In the things you never thought about for 60 years category:
You know the little light panel in the wall, that shows a light bar going by, either up/down or left/right when the lift moves? In the reality of the show, is that an actual window and the lights are lights going by in the shaft, or is it just a synthetic representation of travel?
I always assumed the latter. Why would there be lights in the shafts? Set designers love to have repeating lights in long tunnels, even if they make no sense, because they give the viewer the sense of motion for little expense. But you don’t need lights because NO ONE is going to be in a turbolift shaft, or a 3000 mile long evacuated transcontinental sub-shuttle tunnel, or a Moonbase Alpher going-to-the-launchpad tunnel when there is a possibility of a car going by. THUMP “What was that?”
So what is your opinion? Actual shaft light, or computer generated on a screen light? Ignore STV’s non canon shafts. Please.
As a production thing, probably a subtle clue that the turbolift does move lefty-righty. In context, since it is so quiet, probably an indicator to the passengers that the thing is moving and not just stuck.
It might be lights for the workers. In TOS, at least, they had all kinds of access shafts for equipment, so if a turbolift went down (as in the sense of broken) someone might have to go into the shaft to repair it. Just like regular elevators today.
Note to get to the engineering section from the bridge, the turbolift would indeed have to travel sideways to the rear of the saucer section. Not that said lights ever remotely matched the ship’s actual schematics, except by accident…
Turbolifts went sideways from the very beginning of TOS. I’m not sure it was in the writer’s guide, but it was definitely in early material. So one thing they got right.
I always assumed it was a visual confirmation of movement, rather than anything showing through a physical window in the lift. Yeah, Trek is full of stupid points, but was better than say, Star Wars about having a giant physical window to the outside from your command deck.
But, depending on era, ship and station, there are absolutely lights inside the shafts!
On Captain Picard Day, Picard got stuck in the turbolift with a couple of kids. They eventually popped out the roof hatch to climb up to the next level with a climbing song. The whole shaft was lit up, though I don’t remember how. A quick search found a photo of 1’x4’ light panels going up the 3 or 4 sides of the shaft. All things considered, why didn’t they put a ladder in too?
My opinion is that it is a frosted glass with the lights on the shaft wall showing through. Why would they make it complicated?
Off-hand, considering today’s methods, there would be a lit bulb every level always on. Similar circuit to “always powered” emergency lighting in a building.
The same subcontractor who designed Spock’s science station
built the turbolift.
Their design engineer happened to like moving lights, so they added it.
Aye, there’s the rub. I’m sure OSHA regulations have something to say about that. Even still, there was some problem with the lift to begin with – lights but no controls. No comms. All around no way to switch things on or off.
For those of you who’ve never been to the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, you ride to the top in small capsules inside the Arch legs. The capsules have windows even though the only thing you see through them is the wall of the shaft. There’s no practical reason for the windows, unless they’re supposed to make claustrophobics feel better.
So what’s wrong with the turbolift having a porthole?
There are no turbolifts or shafts. Why waste all that space? You just get in and the computer teleports you to the destination. It just makes you wait while lighting up glowy things to make you think you’re actually moving (I mean, why else would every turbolift ride take exactly as long as the conversation requires?).
Oh, you say you’d notice all the sparkly bits when you’re being transported? Those are fake too. And the computer uses the plain old cargo transporter, which supposedly lacks the quantum compensation stuff that for some reason convinces people it isn’t a suicide booth. That’s fake too. No one notices.
Oh Em Gee. That Disco turbolift area is ridiculous! I’m glad I never got invested in that show. What were they thinking?
I prefer the old Starfleet blueprint reality. Turboshafts that went where they should, were not much bigger than the cars themselves, AND had spaces to store extra cars. Because in TOS, no one ever waited for a lift. The system would replace the car behind the door immediately.
Why was it “turbo”? Was it driven by some sort of turbine?
And does it only have like one car? Seems horribly inefficient. Imagine working in an office building of over a thousand people with only one elevator. So when the turbolift is occupied, people crawl through the Jefferies Tubes (AKA “furnished service ducts”)?
No it has a lot of cars. And the system routes them around using an optimization subroutine. There are holding spaces near doors so when one car gets used, another quickly replaces it. And if there is a car at a door where someone is going, the system moves the one car out of the doorway so the new car can “dock”. Maybe it just leaves it there, maybe it sends it to another spot where a car just vacated the “dock”. This is all transparent to the crew.
This actually explains why the route the car takes from, say, the bridge to engineering doesn’t always look the same. No, it’s not bad directing, or that the conversation had to finish first, but because the car had to take a roundabout path since there was a party in sickbay and there was gridlock on deck 7 turbolift shafts!
And in TWoK, when McCoy pisses and moans about waiting for the elevator? Only happened because he was at the end of the line, and there was no way to route a car around Kirk and Saavik having their moment.
I wasn’t particularly a scifi kid but remember being very interested in that viewing thing Spock would peer into. Later, I was disappointed when I saw a B&W photo of pretty much the same eyeshade used by early radar operators. What I thought was a cool futuristic display was already obsolete by the time they filmed the show and extinct when I watched 20 years later.
In a short story similar to Mirror Mirror, the cast of the TV show gets swapped out with the actual, real crew of the Enterprise. One of the points of conversation was that they wanted Nimoy to tell them what Spock sees inside the viewer!
