The original had something similar called “Auxiliary Control”.
Do you honestly think that a starship captain competent enough to get through Starfleet Academy and earn a posting on a ship would want to fly a lengthy maneuver to be able to fire when simply rotating the ship accomplishes the same thing?
you would not do it on a ship but you would if the set designers (who had lined up the bridge so the viewscreen, helm station captains chair and communications station lined up with the bridge, but the lift was offset.) and the model makers (who had the lift on the centerline ) did not work in tandem.
But then these are the people who had the bridge with only one exit.
…and no toilets.
Depending on which movie you watch, the viewscreen is even a window/set of windows itself (ie: the USS Kelvin’s viewscreen setup, which appeared to be some kind of polarized two-way space-mirror. Opaque until you pump it full of space-energy. In Nemesis, of course, the viewscreen was some kind of space-age HDTV setup, place directly on the otherside of a bulkhead from outer space, making a window a much cheaper (and probably as safe) an alternative.
Random question on starship design (since, of course, most ships on ST are designed to look cool first and be functional a distant fifth…), anybody else ever notice that the humans are the only folks in space zipping around in flying saucers? Flying saucers with a second hull attached, but still flying saucers.
I’m not talking about the inside of the ship. We assume that they set it up so that the artificial gravity creates a definite feeling of “down”. Though it should be noted that artificial gravity created by rotating a ring design would have seats that appeared to be on the “ceiling” when viewed from the other side of the ring. 
I’m talking about the movement of the ship itself. Turn the ship 180 degrees on an axis parallel to the direction it “points.” Now the ship is “upside down” relative to its last position. Do you think this makes any difference?? :smack:
If the rear of the ship is the “most vulnerable”, it can be attacked from the below rear as easily as from the directly behind rear, most likely. And given that the ship is in space, it seems quite likely that it would be equally well “armored” in all directions, since an attack can come from all directions. In short, the possibility of a less well-defendended area of the ship is the result of 2-D thinking.
As for “artistic license”, the only artistic license involved is the limited thinking of the director and his crew, which sadly parallels the limited thinking of a large chunk of the regular audience. Most of the science fiction fans at the time that I talked to left the theater shaking their heads in dismay, even if it was a pretty good movie otherwise. 
To answer this, see below.
Not to mention that the cannon movies make it clear that a photon torpedo can move in all sorts of guided directions; witness the crazy loops the one makes following the cloaked Bird of Prey in STVI. Hell, even WE do that with guided missiles, and have since at least the 70s. I worked two summers on the Shrike program, our main at the time (and still to this day, I believe) anti-radar (or, as they prefer to say, anti-radiation) missile. They were launched in a direction not directly at the target, and only in the last few seconds of flight did they turn and home on their intended radar dish. Surely the 24th Century can manage that with a photon torpedo.
As far as where the bridge is:
In the original pilot, you are taken into the bridge through the dome window at the very start of the episode. This at least implied that the bridge had a domed window at the top of the saucer. This photo shows the configuration in question, though not well.
As for “why” this would be, when clearly the “bridge” of the ship, as its nerve center, should be buried inside the ship, I say it’s actually a logical result. Since they imply heavily that the United Star Ships are run by some sort of quasi-naval organization, it’s easy to assume that they were designed by people from the navies of Earth, and followed traditional naval design, with the “bridge” of the ship at the top of the superstructure, where you have the greatest view. Apparently, it has not occurred to anyone yet that the captain of a space vessel doesn’t need the “view” from sitting on top of the ship. 
Also, why WOULDN’T the orientation of the bridge be in ANY direction they want? 30 degrees off line, 52 degrees off line, what does it MATTER? The screen doesn’t need to face forward, remember? Perhaps the feature that orients the bridge is the turbo-lift, which runs down the “middle” of the back portion of the bridge, and everything else is canted as needed from that?
Also, IIRC, the original Technical Manual (from back in the 70s) showed that more than one turbo-lift exited the bridge, but that the one you always see them use heads to the most useful (for Kirk et al) areas of the ship: Sick Bay, Main Engineering, one of the transporter rooms (of which there were several in the technical manual, including one for cargo loads), etc. I cannot recall if we ever saw the whole of the bridge, but I’m thinking we did, and that there were no such doors, so the Technical Manual (or my memory of it! :p) may have gotten that wrong. 
Only if you can power all sections of the shields to the same degree all at once. On the other hand, it makes sense that you might sacrifice shield power in one direction in order to increase it in the direction that you believe the attack will come–particularly if you are already on a damaged ship with a skeleton crew.
That would be the movie where fitting the torpedo with a heat-seeking guidance system was a fairly major plot point, and something that was new to everyone, right?
No matter what the tech manuals may say, in the movies, photon torpedoes act like cannonballs–they fire in generally straight lines, and when they hit, instead of a big matter-antimatter explosion, they tend to just punch a hole through the hull.
And yes, perhaps the Enterprise could have just flipped over, but how, exactly, is that superior to just changing altitude?
IIRC, the blueprints from the TOS Enterprise showed only one turbolift on the bridge, but stairs (and toilets!) behind the view screen. The turbolift was not like an elevator, but each car could travel along alternate paths to its destination. I assume the controller always had one available at the bridge, which could be moved aside if another arrived.
BTW, in some early TOS episodes, back when they could afford enough extras to make things look realistic, we saw crew members climbing down stairs. (more like tubes, I think).
I still have my original Enterprise Blueprints, cost then $5.00.
That would be cool! “The enemy’s ship is DOWN!”
We’re shields and sensors nonfunctional in the Mutari Nebula :rolleyes: so that direct fire was the only way they could shoot?
And to think that today there’d be an army of fans volunteering to do that for free (I would anyway…)
You appear to be missing the point.
I can turn a ship in any direction I want in space; there is no “horizontal” except by some arbitrary definition. So Kirk could have dropped “down”, turned to face “up” and fired as Kahn went by “overhead”.
Face it, there simply is no reasonable, rational reason why ships in space have to fight according to conventions established by ships on the water, or even by aircraft on earth. Any direction is just as good as any other direction. To a certain extent, Homeworld (the computer game) got this right; it was truly fun seeing the battles in 3-D with ships screaming around in all conceivable directions.
If you are not powering the shields identically (which capability is certainly a good idea; and Star Trek’s ships had that capability, on more than one occasion the captains direct that power be directed to things like the “forward” shields), it would be because you KNOW where the attack is likely to come from; which is certainly not the case with Kahn’s ship in the Nebula.
Um, no, that would be the movie where they added a piece of GAS sensing equipment to the torpedo, allowing its guidance systems to track the gas emissions from the Klingon BoP. But the capability to follow such a track would already have to be there, else the torpedo wouldn’t be able to accomplish the trick. And, as I pointed out, we already have missiles that do that simple thing, and did at the time that the original series came out. There simply is no reason to assert that photon torpedos are line of sight objects; note that if this was true, the torpedo fired to the new planet at the end of STII wouldn’t have been able to land the way it did. Duh.
ETA: And the only time that I can recall that something “punctures” a ship in any of the episodes or movies prior to and including STVI is in STVI itself, where the ship’s hull is punctured. In all other cases, series or movie, the torpedo explodes when it arrives at its target, just like a torpedo would during WWII.
You aren’t really asking this seriously, are you???
One involves simple rotation in place. The other involves actually moving the whole ship. One takes little or no time, one takes the time required for the movement to occur. One would already be accomplished before Kahn’s ship was in the area, and thus unlikely to be detected; one would be potentially detectable as it was occurring.
Want to keep going with this? :dubious:
In BSG the Viper pilots could, and did gyroscope around during dog fights, but you still didn’t see the Galactica pulling that shenanigans. Too frakin’ big, right?
Why? Other than stupidly perhaps having failed to give it attitude jets sufficient to accomplish the task, the size of the object wouldn’t have anything to do with its ability to rotate in empty space…
not so much to big but it would take a huge amount of time to accomplish compared to the vipers and for what reason? Galactica had guns top mounted not forward (well it did have them forward but the top guns were the aa) so there is little reason for the Galactica to do some crazy flip while the Vipers with their forward mounted guns needed to do stuff like that all the time.
I agree with you, but in this case he couldn’t guide his weapons because sensors wouldn’t work. It was like throwing rocks, but with a perfectly flat trajectory.
Yes, he could rotate and shoot as Reliant passed “over”, er, now “in front of”, but you do more damage raking, and it looked cool.
I believe Firefly is the only series that showed spacecraft to not be oriented in the same direction.
Star Trek and Babylon 5 have both done it as well. The Big Fights in Babylon 5 were alll over the place.