[kevin]

No, it's not entirely bull****ting - I do wonder how many folks could have identified it specifically as a brewery beforehand. I'm putting my hand up and saying I would never have, because I had never been to one.

[horatio]

Originally Posted by kevin

That's you getting caught up in the specifics of the location's real world purpose.

It depends what you want an engineering area to resemble.

I refer to the settings with the tanks. The other engineering sets with the pipes and so on serve a specific purpose, to create a sharp contrast between the shiny bridge.
I have to ask again, what is the dramatic purpose of the set with the large brewery tanks which is meant to represent, if I understood it correctly, central engineering respectively an arbitrary part of it?

[kevin]

Isn't it amazing what some set design and augmentation can do though.

It looks much more spiffing as part of the interior of the Enterprise than it does in the bottom picture.

[kevin]

Originally Posted by horatio

I refer to the settings with the tanks. The other engineering sets with the pipes and so on serve a specific purpose, to create a sharp contrast between the shiny bridge. I have to ask again, what is the dramatic purpose of the set with the large brewery tanks which is meant to represent, if I understood it correctly, central engineering respectively an arbitrary part of it?

If I recall the nature of the location of the scene isn't specified, it's a location in which the scenes take place.

[Captain Tom Coughlin]

My impression is that the secondary hull is essentially a wide open area.

[kevin]

It seems to be from what we saw of it the film. But it probably isn't if they started going into the minute detail and exact layout. Not that I imagine they would.

[horatio]

Originally Posted by Captain Tom Coughlin

Big metal vats could hold warp plasma just as easily as they hold fermenting beer

That's a good point. But wouldn't it be helpful, taking into account Kevin's point about the advantage of the large space that shooting on real sets entails, if there'd be one, giant warp-core amidst these large tanks?
We see so much engineering space and then there isn't one warp core but many small ones visible somewhere in the distant background?
Perhaps I am inflexible and too conditioned by the warp core as we knew it but in my opinion the source of power of the ship should be clearly visualized and be in focus.

[kevin]

During the ejection sequence it looked like they could be the anti-matter pods that we were seeing. That was the impression I was left with after I had watched the sequence a few times because of the dialogue round it.

But I could be wrong.

There are things that we know the ship has to have (that all starships have to have) and part of that is anti-matter storage. What they may look like is anyone's guess because I don't think we ever saw them before on any ship, or how big or small they might be. Plus the ship also has fusion reactors as well somewhere. The core could (and will be in some form) be there as well, but then maybe they didn't beam into those parts of the ship. When they beamed into the ship from Delta Vega it was into one of the Water Turbine sections. Not the Warp Core.

It could be lurking around the corner like Scotty's control room.

[Captain Tom Coughlin]

Originally Posted by horatio

That's a good point. But wouldn't it be helpful, taking into account Kevin's point about the advantage of the large space that shooting on real sets entails, if there'd be one, giant warp-core amidst these large tanks?
We see so much engineering space and then there isn't one warp core but many small ones visible somewhere in the distant background?
Perhaps I am inflexible and too conditioned by the warp core as we knew it but in my opinion the source of power of the ship should be clearly visualized and be in focus.

I think this looks more accurate than what we have seen in Trek in the past. You'd need a storage area of some sort. You never see anything like that in past incarnations of Engineering. It's just a big glowing thingee. For all the handwringing about the look of Brewgeneering, I actually felt that it was more realistic.

[horatio]

I never liked the idea of storable warp plasma. I think it started in VOY but I am not sure. If you compare it to electric generators the equivalent would be large-scale batteries.
You could let the reactor run normally, fill up the plasma tanks during low and emptying it during high speed.
I think it is dramatically more satisfying to roll without this battery smoothing function, have stress on the reactor, Scotty being in panic ("I'm giving her all she's got."), things failing to work or exploding in engineering and so on.