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Illustrations

A part of sickbay that was supposed to connect Dr. Crusher’s office with the medical lab.

Original floorplan suggestion for the Stage 9 set, featuring a never-built briefing room in the upper left corner.

Stage 9 floorplan.

Recreation of the Sickbay set for Star Trek The Tour.

Designing Sickbay

The Sickbay set of The Next Generation had originally been built for the aborted Star Trek: Phase series. It was subsequently upgraded for the feature films and even became the seedy bar visited by Dr. McCoy in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Initially, the set doubled as conference lounge; in some Season One episodes, outlines of where the windows were hidden by carpet can be spotted. There was a small “medlab” attached to the set, beyond the doors next to Dr. Crusher’s office. It was crammed behind the Transporter Room and a difficult set to shoot, thus a new, separate and multipurpose laboratory was built for Season Three.

The set was used relatively unchaged for Star Trek V: The Final Frontier; for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, the set was more significantly redressed. After Star Trek: Generations, the set ended up as Star Trek: Voyager’s Sickbay. It would further appear in Star Trek: First Contact and Star Trek: Insurrection as the Sickbay of the Enterprise-E. Elements from this incarnation of the set were incorporated in the Sickbay of the USS Prometheus that appeared on the Star Trek: Voyager episode, “Message in a Bottle”. The set was torn down after Voyager wrapped in 2001.

Star Trek: Online

From October through December 2005, Andrew Probert, senior illustrator on Star Trek: The Next Generation, worked with the game designer and art director of Perpetual Entertainment’s Star Trek Online to design previously unseen interiors of a Galaxy class starship. The Star Trek Online project was later taken over by another company, yet Probert’s designs remain and give us a glimpse of what could have been.

Probert was asked to design the “Medical and Sciences” section of Deck 7, which featured besides several laboratories, Stellar Cartography, and Cetacean Ops, an extended Medical Complex.

   

The Medical Complex’ reception area; the main Sickbay ward; the Chief Medical Officer’s office.

   

Entry to the Isolation Ward; the Isolation Ward proper; the morgue.

 

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

Sources for this article include:
• Probert, A., “Perpetual Entertainment,” Probert Designs
• “Sickbay,” Memory Alpha
• Star Trek Stages History