Ok... i am watching Star Trek tonight and a phasor shoots threw a window on the bridge of the ship. I would say the windows dimensions are 40ft by 10ft. One person gets sucked out the window from about 30ft away. The rest of the crew are all hanging on to something. The captain hits the shields up button, it goes up, and then everything around them are back to normal. Now my question.

In reality, Would this be the case? Or, would no one be able to hold on due to do the force, pressure kill you or possibley survive the even seconds this happens?

Thanks...

A window that big would suck a roomful of air into vacuum in a fraction of a second. The effect would be more like an explosion followed by silence than a wind tunnel. But TV scifi always adds hurricane-force winds because it's more dramatic. The air pressure alone would probably not suck out a man under full normal gravity unless he were standing right near the window; The force of the moving air would be very strong, but very brief.

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didn't this happen in ST:Nemesis?
the front of the bridge got blown away, sucking Ensign Redshirt #12 out before they got some sort of a force field up. i recall a fast decompression without much drama, then once the force field was up everything was all well and good and Picard was worried about whether Troi broke a finger nail or Riker messed up his beard..

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Forget the sketchy science. The most hard-to-believe part of that whole thing is that it isn't standard operating procedure to keep that shield turned on at all times.

They have a window on the Enterprise bridge? Gee, one of the things that made sense about Star Trek was that they always used a "viewscreen" instead of just looking out the window Buck Rogers style.

It was the viewscreen, but since the bridge is right on the top of the saucer section of the Enterprise it might as well be a window in normal use.

The most absurd thing is that the bridge is in such a vulnerable location in the first place, and that it took literally decades before anyone actually tried shooting at it. Even more absurd in the context of the film is that at this point Shinzon is trying to capture Picard alive, so firing at the bridge, where Picard is sitting, and causing the air to vent into space hardly seems the most sensible tactical move.

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ST2-TWOK.

But; when you consider the shields, It ends up to be in a fairly protected area away from edges of the force field.

I agree.

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I seem to recall that the Enterprise in ST:TNG had a "battle bridge" somewhere in the non-saucer part of the ship, but they rarely used it.

Nick

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Only when the battle/drive section was separated from the saucer section.

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That's correct. Judging from available drawings, the Enterprise "E" bridge was about 30 ft in diameter and 8 ft tall. Attached was the captains "ready room", roughly 1/4 again that volume. Total volume about 7,000 cubic feet, roughly equal to a 737 airliner cabin.

The hole doesn't look like 40x10 ft, more like 20x8 ft, but the result would be similar. It would be an almost instant decompression.

The other consistent technical error is that phaser fire against unshielded ships is depicted like a cutting torch. The ships take hit after hit, each one doing a little more damage.

However in the Star Trek technical universe, even a hand phaser can vaporize a good size object.

Ship-mounted phasers driven by warp power are immensely more powerful. They could disintegrate a mountain, or lay waste to an entire continent.

Ironically the old classic Trek series often depicted that aspect more accurately than the later movies and series. For the most part, shields either worked or you died. In classic Trek, the "rock and roll" was overload of the ship's field mechanisms to compensate, NOT the ship's hull getting hit by a phaser.

Gene Roddenberry and his main season one producer, Gene Coon, were both combat veterans, and Roddenberry was a bomber pilot. Despite the limitations of commercial TV, their background let them imbue Star Trek with a certain amount of technical realism.

The newer series and movies are produced by a newer generation of people from very different backgrounds. There's a lot more pseudo-technical jargon, and a lot more "fact checking" against established Trek technical canon. However despite getting the details right, they often get the big picture wrong, as evidenced by this very Nemesis scene.

The battle bridge was to be used when the saucer separated. It was the command centre for the stardrive section. However, it was located on the top of the neck of the stardrive section, i.e. in the equivalent, right-on-the-top tempting target position of the main bridge on the saucer.

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"The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common: They don't alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views." The Doctor, Doctor Who: The Face of Evil.

Ah yes, I had forgotten that, though since that happened inside the Mutara nebula, where phaser targetting was done by 'best guess' since the actual targetting mechanism was inoperable in there, one could argue that the fact that the Enterprise shot the Reliant's bridge was more luck than judgement.

Even so, it still makes no sense to have the command centre of the ship so exposed. In any prolonged battle the shields will be weakened or will fail entirely, leaving the bridge exposed and allowing a potentially terminal shot as in Nemesis.

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"The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common: They don't alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views." The Doctor, Doctor Who: The Face of Evil.

I've always suspected that the Enterprise is actually a quite advanced machine intelligence and that the only reason it has a crew is so it can toy with them for its own sadistic amusement. Putting the bridge in such an exposed position is just part of it. It also explains why phasors that can vapourize mountains do so little damage to the Enterprise. The ship is in no danger at all, it just wants to hurt some meatbags.

Here's something that they never think about in science fiction (or scifi) TV shows and movies: if the ship has artificial gravity, shouldn't the shattered window fall inwards, rather than outwards? And wouldn't much of the air remain inside the room, at least for a while?...

And yet you could see lit windows on the outside of the ship...

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I would guess that putting the bridge on top is done because that's where you expect to find the bridge on a ship. Modern warships are controlled from the 'Ops' room down below when they are in action.

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Similarly to Star Trek. The Battle Bridge is located in the secondary hull of the Enterprise ...

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If I correctly remember my Franz Joseph blueprints of the TOS Enterprise, it was simply labeled as "Bridge" or maybe "Auxilliary Bridge"...mmmmmmaybe on a mid-level deck in the secondary hull, right behind the main deflector...I think.

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Think of it exactly like blowing out a window on a high altitude airliner - where there is gravity inside and near-vacuum outside. Of course the glass flies outward. And of course the air equalizes very rapidly.

Yes, I see. Thanks.

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See above. They only ever use the battle bridge when the saucer is separated. In every other battle situation they fly in still controlling the ship from the main bridge.

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"The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common: They don't alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views." The Doctor, Doctor Who: The Face of Evil.

When joined, the battle bridge is fairly well protected, so on paper, the idea was a good one. Unfortunately, it's realtively rare one can predict an impending battle early enough to get your senior staffers to the battle bridge, logging in, etc. Especially when they're busy doing diplomacy in the hope of preventing the battle.

So it seems to be a case of "good idea, horrible execution."

That said, I question the wisdom of putting every senior officer in the same room, especially during a crisis.

Either Picard+Riker, or Data+Worf should be on the battle bridge when all four officers are standing the same watch, with Geordi (or his relief) standing watch in Engineering. They can set up a closed circuit viewscreen for the purposes of telepresence, but they should never all be in the same room for any real length of time.

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And you, to whom adversity has dealt the final blow
With smiling [faces] lyin' to ye' everywhere ye' go
Turn to, and put out all your strength of arm and heart and brain
And like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.

On the other hand, as easily as their starships blow up when damaged, worrying about the bridge's location may redundant

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Large ocean-going ships today have two bridges so it stands to reason the Star Trek ships would also. In fact there's a line in Star Trek OS (from the Kirk & Spock era) where Kirk orders Scotty to eject the saucer and blast away with the rest of the ship "if you have too". (The ship is being pulled in by a tractor beam from the planet of tanned white-haired Val feeders.)

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It wasnt a shield, it was an emergency force field.
To keep all emergency force fields always on would take too much power away from other vital systems.

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Perhaps the bridge of the Enterprise as seen from an enemies perspective is actually a decoy. The bridge is, in fact, safely ensconced deep in the bowels of the ship, away from any direct fire (and the 'window' is indeed a view screen showing images from remote external cameras).

Thus, the enemy uses time and energy attacking the 'bridge' in the hope of a quick end to the battle, while the crew of the Enterprise are in fact well protected and able to continue battle unscathed. While the enemy believe they are using up their photon torpedos on the head of the ship, they actually are, but not in the sense that they meant...

(For those of you itching to reply that your plans of the Enterprise clearly show the bridge in its "known" position at the top of the ship - and I know you are - well, of course they do. You wouldn't expect the true plans of a StarFleet vessel to be available to any old schmoe, where they could easily fall into Romulan hands, do you???)

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OK, then how about the fact we've seen the bridge blown open to space by weapons fire on screen?

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Simply continuing the deception. The crew of the Enterprise are smart - they know the Romulans are watching the movie. They want them to believe that the bridge has been destroyed, so they use footage filmed in Hanger 52 (next to the moon hoax set).

Cunning, huh?

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"Certainly, in the topsy-turvy world of heavy rock, having a good solid piece of wood in your hand is often useful." - Ian Faith

Maybe most spacefaring cultures know that a ship with a hidden, protected command center represents a culture up to no good and fires on such ships on sight. So as soon as a culture learns to fly in space they also learn not to be obviously up to no good.

Agreed. The starships aren't really meant to take much in the way of battle damage as they can't survive the energy of the weapons being used. The only real defense is the shields and once they are down you have basically had it. Thus all you are concerned with is the bit of energy that bleeds through the shield and that seems to strike mostly around the edges of the saucer--probably an inverse square effect from the point of the bleedthrough. If the shields are higher over the center of the saucer (which would happen if they were basically round) then it's actually in a pretty good place. The primary threat to the bridge would be internal and putting it clear up on top would actually be a good idea--it's as far away as possible from internal things that might go boom.