Star Trek: 10 Secrets Of Strange New Worlds' Enterprise You Need To Know

Recently, Star Trek: Discovery's third season finale, "You Are That Hope, Part 2", caused some consternation with its depiction of a previously unseen (and seemingly impossible) open space within the USS Discovery-A, replete with gigantic machinery and speeding turbolifts.

This bit of dramatic license with the scale of the Discovery wasn't restricted to that episode though, with Discovery's rollercoaster-like turboshafts first appearing way back in the season two opener, "Brother". The Short Trek "Q&A" also featured a similar turbolift funhouse, this time aboard the USS Enterprise.

While these brief glimpses into the guts of both the Discovery and the Enterprise may have created technical discrepancies, the designers of the reworked USS Enterprise at least attempted to address a separate turbolift-related issue.

Dating all the way back to Star Trek: The Original Series, many fans have rightly pointed out that the bridge turbolift as it appeared on the Enterprise model (a bump at the center-back of the bridge dome) didn't fit its location at the back right side of the bridge set. Many even wondered if this meant that bridge itself was situated off-center to the rest of the ship.

The reality is simply that the producers chose to relocate the turbolift after the model of the Enterprise was constructed so that Captain Kirk didn't have has back to a plain orange turbolift door. But the updated Enterprise's designers worked to create an in-universe workaround in their version of the ship.

According to John Eaves:

A cool thing that Scott [Schneider] did that you'll never see was to make the turbolift work. He came up with the idea that you get in the turbolift and it rotates into the tube and then drops,. It was a brilliant way of making that work aesthetically on the interior and the exterior.

And it solved a 55 year-old problem, neat.