[martok2112]

Originally Posted by 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.

I was given the same impression...that perhaps those vats were what was holding the anti-matter bottles. The warp core, as it was called, was certainly a bunch of bottles being shot off into space. Methinks those vats were the magnetic containment cells.

But, as with you, I could be wrong.

[kevin]

Originally Posted by Captain Tom Coughlin

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.

My argument is that we don't know areas of even the TOS ship didn't look like that when you really got into the guts of it all.

In a ship that needs Fusion reactors, Warp Cores, Water systems, Air systems, redundancies for these systems, computer cores and a thousand other massive system components................there's going to be areas that cannot look like a Hilton!

[kevin]

Originally Posted by 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, things failing to work or exploding in engineering and so on.

Well, I know that Deuterium tanks (massive ones) show up on the Ent-D blueprints and then there's also Anti-Matter storage tanks as well, so the idea of pods isn't something hugely contradictory I think.

[horatio]

Yeah, the tanks having deuterium and anti-deuterium in them sounds better to me than them being warp plasma storage quasi-batteries.

[Captain Tom Coughlin]

Originally Posted by kevin

My argument is that we don't know areas of even the TOS ship didn't look like that when you really got into the guts of it all.

In a ship that needs Fusion reactors, Warp Cores, Water systems, Air systems, redundancies for these systems, computer cores and a thousand other massive system components................there's going to be areas that cannot look like a Hilton!

That's exactly what I mean, and it's why I think the more industrial look of Engineering works as opposed to what we saw in TNG and what not.

In TOS, we only ever really saw the control room, and this area, so it's possible that it looked very much like what we saw in the new film

[Captain Tom Coughlin]

Originally Posted by horatio

Yeah, the tanks having deuterium and anti-deuterium in them sounds better to me than them being warp plasma storage quasi-batteries.

I think this depends on what warp plasma is and how it works. Is it something that is created by the warp engines, or is it something that the warp engines act upon? It would seem to me that it has been shown both ways in Trek in the past.

[horatio]

TAS had a nice conception of the actual engine. I guess the struts are meant to be the (anti-)deuterium injectors.

[Jim in St. Louis]

I always thought the tubes behind the screen to be plasma transfer conduits from the dilithium chamber under the deck up to the warp coils.

[martok2112]

Originally Posted by horatio

TAS had a nice conception of the actual engine. I guess the struts are meant to be the (anti-)deuterium injectors.

The top half of the picture makes me think of an early version of the M/A reactor as seen in Star Trek TMP.

[samwiseb]

I'm a strong believer in the individual right and artistic license of the director to change whatever aspects of production he sees fit, including production design. Especially if it happens to be a different director from the one you hired last time. But even in a case like this when you have continuity in direction, I believe the director should still be allowed to tinker around. If he so desires.

But I also believe in consistency of packaging. If these movies do indeed end up becoming a trilogy, than each installment should have the same music composer, the same title font in the opening and closing credits, and at east 80-85% consistency with lighting, wardrobe and set design.

I could go either way in regards to the brewery. They either get access to that location again for the next movie, or they don't. Count me as one of the people who never would have guessed that was what I was seeing. I don't even like beer, period. I probably read several dozen-dozen 'Budgineering' comments on here before finally coming across an Abrams interview on reactions to the film and getting clued in as to what people were talking about.

Litmus test: Are there any so-called 'Budgineering' haters out there who just happen to otherwise really like the film? I'm guessing not.

The TOS films don't bother me, because I pretty much view each one of them as a different version of ST altogether. They're sort of a package deal, but I think they're meant to be experienced individually. And I pretty much agree with the changes. (Although I do hope III was still being written when they recycled the sets for that one. Because otherwise someone really cheeped out designing the BoP interior. There's no architectural consistency there whatsoever. It's also just a poorly designed film set. They were right to completely rebuild it for IV). On the TNG front, I also agree that the Enterprise E interiors are not up to par with their predecessor. There's just something muddy and plasticky about them.

I do prefer the more industrial/contemporary look in a lot of sci-fi, because it never ages. I believe B5 and BSG were both made with about the same budget, yet the visual differences between them could hardly look more extreme. The TOS films and TNG have aged better than most of the STs that followed, however even they appear pretty dated now. Contemporary hardware also shows up in a lot of sci-fi anime (which I suppose draws influence from the likes of A L I E N and Blade Runner). I think giving the 23rd century a more contemporary look also makes it appear more tactile than the ST movies/shows past.