Star Trek: Starfleet Academy

[pengbuzz]

On 2/1/2026 at 2:42 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

Yeah, no matter how much I muse on it I can't seem to come up with a sane/cogent reason why the USS Athena's bridge would need to be as big as, or bigger than, DS9's Operations Center.

I remember in Star Trek III the size of the Excelsior's bridge, and how by the time we see it under Sulu's command in Star Trek VI, the bridge module had been replaced with one that was much more on-par with the ones we had seen previously.

The reason I'm focusing so much on this part is that from an ergonomic viewpoint, such a cavernous bridge is going to cause a great many issues with operating as the nerve center of a starship. For one thing: on previous bridges, people were well within earshot of one another, and in proximity to the captain's chair. They could clearly hear one another without having to strain or ask people to repeat themselves, and they didn't have to raise the voices to be heard (unless they were in battle and noise on the bridge made communication difficult). On the Athena's bridge, I can just imagine hearing "WHAT??!!" constantly (among other things), and folks asking one another to repeat themselves.

Another is the necessity of personnel moving from one bridge station to another. Especially in combat, you don't want to take any more time to get to a console than necessary. We've seen many times where someone at another station has had to take over for an injured/ incapacitated crewmember, let alone getting medical aid to them. While it may be only a matter of a few more moments, we've seen that seconds can count in these situations And if the bridge is that big, then how large is the engineering bay? Is it so big that the time needed to cross from one station to another becomes ridiculous?

When a designer makes something so big on the inside that you could time how long it takes to cross it with a calendar, maybe it's time to sit down with them and discuss a potentially more fulfilling career other than starship design.

Finally: larger spaces require more energy, more atmospheric components, and more maintenance. We're not just talking power for lights and consoles, but SIF/IDF reinforcement energies, gravity control, atmospheric consumables delivery systems and CO2 scrubbing mechanisms, and heating/cooling power. A larger area is going to take more of everything.

I know some of these issues may seem minor, but they add up to a considerable ding in the energy budget of a starship, as well as maintenance/ repair and practicality overall. I'm sure also these aren't the only issues; just the ones I could think of.

Thoughts?

[Big s]

4 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

I remember in Star Trek III the size of the Excelsior's bridge, and how by the time we see it under Sulu's command in Star Trek VI, the bridge module had been replaced with one that was much more on-par with the ones we had seen previously.

The reason I'm focusing so much on this part is that from an ergonomic viewpoint, such a cavernous bridge is going to cause a great many issues with operating as the nerve center of a starship. For one thing: on previous bridges, people were well within earshot of one another, and in proximity to the captain's chair. They could clearly hear one another without having to strain or ask people to repeat themselves, and they didn't have to raise the voices to be heard (unless they were in battle and noise on the bridge made communication difficult). On the Athena's bridge, I can just imagine hearing "WHAT??!!" constantly (among other things), and folks asking one another to repeat themselves.

Another is the necessity of personnel moving from one bridge station to another. Especially in combat, you don't want to take any more time to get to a console than necessary. We've seen many times where someone at another station has had to take over for an injured/ incapacitated crewmember, let alone getting medical aid to them. While it may be only a matter of a few more moments, we've seen that seconds can count in these situations And if the bridge is that big, then how large is the engineering bay? Is it so big that the time needed to cross from one station to another becomes ridiculous?

When a designer makes something so big on the inside that you could time how long it takes to cross it with a calendar, maybe it's time to sit down with them and discuss a potentially more fulfilling career other than starship design.

Finally: larger spaces require more energy, more atmospheric components, and more maintenance. We're not just talking power for lights and consoles, but SIF/IDF reinforcement energies, gravity control, atmospheric consumables delivery systems and CO2 scrubbing mechanisms, and heating/cooling power. A larger area is going to take more of everything.

I know some of these issues may seem minor, but they add up to a considerable ding in the energy budget of a starship, as well as maintenance/ repair and practicality overall. I'm sure also these aren't the only issues; just the ones I could think of.

Thoughts?

Makes sense. Not sure why they really need such a large bridge crew so far in the future, but I could see things being spaced out a bit if they were all using headsets. As far as resources, I’m not sure how advanced technically they are with recycling air and what all in all they need to keep the ship going, since they could easily have a system that could change the carbon dioxide back to breathable oxygen like in a miniaturized atmosphere type of system. I just figure that far in the future that ships on longs journeys would develop something like that. I do think the bigger issues would be overall energy use like lighting and antigravity.

As far as injuries, I always thought that that kind of stuff was entertaining, but silly when you take the time to think about it. They would get into combat and random consoles would explode or people wouldn’t be sitting with seat belts and just fall all over the place. At least with a silly anime like Gundam they would occasionally put on full space suits just in case of a hull breach…..sometimes.

[pengbuzz]

2 hours ago, Big s said:

Makes sense. Not sure why they really need such a large bridge crew so far in the future, but I could see things being spaced out a bit if they were all using headsets. As far as resources, I’m not sure how advanced technically they are with recycling air and what all in all they need to keep the ship going, since they could easily have a system that could change the carbon dioxide back to breathable oxygen like in a miniaturized atmosphere type of system. I just figure that far in the future that ships on longs journeys would develop something like that. I do think the bigger issues would be overall energy use like lighting and antigravity.

As far as injuries, I always thought that that kind of stuff was entertaining, but silly when you take the time to think about it. They would get into combat and random consoles would explode or people wouldn’t be sitting with seat belts and just fall all over the place. At least with a silly anime like Gundam they would occasionally put on full space suits just in case of a hull breach…..sometimes.

Yeah; I just figure why waste energy and resources on changing excess air back when it isn't needed?

[Big s]

13 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

Yeah; I just figure why waste energy and resources on changing excess air back when it isn't needed?

Yeah, I’m not that familiar with how all the tech in modern star trek works, I just figured that by that point in the future there might be an almost natural way to do it. They need food, so carbon helps the plants and the plants change the atmosphere automatically or something along those lines and more efficient than a modern concept and not really sucking up extra energy. But like I said, I’m not really familiar with how their tech works and haven’t really watched any trek shows religiously since next generation 

[sketchley]

10 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

I remember in Star Trek III the size of the Excelsior's bridge, and how by the time we see it under Sulu's command in Star Trek VI, the bridge module had been replaced with one that was much more on-par with the ones we had seen previously.

The reason I'm focusing so much on this part is that from an ergonomic viewpoint, such a cavernous bridge is going to cause a great many issues with operating as the nerve center of a starship. For one thing: on previous bridges, people were well within earshot of one another, and in proximity to the captain's chair. They could clearly hear one another without having to strain or ask people to repeat themselves, and they didn't have to raise the voices to be heard (unless they were in battle and noise on the bridge made communication difficult). On the Athena's bridge, I can just imagine hearing "WHAT??!!" constantly (among other things), and folks asking one another to repeat themselves.

Another is the necessity of personnel moving from one bridge station to another. Especially in combat, you don't want to take any more time to get to a console than necessary. We've seen many times where someone at another station has had to take over for an injured/ incapacitated crewmember, let alone getting medical aid to them. While it may be only a matter of a few more moments, we've seen that seconds can count in these situations And if the bridge is that big, then how large is the engineering bay? Is it so big that the time needed to cross from one station to another becomes ridiculous?

When a designer makes something so big on the inside that you could time how long it takes to cross it with a calendar, maybe it's time to sit down with them and discuss a potentially more fulfilling career other than starship design.

Finally: larger spaces require more energy, more atmospheric components, and more maintenance. We're not just talking power for lights and consoles, but SIF/IDF reinforcement energies, gravity control, atmospheric consumables delivery systems and CO2 scrubbing mechanisms, and heating/cooling power. A larger area is going to take more of everything.

I know some of these issues may seem minor, but they add up to a considerable ding in the energy budget of a starship, as well as maintenance/ repair and practicality overall. I'm sure also these aren't the only issues; just the ones I could think of.

Thoughts?

You've made excellent points.  It makes no sense—especially compared to the bridges and command centres in modern naval vessels.

It also lends credence to an earlier post about the bridge being a redressing of a large set that is (or was) also being used as a large room.  That, or they wanted plenty of space between the work stations to set up and move the cameras around while filming! 🤷‍♂️

The only other cavernous command centre in live-action that comes to mind is the control room in the film "Elysium".  It's very dark, and has multiple levels, but that may be stylistic choices to emphasize the villain on her throne, so to speak.  The plants are a nice touch, and all the underlings have radio earbuds to facilitate communication.

 

Around 2:12

 

Edited Wednesday at 03:45 AM by sketchley

[Seto Kaiba]

10 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

I remember in Star Trek III the size of the Excelsior's bridge, and how by the time we see it under Sulu's command in Star Trek VI, the bridge module had been replaced with one that was much more on-par with the ones we had seen previously.

The bridge module Excelsior had as a transwarp system testbed wasn't that much bigger than post-commissioning bridge it entered fleet service with.

Of course, it also makes sense for a testbed starship to have extra stations on the bridge to monitor all of its various systems during testing.  (Though it actually had fewer people stationed on it than the fleet service version did.  NX-2000 Excelsior's bridge seated 13, the service version had 17.)

 

10 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

The reason I'm focusing so much on this part is that from an ergonomic viewpoint, such a cavernous bridge is going to cause a great many issues with operating as the nerve center of a starship. For one thing: on previous bridges, people were well within earshot of one another, and in proximity to the captain's chair. They could clearly hear one another without having to strain or ask people to repeat themselves, and they didn't have to raise the voices to be heard (unless they were in battle and noise on the bridge made communication difficult). On the Athena's bridge, I can just imagine hearing "WHAT??!!" constantly (among other things), and folks asking one another to repeat themselves.

Another is the necessity of personnel moving from one bridge station to another. Especially in combat, you don't want to take any more time to get to a console than necessary. We've seen many times where someone at another station has had to take over for an injured/ incapacitated crewmember, let alone getting medical aid to them. While it may be only a matter of a few more moments, we've seen that seconds can count in these situations And if the bridge is that big, then how large is the engineering bay? Is it so big that the time needed to cross from one station to another becomes ridiculous?

It took me a bit to figure out why the Academy-class starship's bridge feels so uselessly huge.  It was so stupidly obvious I can't believe that I missed it.

Look at the walls.

Up to now, almost every Starfleet starship bridge we've seen has been liberally festooned with consoles around the outer perimeter of the room.  This goes all the way back to the TOS-era Enterprise where every inch of wall that wasn't the viewscreen or turbolift door was occupied by a console of some description.  This tendency was carried over into TMP's refit, and from there into practically every other Federation starship design.  There are a handful of exceptions like the Ambassador, Galaxy, and Olympia-classes that put most of their consoles across the rear 90 degrees or so of the bridge, but practically every Federation starship before or since has positively ringed the bridge with consoles.

What's different in the Academy-class USS Athena is that the bridge is still practically a ring of consoles... but the walls have moved outward 6-10 feet on each side, leaving all the previously wall-mounted consoles freestanding in the middle of the room.  The actual bridge is an island sitting in the middle of Deck 1, with a huge walkway around it like it's a zen garden in a Japanese estate.  

Instead of wall mounted consoles, the bridge seems to have five viewscreens around almost the entire perimeter of the room.  The one mounted starboard aft seems to be pulling similar duty to the big Master Systems Displays on older starships, while the others don't seem to be being used for anything.  

So there's just this massive ring of NOTHING around the actual bridge... and because they're using holo-comms instead of the viewscreen, the actual viewscreen is pretty much surplus to requirements 90% of the time.

 

10 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

Finally: larger spaces require more energy, more atmospheric components, and more maintenance. We're not just talking power for lights and consoles, but SIF/IDF reinforcement energies, gravity control, atmospheric consumables delivery systems and CO2 scrubbing mechanisms, and heating/cooling power. A larger area is going to take more of everything.

All things considered, I'd assume that's a negligible concern at worst.

After all, in the 32nd century Starfleet ships have clearly advanced considerably from the 23rd and 24th century designs we know.  They've been able to delegate a lot of repair and maintenance work to autonomous robots, they've made programmable nanotechnology a core feature of almost every part of a ship's structure down to things as mundane as the crew quarters furniture, replicators have been commonplace for almost a millennium, and surely they've improved the output and efficiency of things like the impulse reactors and warp core in the intervening centuries.  The Athena has, by any reckoning, at least two warp cores and possibly more than that depending on how "disconnected nacelles" work... given that we've seen that at the very least the Saucer section is capable of independent warp travel without the nacelles or engineering section.  If they've gone all the way back towards early TOS explanations, the Academy-class may well be able to lean on THREE warp cores worth of output to provide for its energy needs.  (Which makes Braka's attempt to steal one of them feel less like a major crime and more like pickpocketing.)  Shipwide holograms have been something ships could manage on the energy budget of the late 24th century, so that's clearly no problem.  

(Back before the "warp core" was invented as a concept, TOS Main Engineering was the impulse reactor room at the back of the saucer section and the warp drive's power system was inside the nacelles themselves.  The whole reasoning behind the nacelles being a thing was that any power source potent enough to warp space and time must be radioactive AF, and thus should be kept away from inhabited sections of the ship and be jettisoned if needed.  If the nacelles are powered individually like that, and the saucer has its own warp drive as we saw recently, that's 3 warp cores if we assume the secondary hull lacks one or at least two if they're doing things the newer way.) 

They've got enough spare juice kicking around to give everyone a personal transporter and tricorder built into their commbadge and officers on space stations are shown literally unmaking the bed at the molecular level each morning.

[Roy Focker]

Mork.

[pengbuzz]

On 2/4/2026 at 12:07 AM, Seto Kaiba said:

The bridge module Excelsior had as a transwarp system testbed wasn't that much bigger than post-commissioning bridge it entered fleet service with.

Of course, it also makes sense for a testbed starship to have extra stations on the bridge to monitor all of its various systems during testing.  (Though it actually had fewer people stationed on it than the fleet service version did.  NX-2000 Excelsior's bridge seated 13, the service version had 17.)

No, but they did scale it back down regardless and I suspect it was because the ergonomics the classic bridge setup possesses begins to lose cohesion with larger spaces.

 

On 2/4/2026 at 12:07 AM, Seto Kaiba said:

It took me a bit to figure out why the Academy-class starship's bridge feels so uselessly huge.  It was so stupidly obvious I can't believe that I missed it.

Look at the walls.

Up to now, almost every Starfleet starship bridge we've seen has been liberally festooned with consoles around the outer perimeter of the room.  This goes all the way back to the TOS-era Enterprise where every inch of wall that wasn't the viewscreen or turbolift door was occupied by a console of some description.  This tendency was carried over into TMP's refit, and from there into practically every other Federation starship design.  There are a handful of exceptions like the Ambassador, Galaxy, and Olympia-classes that put most of their consoles across the rear 90 degrees or so of the bridge, but practically every Federation starship before or since has positively ringed the bridge with consoles.

What's different in the Academy-class USS Athena is that the bridge is still practically a ring of consoles... but the walls have moved outward 6-10 feet on each side, leaving all the previously wall-mounted consoles freestanding in the middle of the room.  The actual bridge is an island sitting in the middle of Deck 1, with a huge walkway around it like it's a zen garden in a Japanese estate.  

Instead of wall mounted consoles, the bridge seems to have five viewscreens around almost the entire perimeter of the room.  The one mounted starboard aft seems to be pulling similar duty to the big Master Systems Displays on older starships, while the others don't seem to be being used for anything.  

So there's just this massive ring of NOTHING around the actual bridge... and because they're using holo-comms instead of the viewscreen, the actual viewscreen is pretty much surplus to requirements 90% of the time.

Echoing the massive ring of nothing that the writers seem to have inherited from Discovery.

 

On 2/4/2026 at 12:07 AM, Seto Kaiba said:

All things considered, I'd assume that's a negligible concern at worst.

After all, in the 32nd century Starfleet ships have clearly advanced considerably from the 23rd and 24th century designs we know.  They've been able to delegate a lot of repair and maintenance work to autonomous robots, they've made programmable nanotechnology a core feature of almost every part of a ship's structure down to things as mundane as the crew quarters furniture, replicators have been commonplace for almost a millennium, and surely they've improved the output and efficiency of things like the impulse reactors and warp core in the intervening centuries.  The Athena has, by any reckoning, at least two warp cores and possibly more than that depending on how "disconnected nacelles" work... given that we've seen that at the very least the Saucer section is capable of independent warp travel without the nacelles or engineering section.  If they've gone all the way back towards early TOS explanations, the Academy-class may well be able to lean on THREE warp cores worth of output to provide for its energy needs.  (Which makes Braka's attempt to steal one of them feel less like a major crime and more like pickpocketing.)  Shipwide holograms have been something ships could manage on the energy budget of the late 24th century, so that's clearly no problem.  

(Back before the "warp core" was invented as a concept, TOS Main Engineering was the impulse reactor room at the back of the saucer section and the warp drive's power system was inside the nacelles themselves.  The whole reasoning behind the nacelles being a thing was that any power source potent enough to warp space and time must be radioactive AF, and thus should be kept away from inhabited sections of the ship and be jettisoned if needed.  If the nacelles are powered individually like that, and the saucer has its own warp drive as we saw recently, that's 3 warp cores if we assume the secondary hull lacks one or at least two if they're doing things the newer way.) 

They've got enough spare juice kicking around to give everyone a personal transporter and tricorder built into their commbadge and officers on space stations are shown literally unmaking the bed at the molecular level each morning.

While all that may be true, it still expends fuel (deuterium/ antideuterium) which is extra mass they must carry (the old conundrum more mass= more fuel= more mass). I'm not saying it'll "make or break the ship" per se, but that the thinking behind this is not solid by any measure and lacks the fairly tight economy of some previous starships.

[Seto Kaiba]

2 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

No, but they did scale it back down regardless and I suspect it was because the ergonomics the classic bridge setup possesses begins to lose cohesion with larger spaces.

I'm not sure that necessarily even implies anything.

After all, the Excelsior's prototype-era bridge wasn't that much bigger than the regular Constitution-class refit bridge of the era or many of the more modern bridge designs that would follow and Starfleet ships of that era seem to swap out bridge modules with a fairly high frequency.  (This, of course, being an in-universe justification for having struck sets, redressed or modified sets to the point of being unable to revert them, or simply built more advanced sets to replace the ones previously used.) 

Spoiler

For example, the Enterprise-A's bridge we see at the end of Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home is a fairly simple redress of the refit Enterprise bridge set used in Star Trek III: the Search for Spock.  The refit Enterprise bridge and other surviving sets were subsequently redressed and reused in multiple other capacities in Star Trek: the Next Generation.  So much so that they could not be returned to their original form and new sets had to be constructed for Star Trek V: the Final Frontier.  The Enterprise-A's new bridge set for Star Trek V: the Final Frontier was a more modern design that included gimbals allowing the set to be physically shaken instead of relying on shaking the camera, and that new bridge set would be redressed twice for use as the bridge of the Enterprise-A and the Excelsior in Star Trek VI: the Undiscovered Country.  (The weird little pedestal at the foot of Kirk's chair and the tea table in front of Sulu's are both covers for the bridge set's primary pivot.)

The change in the bridge design may have nothing whatsoever to do with ergonomics and simply reflect whatever Starfleet settled on as a standard operational design or include some unspecified modernizations.

 

2 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

While all that may be true, it still expends fuel (deuterium/ antideuterium) which is extra mass they must carry (the old conundrum more mass= more fuel= more mass). I'm not saying it'll "make or break the ship" per se, but that the thinking behind this is not solid by any measure and lacks the fairly tight economy of some previous starships.

True, but at the same time it's also true that fuel has never really been a concern for Starfleet ships in normal operations in Star Trek's various series and movies.

Fuel concerns only ever really come up prominently in Voyager and Enterprise.  In both cases, those are stories depicting a Starfleet ship ill-equipped for its current situation that is operating many months or years away from the nearest friendly ship or starbase that might be able to replenish its stores. 

Mind you, it's worth noting that in both of chose cases it's also true that the entire plot hinges on a critical research failure.  It's always deuterium they're running out of, and while deuterium is rare relative to elemental hydrogen it's simply not that rare. 

Spoiler

It accounts for about 0.02% of all hydrogen on Earth.  Replenishing deuterium stocks should be laughably easy for a starship.  Not only can deuterium be had in abundance in ordinary water found on planets or in comets, it can also be obtained in large quantities in nebular gases.  It's just a matter of collecting up semiheavy water and/or hydrogen deuteride and separating it... which we can do easily with today's technology.  At no point should running out of deuterium ever be a concern for a starship.  

Previous writers understood this point.  So much so that every single Federation starship we've yet seen has been equipped with a system for collecting usable particles like deuterium from space as the ship travels.  That's the Bussard collectors.  The glowing red bits on the front of the warp nacelles.  They're giant magnetic field projectors that hoover up hydrogen and deuterium and other things that can be converted into fuel or used elsewhere in the starship as it goes.

Anti-deuterium, however... that should be what they're worrying about.  You can't just rock up to any planet or moon with water and expect to find THAT.  You have to MAKE that in a particle accelerator.  Of course this setting has room-temperature superconductors and reactors that produce tens of billions of gigawatts of power so it probably is not THAT hard for them.  (Technical manuals suggest that Federation Starships are absolutely equipped to manufacture their own antimatter if need be, but it's not anything like as efficient as the passively-powered systems used by Federation fuel depots.)

 

The implication going back as far as TOS - and explicitly confirmed in the tech manuals and some onscreen okudagrams - is that a Federation starship typically carries enough fuel to operate away from base for months if not years.  Even the Danube-class runabout in TNG "Timescape" is said to have enough fuel for a month and a half (over 47 days) for each engine.

And given that mass does not impact acceleration or flight performance for these starships due to the way they get around by bending space-time and the amount of other stuff they're carrying, a bit more fuel mass seems like a negligible concern at best.

[pengbuzz]

42 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

I'm not sure that necessarily even implies anything.

After all, the Excelsior's prototype-era bridge wasn't that much bigger than the regular Constitution-class refit bridge of the era or many of the more modern bridge designs that would follow and Starfleet ships of that era seem to swap out bridge modules with a fairly high frequency.  (This, of course, being an in-universe justification for having struck sets, redressed or modified sets to the point of being unable to revert them, or simply built more advanced sets to replace the ones previously used.) 

  Reveal hidden contents

For example, the Enterprise-A's bridge we see at the end of Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home is a fairly simple redress of the refit Enterprise bridge set used in Star Trek III: the Search for Spock.  The refit Enterprise bridge and other surviving sets were subsequently redressed and reused in multiple other capacities in Star Trek: the Next Generation.  So much so that they could not be returned to their original form and new sets had to be constructed for Star Trek V: the Final Frontier.  The Enterprise-A's new bridge set for Star Trek V: the Final Frontier was a more modern design that included gimbals allowing the set to be physically shaken instead of relying on shaking the camera, and that new bridge set would be redressed twice for use as the bridge of the Enterprise-A and the Excelsior in Star Trek VI: the Undiscovered Country.  (The weird little pedestal at the foot of Kirk's chair and the tea table in front of Sulu's are both covers for the bridge set's primary pivot.)

The change in the bridge design may have nothing whatsoever to do with ergonomics and simply reflect whatever Starfleet settled on as a standard operational design or include some unspecified modernizations.

I just checked, and I'll concede the point about Excelsior's bridge: the missing handrails on the NX-version made it look more cavernous:

 

 

(pics courtesy of Ex Astra Scientia)

42 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

True, but at the same time it's also true that fuel has never really been a concern for Starfleet ships in normal operations in Star Trek's various series and movies.

Fuel concerns only ever really come up prominently in Voyager and Enterprise.  In both cases, those are stories depicting a Starfleet ship ill-equipped for its current situation that is operating many months or years away from the nearest friendly ship or starbase that might be able to replenish its stores. 

Mind you, it's worth noting that in both of chose cases it's also true that the entire plot hinges on a critical research failure.  It's always deuterium they're running out of, and while deuterium is rare relative to elemental hydrogen it's simply not that rare. 

  Reveal hidden contents

It accounts for about 0.02% of all hydrogen on Earth.  Replenishing deuterium stocks should be laughably easy for a starship.  Not only can deuterium be had in abundance in ordinary water found on planets or in comets, it can also be obtained in large quantities in nebular gases.  It's just a matter of collecting up semiheavy water and/or hydrogen deuteride and separating it... which we can do easily with today's technology.  At no point should running out of deuterium ever be a concern for a starship.  

Previous writers understood this point.  So much so that every single Federation starship we've yet seen has been equipped with a system for collecting usable particles like deuterium from space as the ship travels.  That's the Bussard collectors.  The glowing red bits on the front of the warp nacelles.  They're giant magnetic field projectors that hoover up hydrogen and deuterium and other things that can be converted into fuel or used elsewhere in the starship as it goes.

Anti-deuterium, however... that should be what they're worrying about.  You can't just rock up to any planet or moon with water and expect to find THAT.  You have to MAKE that in a particle accelerator.  Of course this setting has room-temperature superconductors and reactors that produce tens of billions of gigawatts of power so it probably is not THAT hard for them.  (Technical manuals suggest that Federation Starships are absolutely equipped to manufacture their own antimatter if need be, but it's not anything like as efficient as the passively-powered systems used by Federation fuel depots.)

 

The implication going back as far as TOS - and explicitly confirmed in the tech manuals and some onscreen okudagrams - is that a Federation starship typically carries enough fuel to operate away from base for months if not years.  Even the Danube-class runabout in TNG "Timescape" is said to have enough fuel for a month and a half (over 47 days) for each engine.

And given that mass does not impact acceleration or flight performance for these starships due to the way they get around by bending space-time and the amount of other stuff they're carrying, a bit more fuel mass seems like a negligible concern at best.

My references on this was the TNG Technical guide by Rick Sternbach, where he went in-detail about the Galaxy class' fuel supplies. And yeah, it was antimatter th at I was more concerned about. But perhaps I'm just getting too wound up in the details here, so I think I'm just going to let this go.

But I still think the Athena's  bridge is stupid big. 

[Seto Kaiba]

New episode's out.  "Series Acclimation Mil".  Guess we're getting a Sam-focused episode.

 

Spoiler

And we are not off to a great start as someone (implicitly Sam) is doodling on the episode credits in pink marker with handwriting appropriate for a small child.

We get one interesting piece of trivia out of the opening narration.

"In the last thousand years, the Federation has encountered 4,633 sentient species."

 

The episode opens with Sam narrating over herself walking through a corridor on the USS Athena, and I am once again struck by the thought...

Does nobody go to class at this Starfleet Academy?

This whole scene is shot the same way you'd shoot a scene of someone walking down the hall of a high school on the way to their locker between classes.  Complete with some very modern, very out-of-place pop music.  There's also a lot of that same "scene from a college applications brochure" going on.  We see a group of girls sitting and chatting by a sofa, with half of them sitting on the floor for some reason.  They've carrying potted plants around with them.  There's a bunch of students wearing totally unmodified modern backpacks looking as out of place as you'd expect on a spaceship 1,000 years into the future.  A bunch of other students are carrying rolled-up yoga mats for reasons unclear.  There's a bunch of cadets holding sports equipment too, including several basketballs.

Spoiler

This shot was probably pretty damned expensive, considering how many aliens are in it.  Several of whom are in HEAVY prosthetic makeup too.  

All so Kerrice Brooks's character can walk towards the camera and point out that there's only one of her, and then introduce herself.

Was a dance segment with a hip-hop beat really required here?  

Sure, Kerrice Brooks is a black actress but is there a reason to treat Series Acclimation Mil like a stereotypical token black character on a sitcom?  She's playing a sentient hologram from a planet populated by AIs who haven't seen a human in generations.  It feels weird in a subtly racist way, like how they had to make Michael Burnham an ex-convict.  

 

There's another easter egg or two in her introduction.  When she introduces her homeworld of Kasq, the other worlds listed in the "Holo Matrix Specs" dropdown menu that shows up on the right side of the screen are:  Earth, Vulcan (not Ni'Var!), Orion, Denoblia (misspelled Denobula!), Andoria, Bajor, Delta, Ferengar (misspelled Ferenginar?), Hirogen Prime, Kazon Prime, Risa, and Betazed.  

Most of those were already Federation members or, in the case of Ferenginar, in the process of applying to join the Federation as far back as 2381 (LDS: "Parth Ferengi's Heart Place")... but the implication that somewhere along the way the Hirogen and Kazon got their sh*t together enough to join the Federation is WAY more interesting than whatever's going on here.  

Spoiler

What I'm not going to do is knock the explanation by Sam that she is an artificial lifeform with a holographic body.  That's needed context for any new viewers who might not have seen Star Trek: Voyager which piloted referring to self-aware holograms as "Photonics".

...

...

...

Wait a ding-dang minute... I have an insane idea.  Are the Kasqians leftover sentient holograms from the whole "Voyager gave the Hirogen holodeck technology so they'd F off" situation?  If so, that sh*t is WILD and I am here for it.

Sam is apparently just 217 days old at the time of this story.  And we're treated to a rather cringeworthy montage of her various nicknames bestowed by other cadets.  

Honestly though, what's worse is the constant condescending childishness of her explanation.  She has to explain, via infographics with childish handwriting, that she's meant to be her people's emissary to the Federation... which makes her a diplomat and is therefore a "big job".  The audience aren't Pakleds, please assume a bit more intelligence than that.  OK, having looked at the daily news some audience members might be Pakleds but let's assume they're at least more intelligent than the average Pakled.

The idea of a sentient AI needing to explain organic behavior to her creators is itself a fascinating premise I hope they actually DO something with.  Sadly, it seems to be limited to explaining basic biology, the very concept of Starfleet, and pranks?  

Spoiler

We're treated to Darem being cajoled into eating a "weird hash" composed of chicken, bananas, and "yeel pudding". 

 

You are NOT hurting my feelings with the constant lore dumps though.

Spoiler

Darem's profile gets thrown up onscreen... but it seems to contain at least one error.

According to this, Darem REymi is a science major... but his unform trim is command red.

We learn that he was born on Stardate 851095.82, that he graduated from Khionian Royal High on Stardate 868490.0, and that he is actually allegedly the kind of elite student you'd expect at Starfleet Academy with academic distinctions in mathematics, physics, and biology, that he's been commended by the Khionian government for his volunteer work, and that he received glowing letters of recommendation from various educators and government officials on his homeworld when he applied to the Academy.

It also shows his true appearance, a blue barmy fish man.

We even get a scientific explanation for why he hates bananas.... and weirder still, it's scientifically sound.  His body produces polyphenol oxidase as a part of its digestive process, the compound that causes bananas to go all brown and mushy.  Basically, they rot as soon as he puts them in his mouth... which would make anyone dislike them I suppose.  

That his species vomit is glitter is less scientific.

 

We get to see a Kasqian in its "natural" state... which is a wholly non-humanoid mess of energy strands that hovers in the middle of the room.  (One has to wonder why Sam is taking personal calls in the middle of the atrium instead of in her quarters, but whatever.)

Spoiler

Nosy buggers, apparently  They interrogate her weekly about all manner of nonsense.  Lately, her music elective.  Her choice of instrument is apparently a theremin?  I guess that's fair.  I'd be asking questions about that too.  Apparently it appeals to her because of its unique electromagnetic operation.

We learn that Kasqians were created as non-sentient holographic servants who gradually developed sentience after their creators disappeared.  The reason Sam exists is the Kasqians are both intensely curious about the rest of the galaxy and deathly afraid of being enslaved.

More childish generic school drama antics ensue... like a "turf war" over the atrium between the War College and Academy... incited because the War College is now forced to use the Academy's classrooms due to the "stupid talking plants" infesting the war college grounds.

Honestly, viewing it through the warped lens of a not-all-there AI attempting to understand and, worse, explain Human behavior to another AI that has never even seen humans does make the show's rampant stupidity a bit easier to tolerate.  Played for laughs in Sam's observations of Caleb lusting over the Betazoid president's daughter still.  Sam has a great deal of that early TNG Data level bluntness going on... but it doesn't land quite as effectively without the studied neutrality of Data's every remark.  Sam is... too human?

Spoiler

That an eavesdropping Orion cadet leans in for a sniff when Sam raises the subject of pheromones is, I'll admit, a little bit funny.  They got a chuckle out of me with that one.  I guess his would be a nose that knows.

Really getting a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy vibe from this episode, and the Kasqians in particular.  Particularly its fondness for overlaying infographics and emojis.

The seminar for "Confronting the Unexplainable" has a bunch of easter eggs hiding in it too.  The Guardian of Forever is one of the items on display.  Another is the Ben Sisko thing from the series teaser trailer.  The class is taught by a new character played by Tawny Newsome (LDS: Beckett Mariner).

Spoiler

She's playing a Cardassian Starfleet officer named Illa, who runs the Confronting the Unexplainable seminar that Sam's creators have ordered her to take.

Sam clearly does not get the point of the class, but selects Ben Sisko as her midterm project because she's never met another emissary before.

Apparently even now, eight centuries after the fact, the Bajorans still haven't made peace with the fact that Ben Sisko thought the emissary role was bullsh*t for most of his time in their space and venerate him as one of the Prophets now. 

Spoiler

The Academy conveniently has a "Bajor club".  Which seems to be either a religious outreach program or just straight-up a Bajoran church group.

Sam walks in and immediately dismisses their religious belief as nonsense, asking for something more solid as proof.  This, in an unusual bout of realism, gets her sent to the chancellor's office for discipline and Captain Ake tries to actually explain the situation properly for once.  Apparently Sisko's so venerated on Bajor they don't even allow art of him as a person... saying he's transcended humanoid form.  There's apparently even a museum dedicated to him in New Orleans.

Kelrec, meanwhile, is diverting power from the Academy to heat the ocean for an incoming diplomatic visit that he's freaking out over because he's desperate to make a good impression.  Ake strikes a bargain to help him with his diplomatic event if he stops screwing around with the Academy's power systems.

Sam loads up the Sisko Museum's digital collection... which is replete with more easter eggs and callbacks.  We see several promotional photos from DS9 including the station itself, the Defiant, the sign for Sisko's Creole Kitchen in New Orleans, the inside of the Bajoran wormhome, a baseball, glove, and cap with the "Niners" logo, the Orb of the Emissary, a typewriter (presumably Benny Russel's?), and some other odds and ends.  She tries talking the Orb of the Emissary's hologram for some reason.  We also get to see a geneology of the Sisko family that mentions, prominently, the Siskos seen in DS9 including Sarah, Jennifer, his father Joseph, and son Jake.  We get to see an archival hologram of an interview with a grown-up Jake Sisko (role reprised by original actor Cirroc Lofton).  Sisko's child with his second wife Kassidy is conspicuously missing.

The idea of a Cardassian Starfleet officer with strongly held opinions on the subject of tomato in gumbo recipes is... something.

Sam is winning points with me for being mildly put off by the idea of just biting into a raw tomato like it's an apple despite being a noncorporeal piece of software that does not eat. 

A tomato is not a handfruit, people!  The line must be drawn here!  This far! And no further!😅

 

Spoiler

Honestly, for an episode that is leaning as hard as it is on the borrowed gloss of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and infamous foodie Benjamin Lafayette Sisko, it is surprising that nobody has made a jab about replicator food.

He and his father started that whole thing about how replicated food doesn't taste good/right.  Well, them and Michael Eddington.  Sisko was a food snob raised by a chef and Eddington was a Maquis luddite, but people just ran with the idea that "Replicated food = bad" for some reason even though TNG always presented replicated food as actually quite good (like that one alcoholic from the 21st century who praised the replicator martini as the best he's ever had, or Troi's adoration of replicator ice cream).

The cadets seem to quite enjoy the replicated Creole cooking.  It's somehow unsurprising that Kraag is thrilled to no end to have spicy food.  They got another chuckle out of me with Kraag very enthusiastically noting that raktajino is a Klingon drink... and then very diplomatically noting that Sam's attempt at it is "horrendous" but that he respects her for trying.

Reymi found a bar where Sisko allegedly got punched by a Vulcan.  Five'll get you twenty that was Solok.  Apparently the original bar "The Landing Pad" is long gone but there is another standing on the same site that is effective its successor.  So they're going drinking.

 

Honestly, the less we have of Captain Ake and the professors in this series the better it seems to get.  Which is funny, given that they were leaning REALLY hard on having the Doctor, Jett Reno, etc. as a main draw for the series.

 

Spoiler

Back to Captain Ake's barely-there B-plot, they're practicing some kind of ceremonial dinner that seems to involve small megaphones and something that looks a bit like a blobfish.  This scene is a bit cringe... because it's basically off-brand Arnold Rimmer and three characters who are all trying to be funny but doing a very poor job of it.  That that scene doesn't last long is a mercy.  

 

Bad decisions seems to be a theme here...

Spoiler

 

A sentient hologram letting someone as irresponsible as Caleb tamper with their settings is UP THERE.  

Her little menu of "PSYCHOTROPIC SIMS" includes alcohol, cannabis, heroin, GHB, ketamine, morphine, and codeine.  WHAT.

The alcohol menu goes down into beers, wines, ciders and spirits, and lists some methods of serving vodka including "vapor" and "hypospray".  Who TF is out here INJECTING vodka?  I'm pretty sure even the Russians consider that sacrilege or some kind of capital crime.

Caleb has given her the ability to simulate inebriation.  She immediately gets wasted.  As in, she gives herself the digital equivalent of twelve shots of vodka in a matter of a second or so and immediately collapses.  

More turf war with the war college at a really tacky bar, and a wasted hologram trying to give Caleb romantic advice.  Kraag and one of the War College students seem to be hitting it off, though.

 

The B-plot rears its ugly head again at that point... feeling increasingly like Kelrec is being pranked, and even Reno seems put off... 

Spoiler

... until the horrid blobfish deflates with a noise like a squeaky fart, leaving everyone cracking up except Kelrec who now thinks he's being made fun of.

Kelrec unexpectedly gets serious.  It seems the reason he doesn't like her is he feels she abandoned Starfleet.

Sam is having a drunken epiphany while semiconscious on the bar while the bar owner is being extremely patient for someone who dresses like Boy George.  

Honestly, if Sam wants to slug the annoying Romulan war college girl I am here for it.  Now it's a bar fight.

The Doctor seems to be very very bitter about having outlived his friends and colleagues on Voyager.

Once again, the feet thing.

I keep having to check and see if Quentin Tarantino has died, because he seems to be haunting this series.

Spoiler

So, it turns out that the Cardassian instructor Illa has Jake's finished but unpublished book about his father.

Sam gets to have an extended (imaginary) conversation with Jake Sisko about her role as Kasq's emissary to the Federation.  Weird that we keep failing to acknowledge that Jake has a half-brother though.  

Tawny Newsome's character Illa is actually a Cardassian-Trill hybrid and the current host of the Dax symbiont.  

They go out on a monologue from Ben Sisko (preexisting audio from something he did ages ago) and the DS9 theme.

 

All in all, not a bad episode despite a rough start... it feels like the writers are gradually inching closer to understanding what Star Trek is.  This one just leans way too heavily on the DS9 references to be accessible to a new viewer and doesn't go far enough into them to have much for the long-time fan.

Edited Friday at 04:57 AM by Seto Kaiba

[Big s]

7 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

. But perhaps I'm just getting too wound up in the details here, so I think I'm just going to let this go.

Haven’t watched the show and probably won’t start, but since they seem to be training, is it possible the bridge is designed bigger to allow for multiple students at some point to view what is going on at certain stations? 
Been too busy watching old episodes of Sledgehammer and Dark Place that are fun than to start hate watching a new show 

[JB0]

6 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

The Doctor seems to be very very bitter about having outlived his friends and colleagues on Voyager.

Awwww.  : (

I suppose it is inevitable as a near-immortal machine intelligence that he'd have far too much experience with loss, but... frownie-face.

 

I hope they reference the OTHER Doctor at some point. The lost backup EMH has been stuck in my head for years now. I want to know if he made it back to Federation space, and when.

[Seto Kaiba]

9 hours ago, Big s said:

Haven’t watched the show and probably won’t start, but since they seem to be training, is it possible the bridge is designed bigger to allow for multiple students at some point to view what is going on at certain stations? 

I've seen a number of people raise that hypothesis in various corners.  If that is the case, the bridge does not seem well laid-out for it.  The students would be stuck standing around the perimeter of the room watching the bridge officers from the outside.  

Ordinarily, if you were going to do a training cruise you'd have either:

• Small groups of cadets shadowing officers in the course of normal duties aboard a ship during routine operations (e.g. the cadets on the USS Enterprise in Star Trek II or Red Squad on the USS Valiant in DS9 "Valiant").
• A larger group of cadets crewing an old, decommissioned ship under the supervision of an experienced commander and team of instructors (e.g. Pike's final training cruise on that J-class freighter or Picard's first training cruise on the decommissioned USS Leondegrance.)

 

9 hours ago, Big s said:

Been too busy watching old episodes of Sledgehammer and Dark Place that are fun than to start hate watching a new show 

Honestly?  This series isn't bad enough to merit calling it a "hate watch".

The first episode is a train wreck and the second episode is a real stinker, but it's actually getting noticeably less shite with each episode.  The Klingon episode could even be called "almost Star Trek".  If this trajectory continues it might actually be good by the end of the first season.

Quality-wise, we're basically watching the series crawl out of the wreckage of its first two episodes and start staggering to its feet.  It remains to be seen if it'll finish up by walking away from a sick explosion without looking back or if it'll just catch a bit of errant shrapnel in the back of the head and fall over again without any dignity.

[Seto Kaiba]

7 hours ago, JB0 said:

Awwww.  : (

I suppose it is inevitable as a near-immortal machine intelligence that he'd have far too much experience with loss, but... frownie-face.

IMO, it's surprising that he's still around at all given that his matrix was falling apart due to excessive data input after just a few years in service in Voyager.

His design lifespan (per VOY "The Swarm") was 1,500 hours.  62.5 continuous days of operation.  He started to break down after about 2 years of on-and-off service (substantially less than 17,500 hours) and was band-aided back into service using the matrix of a diagnostic hologram meant to provide field service for him.  But now he's been online continuously for over 7 million hours.  Over 4,666 times his design lifespan.  How his software even works with modern technology is a mystery and why they'd keep him around to teach anything is a mystery since his program has been outdated for 821 of his 824 years of service.  It's like learning medicine from someone who was a practicing doctor in 1205.  (Fodder for snide jokes like Spock's calling McCoy's medical tools "beads and rattles".)

 

7 hours ago, JB0 said:

I hope they reference the OTHER Doctor at some point. The lost backup EMH has been stuck in my head for years now. I want to know if he made it back to Federation space, and when.

Considering they've un-personed Benjamin Sisko's extremely important-to-his-fate child by his second wife, I'd expect the Doctor's backup will be completely forgotten.

Then again, of all the possible scenarios there's a strong possibility that he may not have even left for Federation space yet at the time of Starfleet Academy.

Spoilered, because I am about to overanalyze the **** out of this in my habitual manner.

Spoiler

In VOY "Living Witness", the backup!Doctor was reactivated approximately 700 years after Voyager's encounter with the Kyrians and Vaskans in 2374.  That puts his reactivation circa 3074, though we don't know the error bars on that one.  After he set the record straight on the whole incident in 2374, he supposedly hung around promoting unity and equality on their planet for years and eventually became their Surgical Chancellor for "many years" after Quarren's death six years later (c.3080?).  

So if we assume he was inactive in that backup module for 700 years on the nose then he was reactivated about 5 years post-Burn in 3074.  He then hung around in that old museum setting the record straight for a further 6 or so years until Quarren died (c.3080) before going on to spend an unspecified but long period unifying their government and serving as its surgical chancellor before deciding to go home in a "small craft".

Starfleet Academy, for its part, is set 125 years after the Burn... putting its events in 3194-3195.  About 115 years after the Doctor essentially gained autonomy on the Kyrian-Vaskan homeworld.  He's functionally immortal (if their holo-tech is any good) so he could potentially still be there in 3195.  115 years is certainly "many", but it's also still a single Human lifespan by Star Trek standards. 

If the backup!Doctor has already left, then it really depends on how good the 32nd century ship they gave him was.

The Kyrian-Vaskan homeworld is about 60,000 light years from Earth according to "Living Witness'.  If the ship they gave him is comparable to a top-tier longhaul Starfleet shuttle (e.g. Yellowstone-class) he'd be in for 137 years of non-stop flight to get home at Warp 6.2.  If they gave him something that can hold Warp 9 indefinitely, about 40 years.  If it's as fast as the USS Athena is?  A hair over 2 years.  (Yes, the Athena is THAT fast using regular warp drive.)  If it can rival Voyager's abortive quantum slipstream flight from "Hope and Fear"?  Eight days.  

 

[JB0]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

IMO, it's surprising that he's still around at all given that his matrix was falling apart due to excessive data input after just a few years in service in Voyager.

One assumes his heavily-modified program has been reinforced and expanded significantly since then.

Also, I didn't realize the time frames for Living Witness and Starfleet Academy lined up so closely.

[pengbuzz]

19 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

 

  Hide contents

The Kyrian-Vaskan homeworld is about 60,000 light years from Earth according to "Living Witness'.  If the ship they gave him is comparable to a top-tier longhaul Starfleet shuttle (e.g. Yellowstone-class) he'd be in for 137 years of non-stop flight to get home at Warp 6.2.  If they gave him something that can hold Warp 9 indefinitely, about 40 years.  If it's as fast as the USS Athena is?  A hair over 2 years.  (Yes, the Athena is THAT fast using regular warp drive.)  If it can rival Voyager's abortive quantum slipstream flight from "Hope and Fear"?  Eight days.  

 

 

Spoiler

If it's a cat hearing a can of cat food open on the other side of the universe: near instantaneous.

 

[Seto Kaiba]

21 hours ago, JB0 said:

One assumes his heavily-modified program has been reinforced and expanded significantly since then.

Also, I didn't realize the time frames for Living Witness and Starfleet Academy lined up so closely.

I'd assume so.  Either that or he's just been given a massive amount of computer memory in order to continue functioning without running out of space like he did in Voyager.

IMO, one of the weirder aspects of NuTrek's 31st/32nd Century setting is how the writers lack of respect for continuity has led to Federation technology either not advancing at all in 800 years or actually regressing in many areas for no clear reason.

Spoiler

The Doctor - USS Voyager's EMH Mark I - is a piece of software that was already outdated 820 years before the events of Starfleet Academy.  Yet he, and many other mid-to-late 24th Century holograms like the EMH Mark II, Badgey, or the La Sirena's various emergency holograms all seem to be vastly more advanced and more capable than any 32nd Century holograms we've seen so far.  Evil!Georgiou was able to disable a security hologram by blinking at it just right (which made no sense and was a desperate go at making her character "cool") and Caleb is able to lock up a security hologram that's meant to keep him from leaving academy grounds by instructing it to recite coffee orders like someone jailbreaking ChatGPT.

These 32nd Century holograms should be way more advanced and yet they seem to be hopelessly outclassed by a 8 century old disposable medical appliance and an 800 year old update of Clippy.  WTF.

It's almost as weird as how the entire galaxy is still dependent on dilithium and conventional warp drive despite dilithium-free warp drives having been a thing since at least the 2360s and there being at least three vastly superior alternatives that don't depend on dilithium at all, two of which are acknowledged to be present and just never used for some reason.