Nope, It's A Bridge

General
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Many of you, gentle readers, are also devotees of the Atomic Rockets web site. (As well you should be, if you are interested in matters rockety.) And, of course, you may have noted the Atomic Rockets Seal of Approval off in the right-hand column.

But today I’m going to talk about a place where I find myself, and the ‘verse, disagreeing with it. Specifically, with “It is a CIC Not a Bridge“. For convenience, I’m going to quote from it here:

That round room in the Starship Enterprise? The one they call the “Bridge?” Wrong term, that thing is a Combat Information Center (CIC). On a real wet-navy vessel, the bridge is a tiny two-station place used to control the the movement of the ship. It only had stations for the navigation and helm.

In other words, the “bridge” on the Starship Enterprise is that little console that Sulu and Chekov sit at.

The CIC is where all the data from the sensors, scoutships, intelligence agencies, central command, and other ships is gathered and evaluated. The important information is passed to the captain along with tactical suggestions. Exactly the way Uhura, Scotty, and Mr. Spock pass information and tactical suggestions to Captain Kirk.

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/misconceptions.php#id–It_is_a_CIC_not_a_Bridge

So, here’s the thing. It’s actually slightly more complicated than that. There are three places on a wet navy vessel all of which do things that people think of as functions of “the bridge”.

There is the CIC, as described above. It’s the information-gathering and decision-making center.

Then there is the wheelhouse, which is where the ship’s movement is controlled from. This, on ships that had a bridge, was usually buried down inside the hull or beneath the superstructure – for one simple reason. You don’t want it shot off. If you lose the wheelhouse, you can’t command the ship any more, so you don’t want it somewhere vulnerable.

And then there is the bridge, which is the place you conn the ship from. It’s up high at the front of the superstructure with generous wings, etc., because its requirement is that you be able to see what the ship’s doing in order to command it.

(On a merchant ship, you probably don’t need a protected CIC, and since you don’t expect anyone to shoot your bridge off, you may have the engine-room telegraphs and wheel up there in one place. On navy vessels, on the other hand, instead of passing engine orders and steering directly, you have a bridge talker yelling “Port 40! Half ahead both!” down voice tubes to the wheelhouse.

On the other hand, the bridge is also exposed to heavy weather, so merchies that expect to encounter the rough stuff may still have a separate wheelhouse. This was actually where they first came from.)

In a historical digression, incidentally, the original bridge is an evolution of what was originally the quarter deck, the raised deck at the stern, on sailing ships. When it became more important to avoid your own smoke than see what your sails were doing, which is to say, as we moved from sail to steam, the raised area moved for’ard and became the bridge as we know it today.

As for the wheelhouse, that came from sailing ship designs in which the poop deck (the highest deck at the stern, typically forming the roof of the stern cabin) was extended forward to cover the quarter deck and the ship’s wheel, on the entirely reasonable grounds that in a storm, it’s easier to steer without being out in the full blast of wind and wave, and in battle, it’s much easier to steer if you have some protection from being shot.

So let’s bring this back around to starships.

You don’t need a bridge in the above sense. As it says further up that page, Rockets Don’t Got Windows – given space ranges and instrumentation, you are never going to be trying to conn the ship with your Mark I Eyeball, which is essentially what a bridge up high is for. Your best view is going to come from sensors, but they can be read just as easily from the CIC, buried deep in the center of the hull for maximum protection.

(Why did the Enterprise designers perch the bridge right up at the top of the saucer, with about three feet between the back of the fancy digital sensor-feed-showing viewscreen and hard vacuum, right where any Tom, Dick, or Kang could shoot at it conveniently? Were they all Romulan spies?)

Do you need a separate wheelhouse? Well, given that starships are certainly going to have fancy electronic controls rather than the hydraulic/pneumatic/etc., systems that imposed constraints on the position of wet navy wheelhouses vis-a-vis the CIC – usually buried down in the bottom of the ship where the armor is thick – I’m going to say probably not. The CIC’s already in the safest place, per above.

(You may have a maneuvering room, as they call the place on submarines, where the engineers translate your requests into detailed instructions to the engines, and given that a starship ACS is probably also rocket engines of some sort, that may also be handled from there – but that’s a different function.)

You are going to have a CIC, because you still need somewhere to coordinate information, make decisions. In my opinion, it will probably also be the wheelhouse (after all, as in the Enterprise example above, it’s just one console, and since the maneuvering orders are going to come from the officer on watch in the CIC anyway, why make him shout any further than he has to?).

The only question is whether it will be called the CIC. The above (combined CIC/wheelhouse) is essentially the arrangement they use on submarines today (where it is called the control room; the bridge is the place you can stand at the top of the conning tower when the boat’s on the surface).

That may be likely nomenclature for starships, too. (Nothing especially that civilian starships are unlikely to have a Combat Information Center.)

On the other hand, the Imperial Navy, and their merchant tradition, call it the bridge. Why? Well, unlike our submarines, there isn’t another bridge somewhere to clash with it – and you get your best view of what’s around from it – and in the meantime, it’s a name that’s got centuries, indeed millennia, of tradition behind it as The Place From Which Ships Are Commanded. It’s a word, in a nutshell, that’s got weight.

And since you’re combining all the functions back together, as they were in the beginning, that counts plenty.

The quarter deck, on the other hand, that’s somewhere else.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://eldraeverse.com/2019/05/23/nope-its-a-bridge
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Comments migrated from WordPress:

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I am reminded of the design for the Long Shot, the puppeteers’ prototype Quantum II hypership in the Known Space saga. The control space (cockpit, because it’s originally a single-soph vessel) is buried at the center, as a proper CIC should be. A member of the design team scoffs at the human tradition to place the pilot station at the less protected bow; the pilot, in contrast, scoffs at the puppeteer tradition of installing the pilot seat facing aft.

Flight deck and command deck are two more totally valid names for the space, but I don’t see them often used…

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Just found this old resurrected post and to play mischievous imp’s advocate there are scenario’s in the Star Trek universe where exposed bridges prove occasionally useful. For example in Star Trek Lower Decks [ROT13 encrypted potentially spoilers information follows{va gur gragu rcvfbqr bs frnfba gjb juvpu jnf nyfb gur frnfba svanyr, Svefg Pbagnpg}] a negative space wedgie type anomaly that disable most electronics(or whatever Starfleet uses) when travelling though it is faced but which must be travelled through to [ROT13 encrypted spoiler {cerirag nabgure qvfnoyrq Fgnesyrrg irffry pbyyvqvat jvgu gur fhesnpr bs n cer-jnec pvivyvmngvba’f ubzrjbeyq juvpu jbhyq obgu xvyy gur fuvc’f perj naq xvyy n ynetr nzbhag bs gur angvir cbchyngvba qhr gb xvargvp vzcnpg naq nagvznggre pbagnvazrag ybff}]. They figure out a way to do it but the viewscreen is inoperable due to the anomaly and while maneuvering through the anomaly is possible with only manual control but the only place the ship can be controlled form is the bridge where the viewscreen is oh no e-scooter wait the bridge is at the very front of the saucer which is tactically exposed but in this case means you can just jettison the part of the hull containing theviewscreen and look at the space in front of you directly if you’re willing to wear a vacuum suit and guess what the day is saved due to [ROT13 encrypted spoiler{gur perj bs n qvfnoyrq Fgnesyrrg fgnefuvc orvat erfphrq, zvyyvbaf bs crbcyr orvat fnirq sebz qrngu qhr gb nagvznggre pbagnvazrag snvyher jura gur fgnefuvc jbhyq’ir uvg gur tebhaq, naq n svefg pbagnpg abg orvat zneerq ol nppvqragny zrtn qvr qhr gb artyvtrapr..}] Hurray. All because the bridge was close to the front of the saucer and had a hull panel that could be jettisoned in emergency situations. Does this outweigh the tactical weakpoint of having your bridge at the very front of the saucer? Probably not but sometimes the narrative causality that the Star Trek universe runs on twists probability and makes it useful. If suspension of disbelief fails you can always blame it on a Q after all.

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They blew out the entire hull to do this?

It’s Lower Decks, so I won’t criticize, but in any other ST property: “Let me introduce this ancient Earth technology called a periscope…”

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Quick note: We have spoiler tags for your convenience!

Not that it’s an inconvenience for those of us with at least three rot13 decoders to hand and a Usenet history that make it almost readable anyway, but for those readers who aren’t me… you can just {spoiler}surround the text{/spoiler} only with square brackets instead of curlies. :grin:

I think there’s a similar scene in Nemesis where they get the front of the bridge shot off, viewscreen included, and end up hand-flying Enterprise with the Mk. 1 Eyeball. It wasn’t a good enough movie for me to have clear memories of it, though, so don’t quote me on that.

On the lack of remote control, I seem to remember a time in Discovery, or maybe SNW, in which they had to control the ship by calling people on the intercom to manually operate the appropriate thruster controls, so there’s always that. And if nothing else they should be able to steer the ship by differential engine thrust from engineering, the same way they do on sea-ships.

But anyway. The real problem is

…because in the name of the Gods of Engineering Redundancy, not having even one auxiliary steering position (maneuvering room/after-steering) is damn near malpractice. Even if you are getting someone on the communicator from 10-Forward or whatever the California-class equivalent is and calling out steering orders.

(At least the Enterprise has a “battle bridge”, but it probably wouldn’t if it couldn’t separate.)

If you happen to have your copy of The Core War handy, you see the little dome-windows tucked beneath the leading edge of the mid-deck bulge on the ship on the cover? The primary air locks are just abaft those; directly behind the windows themselves are small conning stations. Their primary use is when docking, hence the location, but if you lose the primary conn on the bridge you can fly the whole ship from here.

And the Drake-class is a dinky little frigate.

But!

It turns out all this is irrelevant. Because the Star Trek tech manuals include the canonical equivalent to that thing I talked about once as “Stupid WeaveControl Tricks” possible in the 'verse.

Which is to say everything is computer-run, so it’s not like you’re constrained by the physical location of the conn. You can call up the helm controls on any of the assorted software-reconfigurable display surfaces on the ship, fixed or portable, and they’ll work. So you can pick any room with a view if you need to, or hell, send Ensign Expendable to go stand on the hull with a PADD, and control the whole ship from there!

(100 Kirk points to the first officer to kill a D’deridex battlecruiser while piloting with an Apple Watch!)

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…I know that you have to have a butt-stick surgically fitted to join Starfleet, but holy shit, how cool would it be to put your mag-boots on and stand on top of a ship going into warp?

I would so be expelled from the Academy for “runabout surfing”.

(And that’s before doing the whole “turn the shields into an oxygen envelope” thing so I could invent naked runabout surfing.)

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Some Vulcan, early in Earth’s starfaring history:

“What is a ‘Silver Surfer’?”

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I’ve fairly sure that would kill you. I’m not sure HOW, but that seems like it should be lethal in some fashion.

…possibly by the very Star Trek explanation of “if it were doable, someone would have done it and many people copied and someone would have made a joke about it”.

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Argleblarglebluh, I totally forgot that that was an option. My at the time sleep-deprived mind wanted to share some Star Trek Lore I knew but also knew parts of it were spoilery and instead of searching for a spoiler hiding function in the message options my brain went, “hey, don’t those super smart eldrae hide spoilers with encryption?”(see Entry 14 in 37 Things You Probably Shouldn’t Do (But Are Allowed To) In The Associated Worlds) and was thus inspired to use ROT13 as opposed to anything more easily revealable method of spoiler concealment because a large portion of my brain was no longer in the business of rational thinking and instead starting to chant the mantra titularly described in the children’s book Go the Fuck to Sleep. Apologies for that lapse in judgement.

With that explanation for my embarrassing error out of the way do you think I should replace the ROT13 with spoilers, keep it as is, or put in the tagged spoilers alongside but keep the encryption so they both coexist, or something else? I mean you’re basically the moderator for this forum, and by virtue of being the only moderator effectively the supermoderator as well, and since there’s no one else who has moderating privileges you are the Dictatorial Grand-over-mega-ultra-moderator for, if not life(you could hypothetically step down or appoint someone else you trust to equal rank for delegation purposes), at the very least the current moment. What do you think I should do?

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I don’t really see the need, by which I mean you didn’t do anything that qualifies as a moderatable offence or error, and you’re taking this about eighty-three times more seriously than I am. :wink:

I just wanted to drop word of the spoiler tag in case you’d missed it. Job done and over, belike.

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