Someone's got to make sure the Enterprise really works.
Visual artists and architects have spent most of history asking themselves two basic questions: "What does Heaven look like?" and "How do we get there?" Every epoch produces its own answers - from the naive corkscrew of Babel to the cadmium whorls of Chagall.
For the digital generation, few visions of the heavenly sphere (or the wrinkled fabric of space-time) are more convincing than those offered by Star Trek: The Next Generation. The most popular show on syndicated television, Star Trek: tng enters its seventh and final season this fall. By its last episode, Captain Jean-Luc Picard will have commanded the Starship Enterprise for more than 180 missions - far more than James T. Kirk, who served for 79.
Captains, of course, will come and go. The real star of Star Trek, and the most visible member of its cast, is the Enterprise itself. So deeply ingrained is the starship in contemporary American culture that the first space shuttle was named after it. Its elegant design - blending the time- honored saucer with twin-warp engine nacelles - is as familiar to this generation as was the Corsair to the children of World War II.
If a single factor has made the Enterprise and its mission believable, it's the intelligence and consistency with which 24th-century technology is portrayed. From the techno-jargon used in main engineering to the animated displays on the bridge, Star Trek's senior illustrators and technical consultants - Rick Sternbach and Michael Okuda - have created a nearly seamless illusion of life aboard a stadium-size starship.
Entering the Star Trek art department at Paramount Pictures, I found the two techs on their feet, watching television. The program, of course, was Star Trek - and even though it was a tape of an episode they'd just finished shooting, their rapt expressions indicated that they were utterly entranced by their own illusions.
Rick Sternbach and Mike Okuda are in their early 40s, and have remarkably parallel backgrounds. Both define themselves as children of the post- Sputnik education system, one shaped when, as Okuda remembers, "The nation still realized that science, education, and technology were priorities." Both grew up devouring science fiction, building model rockets, and memorizing the satirical ballads of Tom Lehrer.
Career-wise, they took different tacks. While Sternbach moved into magazine and book illustration, Okuda worked in corporate graphics and audio/video. He also did a lot of community theater, learning skills that would apply very directly to television production. "You're forced to come up with solutions," he explains, "and there's no money."
Sternbach was drafted by the Star Trek: The Motion Picture team in 1977, designing spaceships and props for the first feature film. He moved on to other projects, but returned in early 1987 to work on the new television series. Okuda - who contributed to Star Trek IV - was called back shortly after Sternbach to design the graphics for The Next Generation. "The similarities between us were very scary," Sternbach recalls. "We were fortunate to converge on this project and achieve a high-tech critical mass."
"Fortunate" isn't a strong enough word. Playing with the spaceship models in their office, boggled by the sheer fun these guys are having, I realized I was visiting the luckiest nerds in the world.
The Galaxy Class Enterprise 1701-D, as seen on Star Trek: tng, was designed by Andrew Probert in 1986, based on a concept dreamed up almost 30 years ago by artist Matt Jeffries. Since 1987, Rick Sternbach has made numerous modifications to the UFP's (United Federation of Planets) flagship, designed dozens of smaller Star Fleet vehicles, and concocted an armada of alien battleships, shuttle craft, and cruisers.
"Designing a real spacecraft is for people with real mathematical and engineering backgrounds," admits Sternbach. "We're safe doing what we're doing because there are no peer reviews; there are no wind-tunnels. You can't test the Enterprise to destruction."
Ratings, however, do function as a kind of test. If the Enterprise didn't hold together visually and conceptually, Star Trek would have been blown off the air long ago. In some ways the original Enterprise had it easy. It sailed in the late 1960s, long before the era of personal computers. Today's viewers are computer literate, which makes technical authenticity a must.
As the show was between seasons during my visit, my hosts were able to walk me through the set. We entered the door of the enormous stage and walked directly past the Milky Way: a huge black scrim on vertical rollers, salted with mylar stars. While the ship is in flight, this background is slowly scrolled, giving a sense of motion against a backdrop of infinite suns. Stepping through the open back of a turbolift - one of the Enterprise's elevators - we emerged onto the main bridge. The set was dark at first, but Okuda arranged for power. As the lights and panels of the Enterprise came alive all around us, pulsing and glowing, I had to catch my breath. I had en-tered not just a starship, but a myth.
Since most of the action aboard the ship takes place on the main bridge, one key to the Enterprise's viability lies in its displays: the blinking color panels that feed the crew tactical, scientific, and environmental information about the ship.
"One can easily imagine control panels a hundred times more complicated, providing more information than anyone could absorb," says Okuda, who designs many of the show's animated and backlit graphics on a Macintosh Quadra or fx running Macromind Director. "What I'm trying to imply here, by these sweeping curves and clear lines of organization, is that Star Fleet has put an enormous amount of thought into figuring things out. Each task has been broken down into highly simplified steps. The software reconfigures itself to relate to what you're dealing with now: The computer knows what you want to do before you even know you want to do it."
"We could of course come up with things the audience couldn't really identify with," adds Sternbach. "Driving the ship by brain waves, for example. But we don't do that. Instead we jump way ahead - then step back a few paces." Running a starship will require vast amounts of ram, and the Enterprise's on-board computers make today's most advanced Crays look like bean counters. "We have mass storage on both sides of the bridge," Sternbach casually notes - "lots of parallel processors, connections we haven't even thought of today. There are massive amounts of computing power distributed throughout the ship, and concentrated in three central computer cores. Each one is about the size of the Capitol Records building" (a landmark high- rise in Hollywood.)
"When you look at these things," Okuda adds, "assuming that 24th-century computers have even higher information densities than we have now, you go, 'Gee, why do you need that much power?' The reason is, each time you have a more advanced kind of computer, you create new applications that take advantage of it. Fifteen years ago a graphic user interface was considered frivolous - because after you supported the graphics you had no power left to do work. But as personal computers evolved, people realized that the interface was a good idea. It made things more usable, and that's what it's all about."
"No ashtrays," I noted, surveying the bridge.
Okuda nodded. "Back in 1964, Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek's creator, made a conscious policy decision that you would not smoke in the 23rd - now the 24th - century."
The issue of life imitating art (and vice versa) is one of the most fascinating things about the Star Trek universe. The holodeck, a virtual- reality playground that crew members use for everything from martial arts training to erotic distraction, is probably still a century away. Meanwhile, some of the original series' gizmos - like medical hyposprays and folding cellular communicator phones - are coming into common use. Also on the way is the modern equivalent of the padd (Personal Access Display Device), the hand-held slate computer used by Star Fleet personnel.
"When Rick first designed the device, my reaction was, 'Shouldn't this have more buttons?'" Okuda laughed. "Then, just a few days ago, we saw the Newton (Apple's Personal Digital Assistant), and I said "'Oh - no buttons '"
Such situations call up the question of obsolescence, a real pitfall when you're designing a starship that won't be launched for 370 years.
"We try to stay reasonably well informed of things that are likely to happen in the next five, ten, or twenty years," Okuda remarks as we stroll down the curving corridor leading from sick bay to main engineering. "But at the same time, a lot of the ship's computer systems are archaic even now. For instance, keyword searches. They're ten years old already, but I continue to include them in my graphics for story or dramatic purposes."
"We try to keep technology from chasing us down," Sternbach agrees. "But the padd is certainly coming into reality faster than we would have liked " More than the ship's hardware is imperiled by our wave of techno-progress. Language, Okuda points out, is another dicey issue.
"Every once in a while we'll have to describe the processing capacity of a shipboard computer. The first few times we did so in terms of bits and bytes: quadrillions of them. I finally realized that it was like trying to describe the speed of the Concorde in inches per fortnight. So, we came up with units called kiloquads. What's a kiloquad? What does it translate to in bytes? I don't know. I don't want to know. If I say it's equal to 400 Mbytes, six months from now Motorola will introduce a 400-Mbyte chip - and we'll be obsolete."
Although the show is filled with wild terms - millicochranes, dilithium crystals, and isolinear optical chips (see Sternbach and Okuda's Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual, for details) - much of the ship's technology and context is grounded in hard science. Technical advisors include Dr. Robert Forward, widely known for his science fiction writings; Dr. Robert Bussard, who invented the concept of using interstellar gases as fuel; and Dr. Greg Benford, a scientist and writer at the University of California, Irvine. "A lot of the engineering inspirations come from G. Harry Stine, a former White Sands missile engineer," says Sternbach. "He's got a very practical view of large aerospace projects. It's a very long design process; you can't simply throw parts together and make them work. In a lot of cases you have to order materials five years before you start cutting parts. So after talking with Harry for fifteen or twenty years, one gets a very good sense as to what would actually go into a vehicle like the Enterprise. That's why, as per the manual, constructing a Galaxy Class Starship is a 20-year effort. Even with fabulous cad and expert systems, it would take longer than one would believe."
We pause in engineering, gazing up at the huge cylinder of the matter/antimatter reaction assembly. The dilithium housing and reaction chamber are flagged with official-looking labels, bright red and bearing meaningless streams of data. "With high-tech shapes, and through the use of color, we can tell it all," Sternbach explains. "Style and color are the two most important aspects of the equipment we design. Star Fleet looks different from Romulan. Romulan looks different from Klingon. All the major cultures that we come across are kept separate, and visually distinct."
One of the most impressive contributions that Sternbach and Okuda have made to the new series is to flesh out future physics. They can lecture for hours about the warp drive, list the sixteen power settings of Type II and III phasers, and explain how the Romulans drive their ships with quantum singularities. It sounds very convincing; in fact, it sounds inevitable. But are there some technical devices of the show that - given the laws of physics - will never be possible? "Never," as Arthur Clarke would say, "is a term that you want to stay away from." Okuda grins. "But there are things like the replicator, which is essentially a molecular fax machine...."
"Superluminal speed may never come to pass," nods Sternbach. "And the transporter is another magic box. But I think that seeing these things, week after week, is a tribute to the potential ingenuity of future generations. And if we don't do exactly those things - well, we may do others that are just as magical."
"Don't you sometimes feel convinced," I ask, "that after so many years designing the Enterprise you could put together a real starship?" The two men smile, and shake their heads emphatically. "You try to make the design look credible," Sternbach says. "You want the audience to believe it's real. But we're not kidding ourselves; we haven't filled in the details."
"The most powerful device in television, and in all of drama, is the viewer's mind," Okuda states. "We can suggest and imply that a tremendous amount of work has gone into all this." He waves his arm, a sweeping gesture that embraces all 42 decks of the Starship Enterprise. "But if Rick or I actually knew how to make warp drive work, we'd be polishing our Nobel acceptance speeches."
