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

While all five previous Star Trek shows were filmed at Paramount Studios in Hollywood, California, Star Trek: Discovery would be the first (but not last) series to be filmed at Pinewood Toronto Studios. There, a series of elaborate sets were constructed consisting of the USS Discovery's bridge, the USS Shenzhou's bridge, and a network of corridors connecting various important generic rooms like sickbay, engineering, crew quarters, a mess hall, an airlock, Captain Lorca's "menagerie", and the transporter room.

However, because the premiere episodes "The Vulcan Hello" and "Battle at the Binary Stars" were set almost entirely aboard the USS Shenzhou and the rest of the show would be set aboard the USS Discovery, these standing sets had to be designed to be easily modified to double for both vessels.

A simple repaint of Discovery's corridors allowed them to stand-in for the Shenzhou's corridors and a reconfiguration of Lorca's menagerie resulted in the Shenzhou's brig. Discovery's transporter room, however, was given the most extensive makeover, with a unique lighting scheme, a circular transporter control console, and large "lateral vector transporter" emitters installed in the set to transform it into the more primitive USS Shenzhou.

Oh and about those lateral vector transporter emitters... in Star Trek's great history of recycling sets and recycling props, you might notice the large dish-like emitters appearing again in "Brother" aboard the USS Hiawatha and in "The Red Angel" in which they doubled as phase discriminators.