#deck bridge

[daybreakatdawn]

Fountain Landscape in San Francisco Ideas for designing a small modern backyard water feature.

[frownyalfred]

fic idea: Clark’s escape pod was supposed to be a temporary way to keep him safe and bridge the civilization’s of Krypton and Earth as Krypton resettled in their outpost/tributary planets. when Clark reaches a majority (35?) his parents and General Zod come for him on Earth. they reveal that this planet is also doomed, just like Krypton was; the blast wave of Krypton’s destruction will reach to the very edge of this galaxy and take this planet with it.

their only request? come with them, back to Krypton, with a small selection of Earth’s inhabitants he finds “worthy” to rebuild and integrate with Kryptonians on the new planets. they have moments, maybe only minutes, to make this decision.

Clark is what he calls “selfish”: he takes Lois, Jimmy, his Ma and Pa, Bruce and Alfred and the Batkids and whatever JL members are currently on Earth. they have no choice. they’re knocked out and loaded onto ships, because they wouldn’t leave willingly. not one of them would.

the fic is the after effects, the horror, of that decision, played out in the interpersonal. Clark resumes his place in Kryptonian society and grapples with the fact that he failed Earth without even realizing. and he punished his closest friends and family by taking them with him.

[70sscifiart]

Angus McKie, "Starship Enters Witchlight"

[europeposts]

Dom Luís I Bridge, Porto, Portugal: The Dom Luís I Bridge, or Luís I Bridge, is a double-deck metal arch bridge that spans the river Douro between the cities of Porto and Vila Nova de Gaia in Portugal. At its construction, its 172 metres span was the longest of its type in the world. Wikipedia

[isagrimorie]

Star Trek Voyager, 4x08 - Year of Hell, Part 1

Captain Kathryn Janeway as a Brilliant Tactician, part 1, 2, 3 (version 1) (version 2)

[arcadebroke]

[slippery-domjot-balls]

This is such a wild screenshot. Thank you trekcore.

[stra-tek]

Lower Decks is so hardcore, the bridge of the ship Mariner stole was the TNG guest ship bridge slightly modified with new chairs and screen graphics, just like TNG would have done!

(Pictured below in Enterprise-C configuration, the set was the battle bridge, the Hathaway, the Bozeman, Picard's pirate ship and others)

[essektheylyss]

Just since I was in the mood and have not been focused at all, I also dragged out my Alleyman Tarot deck for the fun of it, and first of all, despite not doing much tarot in the past six-ish years, I've somehow become better at shuffling, which is GREAT because holy hell there are so many cards, but second of all, man I need to work with this deck some more. It's the most unhinged deck I've ever used and I love it.

[premamelody]

chillin

[lumilescense]

Client: What do you want to know about my case?

Holmes: What was your relationship with the governess?

Client, lying through his teeth: Perfectly professional.

Holmes: Mhm. Fuck off now, I dont work with liars.

Client: Ex-excuse me?!?! What are you implying!? HOW DARE YOU-

Watson, narrating: His self control is incredible

Client: *storms out*

[glimblshanks]

Made me feel all warm and fuzzy to see the Cerritos crew all band together and break direct orders to go save Mariner after so many of them turned their back on her in season three. It just gave me this sigh of relief, like thank goodness the crew has her back again.

[themalhambird]

so I made this post, @celebrimbor-apologist made these fantastic tags:

#Just#I could imagine Sauron as a khan-esque guy#He's angry at the federation#He hides in plain sight#Manipulates mansplains manslaughters his way through it#While he's on the ship#Adar sees right through him because#Hes been with the capitalist assholes who fucked up his uruks#But by that time Adar is still kinda new on the ship so he isn't as trusted#That's what makes it all the more tragic that sauron gets along well with Celebrimbor#Because Adar and him got along well#Please no Tyelpe dying here please#But dramatic “we were all fooled” scene in sickbay pls#ALSO#Navigations Officer Camnir#Vorohil at the weapons console

and, well. My hand slipped...

Without any discussion amongst themselves, the other senior officers have fallen into pattern, keeping vigil at Celebrimbor’s side in the medbay in shifts. It feels important that somebody is there when he wakes up, and well. The Lindon has spent the better part of a month in enemy control, dead in space, with engineering and the bridge both sealed off, life support functions cutting in and out and explosions buffeting the ship at random moments. The medical officers have their hands full. 

“Ga…lad..riel?”

It’s been three days. It’s early- or late, depending on perspective- and it’s Galadriel’s turn on Celebrimbor-Watch. She had been just about half way to sleep herself. Now, she snaps awake– a bright smile splitting her face at the sight of Celebrimbor’s sharp, bright eyes.  “Hello you.”

“Did…it work..? The transporter?” 

“It worked.” 

Celebrimbor exhales with relief, eyes shutting for a moment. The grief and distress on his face eases briefly, and then his eyes fly wide open once more. He sits up, moving as though he intends to swing out of the bed and start running. “The warp drive. The core, it’s going- the system wasn’t made to handle- she’s going to blow-”

“No, no- Celebrimbor, you fixed it.” Galadriel grabs his arms and holds him steady, noting in the back of her mind how he flinches and whimpers at the contact but not wanting to let go until she’s sure he’s not going to do himself further injury by trying to get up. “Remember,” she says, fixing her steady eyes on his. “Remember? You rigged up a transporter beam and blasted Sauron off the ship. You got control back to the bridge and dropped the shields cutting engineering off. Adar came down– just him, in case the air was too toxic, the deck too unstable or dark for anybody else. Adar found you, and you told him about the transporter, and the threat to the warp drive. You fixed it together, and then you collapsed. Adar carried you from engineering to the medbay, and you’ve been here for three days.”

“Three days?” Celebrimbor repeats. Slowly, he lets Galadriel sink him back down against the pillows. The first officer nods. 

“Three days,” she confirms. “You’re doing well, and the Lindon-” she pauses. Frankly, the Lindon is a mess. Whatever Sauron was trying to achieve, the engine deck has been well and truly cannibalised. So bad is it that the engineers- having secured life support, and repaired any immediately threatening damage, are reluctant to touch anything else until Celebrimbor is able to take a look first. Gil-galad has sent distress signals not only on Star Fleet channels, but on Vulcan, Klingon- even Ferengi frequencies. In an uncharacteristic display of temper and bloodlust Elrond has declared that if they ever manage to figure out what random coordinates Celebrimbor sent Sauron to, he’s going to pull the Maia’s guts out and rearrange them and see how he likes it. “The Lindon is stable,” she says, “and in no immediate danger.”

“Oh. That is…that is good.” Celebrimbor’s eyes drift closed again. Federation medicine had vanquished whatever burns, cuts, and bruises naturally rapid Feonorian healing hadn’t already taken care of (and it worries everyone that Celebrimbor both had wounds old enough that they should have already healed themselves- and that the true extent of how badly hurt their friend has been injured in the last month is, as of yet, unclear). Nevertheless,  the Engineer’s captivity- and, Galadriel supposes, his ordeal in the run up to it, the period where there had been a growing concern that he was experiencing a psychological breakdown- has left him gaunt- visibly ashen and exhausted. He swallows, and seems to be steeling himself for something. When he speaks again, he doesn’t open his eyes, and though he seems to be doing his best to lie very, very still, there’s a faint tremor in his fingers. 

“Galadriel?”

“Yes?”

“Will you…will you please tell Captain Gil-galad that I…am ready to be escorted to the brig at…his pleasure? I will…co-operate fully. With a court martial. Whatever charges he wishes to bring, I’ll not contest them.” he turns his face toward her and when his eyes open again, they are brimming with tears. “If he will see me, I should like to apologize. I neither expect nor deserve forgiveness, but even so, I am sorry. For my foolishness. For not..being strong enough…” A tear spills down , dripping onto the bridge of his nose. Galadriel’s own eyes prickle. 

“Celebrimbor.” She moves her hand to just above his, and when he doesn’t draw away, gently takes it. His fingers are colder than they should be. “Of course Gil-galad will see you- but because you are his friend and he is concerned, not because he is angry. There is no question of a Court Martial- you saved the ship-”

“After I endangered it in the first place-”

“After your attempts at warning of the danger were ignored-”

“The danger that was all my fault-”

“Control of the ship was seized by a hostile alien force who manipulated and coerced you into doing its’ bidding,” Galadriel says. “Celebrimbor, we all thought Annatar was who he claimed to be. That you saw through it at all…well. You remember when he was with us as Halbrand. And I nearly punched Gil-galad in the face?”

Celebrimbor frowns. “...You did punch Gil-galad in the face. And then Gil-galad punched you back. You both ended up rolling around on the floor, pulling each other’s hair.”

“Not according to any of the official logs,” Galadriel says archly “According to the official logs, we only nearly came to blows.  Only you, Gil-galad, and I know different-”

“Elrond knows.”

“Elrond knows everything, Elrond doesn’t count.”

They lapse into silence for a while. It’s not uncomfortable. “The point is,” Galadriel says at last. “If he hadn’t left us when he did, the first time, I don’t know that he wouldn’t have persuaded me to mutiny. And it took us weeks of going back over everything when we found out he wasn’t who he had claimed, piercing it all together, that we even realised he had been manipulating us. And then, when we were explicitly watching for him…he did it all over again. We were all fooled. Alright, Adar was suspicious,” she acknowledges, a little begrudgingly. “But all that meant was that Annatar- Sauron- persuaded me to lock out his access to the bridge. To be fair, I’m still not sure how he had access in the first place-”

The tips of Celebrimbor’s ears turn pink. “That- ah. That may have been me. A flux coil blew in one of the helm’s navigation controls during the party for Disa and Durin’s anniversary. It was a downshift, no one was on the bridge, and everyone else was having such fun, I didn’t want to drag them away to spend half an hour standing about watching me in case I somehow managed to give myself a plasma–shock doing repairs so routine I could manage in the dark standing backward and with one hand tied behind my back. And, well, I got distracted by- that doesn’t matter- and I forgot to revoke it, and no one seemed to mind his coming and going as he pleased until…well. Until Annatar.”

“The point is- and maybe don’t tell anyone else you gave a non-Federation civilian you met when he abducted you the security clearance to get onto the bridge,” Galdriel interjects into her own sentence, the image of an external investigation into this whole mess suddenly flashing before her eyes. “The point is, we were all fooled, Celebrimbor. Twice over.” she squeezes his hand. “You have nothing to blame yourself for, no apologies you need to make.”

“Nevertheless,” Celebrimbor says. He gives her hand a hesitant squeeze in return. “I will make them. Will you tell the Captain I wish to see him, when it’s convenient?”

“I’ll tell him you’re awake, and he’ll come straight down.” Galadriel stands, leaning forward to drop a gentle kiss on his forehead on her way up. “I’d better fetch you a doctor, to, just to give you another look over now you’re awake.” She lets go of his hand, but lingers long enough to give him a last smile. “It’s good to see you, my friend. It is so very good to see you.”

[mappinglasirena]

The Stairs Under the Bridge

If you've been following my blog for a while, you know that one of the many mysteries/points of discussion that come up repeatedly is: what is happening in the space under La Sirena's bridge? There's a door leading there from the mess hall and we see Picard walk through it in S01E06, "The Impossible Box", but we never find out what that space is being used as.

(At least, we don't know what its in-universe use is. We know from set plans that in the studio, the space apparently held the playback setup.)

We got a glimpse of a cross-section of the ship in the Blu-ray set tour, which has some impossible geometry happening under the bridge...

(That is not a proper floor and something is definitely clipping through it!)

... and if you remember my post from a while back, I speculated that the most likely explanation is that the model has an extendable ladder there, that would allow people to board/leave the ship by a means other than the loading ramp. This would fit with the early idea of the season 1 writers to have Picard board La Sirena in a space port, rather than beam him on board while she's in orbit.

Well, a couple of weeks ago, we got confirmation that this is indeed what the production team originally intended.

Dave Blass, the production designer for PIC Seasons 2 and 3, tweetet some images showcasing a cross-section of the Sirena set/model:

As you can imagine, this gave me enormous joy (and a not too small amount of glee)! I have long insisted that the panorama windows, i.e. the exit the Motley Crew use to get off the ship once she crash-lands on Coppelius, don't really work as a proper access point to the ship. There is a three foot drop right inside the window the crew needs to bridge, no proper hatch, no ladders, etc. The only reason it makes for such a convenient exit is that Sirena is buried in a few metres of dirt, bringing the window level with the ground.

And indeed, La Sirena has, or at least was originally intended to have, a proper access to the front of the ship, one with a ladder and hatch and everything! And it's located in the mysterious space under the bridge!

But, me being me, this schematic also immediately raised a question: Isn't that ladder a bit too short?

If you remember this post, it seems like one of the changes made during Sirena's design process was that the wings were dropped quite a significant amount. Where the early concept art has the ship sitting fairly low to the ground, she is raised much higher when she reaches her final form.

Essentially, we went from a configuration that might have looked something like the version on the top to the actual model on the bottom:

This change increased the ship's clearance significantly.

For the non-imperial-measuring among us, the height of the ladder given in the schematic shared by Blass, 14' 10 1/2", translates to about 4.8m. However, when you line up the orthogonal view of the ship with the cross section, the length of the ladder is not really enough to reach the ground once the ship has landed.

(The green line indicates the bottom of the stairs.)

There is some speculation that maybe Sirena can fold up her nacelles for landing, and that might be true. There are rooms extending into the wings that would end up at an odd angle, but I suppose with artificial gravity, anything is possible -- if somewhat unlikely.

Still, if we presume Sirena's wings are rigid in general, the distance from the tarmac to the belly of the ship (here: the stage floor in the schematic) is a bit larger than 4.8m.

I wanted to adapt the ladder accordingly, but getting good measurements by converting between feet, pixels, and metres is a bit of a hassle. So instead, I simply used the measurements already on the schematic and extended the ladder so that the ship's clearance would be 5.5m or around 18ft.

This brings the total length of the ladder to about 21ft or 6.5m, and overlaid on the orthogonal ship view, it looks like this:

(The green line once again indicates the bottom of the stairs.)

As you can see, this length requires for the outer engines to fold up a little bit and would have the lowest point of the nacelles basically sitting on the ground. I personally think that would make a lot of sense, and in season 2 we did see that the outer engine pods are on hinges and can definitely fold down.

(It's subtle, but they do move back into their resting position towards the end of the gif.)

It was never confirmed that the engings can fold farther up as well, but looking at how they're attached, I think it makes sense that they could.

Now, in the adjusted S1 concept art of Sirena at the space port, the outer engines are in their normal positions and the wings are actually fully off the ground, with the ship resting on extended landing gear:

So, my extended ladder is the absolute minimum length needed to account for the dropped wings. In all likelihood the ladder would have to be even longer than that, because the clearance would be over 5.5m.

One thing that playing around with all of these views and measurements made me realize, though, is that La Sirena is quite a bit larger than I usually picture her. I have this realization about once every two or three months, so to make it easier to internalize, I asked the wonderful @regionalpancake to assist me.

Google helpfully suggests that 5.5m / 18ft is about half the size of a telephone pole or of three Michael Jordan's standing on each other's shoulders. It is also the size of...

... one average adult giraffe. (This is more or less helpful, depending on when you last went to the zoo, but I really enjoyed that as a visual aide.)

And because Regionalpancake is a good sport (and extremely proficient at adding animals to La Sirena), she also gave me this second edit:

(She also helpfully removed the spacedock workers who were a little to tall in comparison to Sirena. Hopefully, the friendly Averagely-Sized Adult Giraffe will make the ship's real dimensions slightly easier to gauge.)

So, now we have an idea of what might lurk beneath La Sirena's bridge!

I imagine in-universe, there is more stuff stashed under there than just the stairs, though. Perhaps the space gives easier access to the phaser banks in the nose of the ship, or to some other flight control or power distribution machinery. And there's still the question of why Picard, after a very emotionally draining conversation, chooses to head into this space rather than going straight upstairs to his cabin or to his study on the holodeck. (Yes, I know the Doylist answer is because it was the more dramatically satisfying blocking/staging choice, but on this blog, we like to dig for Watsonian explanations, too!)

My personal guess is still that there's some communal washroom down there, because those have to be somewhere on the ship, and that space would actually make sense, being in such close proximity to the bridge and mess hall.

But, since we never saw any of it on screen (and won't ever see La Sirena on screen again), I guess the space under the bridge will always remain a canonical mystery -- and thus available for any interpretation your writing /mapping/ headcanon might require ;)

[basicallyanotherwitchesthing]

Alfred Sheinwold - Bridge Play - Cornerstone Library - 1958

[startrektospolls]

Hey all!

I've been really busy lately so I won't be able to make the new polls until the weekends. So each new round will start on Monday morning (as opposed to starting two days after the previous one ended).

Sorry for the delay, but I hope you'll still have fun voting!