as long as the enemy is kept in the proper alignment.
Where the Bridge becomes exposed is when the shields fail and the enemy can get into position to target the Bridge without interference. In this case, usually through surprise attack or the disabling of the ship, the Bridge can be in serious danger of destruction, but this would be true no matter where on the ship it were placed in such a situation.
Now, some designs -do- place the Bridge inside the hull of the ship, usually because the designers regard unexpected attack as the norm, or just natural need to feel more secure with the hull of a ship around them. While this does offer better protection from the attacks which can expose a high-mounted Bridge and omnidirectional attacks such as area-effect damage, it also makes the Bridge more susceptable to internal dangers such as plasma leaks into the main hull and boarding actions, as well as providing only half to a third the protection to the bridge from hull strikes in normal battles. Also, as most weapons fire is directed at the center of target to ensure a hit, putting the Bridge in the middle of the hull tends to put it more directly in the line of fire.
The positioning of the Bridge can also include direct viewports to the front of the ship. While this is given as an aid to piloting the ship in docking manuevers and Fleet planetary operations, it is generally considered unnecessary due to the need for sensors to do anything at near-lightspeed and a dangerous distraction due to weapons impact flash. For this reason, even designs that feature these will either use realistic holographic displays simulating the viewports, or integrated blast compensation tinting.
Finally, given the power of weapons meant to deal damage across vast distances of space on targets moving at fractions of the speed of light, it is generally agreed that the hull of starships are simply not capable of doing more than blunting the damage from an attack. Almost every ship will rely on shields as the only means of resisting the terrible forces directed against the ship, and even 'shields down' targets still have integrated/local shields to give the hull the resistance to keep megaton-level energy strikes from simply turning the ship into drifting plasma.
Hope this helps
1. Nacelles must be in pairs (not necessarily one pair to a ship)
2. Paired nacelles must have 50% unobstructed line of sight between them to create a warp field
3. All nacelles must have unobstructed forward line of sight for the Bussard collectors to take in hydrogen.
4. The bridge must be top, centered on the primary hull, and exposed.
1 and 2 were broken all over the place in diagrams and wreckage, but the first operational Starfleet ship to break them was the Galaxy-X, which was handwaved away by the Galaxy's nacelles being wide and flat to accommodate two warp coils each, making each one an enclosed pair capable of producing a warp field.
The first technical manual also disregarded rule 1, giving different reasons for avoiding odd numbers but still allowing them. It did keep the pair rule as an optional way to increase field strength without increasing power use.
3 was first broken by the Excelsior, which has a partially obstructed forward LOS from the nacelles, but also doesn't have distinct bussard collectors (few of the TMP style ships do).
4 was never broken, except for the debatable case of a few kitbashes and diagrams where the bridge's actual position is unclear.
Incidentally, he also designed that recessed V at the front of the ship as the main deflector, but everyone animates it as a weapons port.
A Romulan Strike Team, Missing Farmers and an ancient base on a Klingon Border world. But what connects them? Find out in my First Foundary mission: 'The Jeroan Farmer Escapade'
"unexposed" may be a debatable term in the case of the Defiant's bridge.
http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/articles/design.htm
Probert talked about them at conventions years ago about how he and Roddenberry nailed them down before TNG.
^ this. And yes, that made the bridge on WWII aircraft carriers a particularly sweet target for kamikaze attacks.
So, if there's no window and no real need for a window, the bridge could be anywhere on the ship, and since the bridge has the command crew and all kinds of sensitive controls and other equipment, it ought to be in the bowls of the ship surrounded by as much protection as it can get. That way you avoid things like what happened in Nemesis where the forward part of the bridge got hit and the helmsman got sucked out a hull breach (as we all know, you should take any and all steps to avoid having Troi drive).
Seems to me that Battlestar Galactica had the right idea. I've never seen a schematic or anything but I got the impression that the CIC was deep in the middle of either the forward or mid section.
All due respect to Gene, but some naval ship design principles are just not effective when building a starship.
My character Tsin'xing
On the original, of course, it was immediately behind that row of windows on the top of the front section, right where it would be vulnerable if the Cylons hadn't had just that one red eye bouncing back and forth...
That said, the DN from the Star Trek manual had a center saucer mounted bridge:
http://www.cygnus-x1.net/links/lcars/uss-federation-class-dreadnought.php
That would be sheet 7 deck 7.
Parallels: my second mission for Fed aligned Romulans.
It entirely depends on how you handle the lack of gravity. Most sci fi handles it by artificially bending space or emitting gravitons or something. Decks are entirely arbitrary, they could have them intersecting at weird angles or some could be upside down, the horizontal floor to ventral arrangement makes things less confusing to navigate and makes for more consistent docking and planetary landing, but is arbitrary when you can create gravity artificially.
A real ship probably wouldn't have that - we're not sure if gravitons actually exist, but we're pretty sure you can't just emit them. They can use accellerational gravity, in which case they'd have vertical decks with the floor towards the aft. But that only works up to a point, as long as you can keep accelerating forever and don't have to turn around to decelerate (your floor would suddenly be the ceiling), and a ship with an Alcubierre drive would experience no acceleration. A ship like that is more likely to use rotational gravity, and have cylindrical decks, with axis pointing fore to aft and the floor towards the outer wall. Some alternate ideas are conical decks, primarily using rotational gravity but angling the decks inward towards the aft to offset engine acceleration, for a ship that can't accelerate constantly but also doesn't have the benefit of an Alcubierre drive.
They're still exposed. They don't have the 360 degree line of sight, but their ceiling is still against the dorsal hull.
Interesting...
The USS Kelvin from the 2009 movie seems to violate rule #1.
The USS Defiant from DS9 seems to violate rule #2
Also, is rule #2 the real reason Voyager was designed to have nacelles that rose up before warp flight?
-- Smoov
if your view screens fail the bridge has view ports so you can still pilot the ship without sensors and view screens.
if your computers fail on sense AND flight commands, you can pilot by joystick wired to the thrust systems.
and when all else fails and its time to get off the ship, the last place you want to be is at her center. some star fleet vessels have the bridge as a small captains yaht ship that can simply detach rapidly, not even having to eject life pods to save the bridge crew, the most valuable personel on board.
(is it a crappy design if the game let us target parts of ships? ya it is cause ild kill you with bridge head shots every game, but we cant do that)
It's the Tal'shiars doing, Sela lied.
Vengeance is born, with eternal scorn.
New Romulus rises.
the borg ship designs are the result of pure utter laziness, sphere, cube, diamond (tilted cube) and little rectangular coffns. o and their giant colony cylinadars. honestly not one bit of imagination went into making borg vessels!
It's the Tal'shiars doing, Sela lied.
Vengeance is born, with eternal scorn.
New Romulus rises.
And I say that because when George Kirk programmed a ramming course, we see the rear-end of Kelvin's nacelle/engineering hull light up with impulse power, while the upper one stayed dark (presumably due to damage).
But yeah, the Defiant is a bit iffy, considering the only line-of-sight between it's 'nacelles' is the hull of the ship. And I believe yes regarding Voyager Considering the Borg's utter lack of care/attention to aesthetics, do you really think they needed to put imagination into the ship's designs?
Been playing STO since Open Beta, and have never regarded anything as worse than 'meh', if only due to personal standards.