Star Trek: 10 Secrets Of The USS Kelvin You Need To Know

The idea of using the USS Kelvin to bridge the gap between earlier Star Trek productions and Abrams' reboot also carried over into the ship's interior. According to production designer Scott Chambliss:

The Kelvin is the first big interior spaceship bridge that we see and it's the most that you would look at and go, "Oh yeah this must be the new Star Trek movie", because it kind of looks like what you've seen before.

Despite the familiarity of the bridge, Chambliss and company nevertheless took the opportunity to add their own touches, including a darker, more weathered look to the sell the age of the Kelvin and (as mentioned in the intro) handlebars coming down from the ceiling for inevitable ship shakes.

Not only is the Kelvin the first starship to appear on screen in Star Trek (2009), it was also the first starship photographed for the movie. As Abrams and his team were brand new to the Star Trek Universe, the filmmaker and crew used the Kelvin as a trial run, or uh crash course, for later sequences to be shot in the Enterprise sets.

Director of photography Dan Mindel explained:

We went onto the Kelvin knowing that we were going to be blind for the first few days, until we started seeing dailies from those sets. Then we could take notes and add whatever we wanted to for the Enterprise, which hadn't been built yet.