Sunday 05 February 2012

Designing Engineering

The details of how warp drive operated were not yet fully devised at the time of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. It was not until Rick Sternbach began work on The Next Generation that it was decided Main Engineering would be where a matter/anti-matter reaction would form. The upgraded Enterprise had featured a similar vertical warp core as the Enterprise-D, and the thinking at the time was that the anti-matter would be in magnetic containment, centered around the keel at the bottom of the engineering hull, sending anti-matter up into the reaction chamber. The shaft above Engineering, however, did not make sense, as there was no place where the “matter” was coming from. For The Next Generation, Sternbach solved that problem by establishing deuterium tanks at the top of the warp core, which would provide the necessary matter.

“When the time came to do [The Next Generation],” says Sternbach, “Mike Okuda and I sat down over many pizzas and bowls of noodles to compile and clarify all of the information we had on impulse, warp, power generation, and so on. The original series touched on many of these concepts but wasn’t clear or consistent, so we wrote a lot of memos which eventually became the TNG Technical Manual.

The Engineering set of The Next Generation was a drastic redress of the Star Trek: The Motion Picture version, erected on Paramount Stage 9. The structural elements of the second floor were kept intact, while the rest of the set was rebuilt. Its floorplan was very open, with several corridors providing access to the room. From Season Two onward, however, walls were placed to block the main corridor passing through the set. The entire area was frequently redressed as a large corridor junction to allow for longer walking scenes.

 

N. Ottens
18 June 2007
Last updated: 24 October 2008

Sources for this article include:
• Reeves-Stevens, J. & G., Star Trek: The Next Generation—The Continuing Mission (1998)
• Star Trek Stages History