Star Trek: 10 More Secrets Of The USS Enterprise D You Need To Know
6. Ten Forward Doesn't Fit
The Ten Forward lounge was introduced at the start of Star Trek: The Next Generation's second season in the episode "The Child". Prior to that, numerous lounge and dining areas appeared aboard the Enterprise-D as temporary "swing" sets (like the dining room in "Haven") or redresses of the crew quarters (see "Justice"), but Ten Forward was intended to be permanent standing set and a place to tell more personal stories about the Starfleet crew.
The impressive Ten Forward set was designed by Herman Zimmerman and constructed when the production moved to a new, larger soundstage. With its three bays of windows looking out into space, the producers decided to place Ten Forward at the tip of the Enterprise's saucer to match the numerous clusters of windows that already existed on the filming miniature.
According to the ships' designer, Andrew Probert, those windows were intended to be lounge areas, but they weren't supposed to look like Ten Forward. Worse, as envisioned by Probert, the tip of the Enterprise's saucer wasn't even large enough to accommodate Ten Forward.
Much to Probert's irritation, the producers ignored existing concept artwork for those areas as well as pre-determined deck sizes, choosing the underside of the saucer section for Ten Forward's location. This decision created a discrepancy between the Enterprise-D filming miniature and the sets, until a second model of the ship was constructed in the third season which reflected the redesigned saucer section.
Still, footage of the older model and the new one was used interchangeably throughout the rest of the series, creating a whole other set of problems...