It still isn’t that big. 
Where do whales go at night, then?
I think (and have always thought) it’s the salesman side of him that came up with the dimension, conveniently probably the largest and most expensive in stock item he has.
Stupid question, but why use any sort of partition at all? Couldn’t they just fill up the entire cargo hold with water and whales?
What else do you use 6" plexiglass for if not giant aquariums?
The water may exhibit more force than the structure could withstand.
It looked to me like the transporter controls were inside the space you’d be transporting the whales and water into without the partition.
I don’t think they really had to span 60 feet. Instead, I think they had to insert the Plexiglas between the vertical column spaced perhaps every twenty feet.
Now that I can believe.
6" seems awfully thick, btw. I’ve never seen plexiglas even approaching that thickness. This site gives 32 mm as the greatest thickness of extruded product they have, although they list block and sheet cast thickness to 160 mm (which is just over 6"). I’ll bet anything that size is a Special Order, and they’re unlikely to have cast blocks big enough for Whale Tanks around. But I’ll cut them some Suspension of Disbelief slack
There are probably a lot of holes and cracks in the cargo bay. I’m pretty sure that if I filled my apartment with water, it would all leak out in less than a day.
I know it’s true of my basement.
He did know the dimensions of the tank – two dimensions and the volume (60 feet by 10 feet, 18,000 cubic feet) defines the third dimension uniquely given the obvious assumption of a rectangular prism (in this case, the third dimension is 30 feet).
Only if you assume that it’s a rectangular tank with only that volume.
And he still did it all pretty fast.
Come on. He’s enough of a genius to invent transparent aluminum. Surely he’s capable of a calculation like that.
I would presume areas of the ship could be pressurized. Klingons are tough, but they can’t suck vacuum very long.
Good point. But that just assumes that the entire ship is airtight, not each individual room.
Then again, should part of the hull be breached, it would be a dandy idea to be able to seal it off.
That is my thought, just as ships have water tight compartments.
What is the calculation for water pressure, rhoGh?
Easily fanwanked and without paradoxes:
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Transparent aluminum was an invention the Vulcans had as well as the Terrans.
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As an undergrad, or maybe even in high school, Scotty wondered how humans came up with the exact same formula as the Vulcans, given that the latter invented it when they were much further along technologically. It had been eating at him for 40-plus years, and he always wondered if there were some alien influence involved.
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Because it had been eating at him, so long, he instantly recognized the engineer he was talking to as the person who had invented transparent aluminum, and then realized that this was the year it was supposed to be invented.
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Thus he realized that it was not only permissible to to give the guy the formula, but was, in fact, necessary.
I’d like to see you do it if you were dumped in 1750. 
With the constraints laid on them, a little knowledge and a pair of glasses is all they had to deal with. Hell, just the rental cost of the Huey alone would eat up a few thousand dollars, never mind the cost of the plexiglass.
I think Sulu stole it.
Well done, sir. Very well done indeed. :: golf clap ::
Even a pressurized Klingon starship is going to have all sorts of wires and conduits passing through the outer hull, I’ll bet. Just filling the hold with water could lead to all sorts of shorts, corrosion, settling into areas you don’t want it to go, etc.