Fun fact: the Olympic class was based on an early design for the TOS Enterprise.
I had this book, which had that illustration, since before TNG came out and when I first saw the Olympic class, I laughed out loud.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Making_of_Star_Trek
So glad we didn’t get this ugly garbage heap
Ugly and, while I think it’s pretty stupid to put the bridge sticking up out of the very center of the saucer section like a bullseye on the world’s biggest dart board, imagine an Olympic class ship getting attacked. Any frontal assault would kill half the crew.
The Covenant had the right idea, burying the bridge in the middle of the ship, surrounded by armor.
Defiant was like that too wasn’t it?
I hope Captain Beverly Crusher was okay… And that none of her crew became sexy ghosts.
Good thing the inertial dampeners held. Those are usually the first to go.
If they put the resilience and redundancy of inertial dampeners into everything else Starfleet, any encounters with hostiles would be over in seconds, even the first Borg. It’s as if Starfleet ships are built with dice rolls and a stat sheet, and they dump everything into keeping the gravity working with all other stats below par.
I wouldn’t be overly surprised if grav-plating is a passive effect that doesn’t require power.
Canon is that all deck plating has embedded various graviton generators. This is separate from the inertial dampening and structural integrity fields. There’s no single canon idea on how they work though (for obvious reasons) so there’s examples of a single generator that can be disabled, or many miniature ones through that are independent. Maybe that design is the one seen where a room or deck can be customized to a different pull than others. The holodecks probably use a much more advanced version along with other tractor beams to create the many forces needed for simulations.
But the best grav generator won’t save you if the inertial dampeners fail to dampen at a crucial point.
Should have tagged it #Spaceballs , surely
