Did Star Trek Build Deep Space Nine The Wrong Way? 

Maybe the D’Deridex couldn’t fit but that’s about it.

​@@GiantFreakinRobotnot that the cardassian would care...

You wouldn't be able to dock a Galaxy Class ship at each pylon though. It's axiomatically an incorrect way to design a docking pier.

All cannon Cardasian ships are much smaller and you could dock 6 Galor or Keldon class ships at once

@@ClarinoI Why would the Cardassians have designed a space station to fit 6 Federation starships that weren't even being designed yet?

Haha!

They were definitely from Section 31

I bet it was Chloe.

DS9 was built by a family oriented evil power so it makes perfect sense

@@samwisegamgee6532 The Cardassians? Obsessed with family? I'm sure many families have been put to death due to their twisted sense of justice.

Right those pylons were meant to dock cargo ships hauling ore. Ships which would need the station to defend them if there was trouble because they were just cargo ships

Curving inward fits a bubble shield design, outward does not

It had shields… they were just not great and/or damaged because the Cardassians stripped the station.

bingo, one of the rules of Star Trek was that designs had to be simple enough that they could be drawn by children

It would have some kind of reactor room you’re right, but your chief engineer would probably spend far less time there than he would in an engine room on a ship.

I dunno, they might well have built the sets and done the filming if you had written the checks to pay for it all.

Proper scaling would be nice

Comparing the picture from the docked enterprise D , Voyager, Klingon BOP and Klingon Battle cruiser really gives a headache...when we throw in the size of the runabout that is the width of the habitat Ring section makes it really ridiculous. With the galaxy class docked the Habitat Ring runabout hangars could fit a defiant (what would be cool as well, three defiant lifting up during the defense situation)

True!

Paramount's higher ups knew about Babylon 5, but I'm pretty sure the rank and file guys working on the show like the ones who designed DS9 did not.

The Babylon 5 station wasn't a very original design. It was a basic O'Neill cylinder, with some external detail. A scifi staple. i.sstatic.net/OlDk6.jpg

I'm gonna blow you mind dude. Gene pitched Star Trek as Wagon Train to the stars. Now Gene comes up with concept for DS9 The Rifleman to the stars which was a spinoff of Wagon Train. Total BS that DS9 was a ripoff of Babylon 5.

​@@patrickradcliffe3837JMS has publicly stated that he pitched B5 to Paramount. They passed. What happened inside of Paramount after that is anyone's guess.

​@justanotherstanczyk with the success of TNG, everyone was trying to make their own Sci-Fi series during the late 80s an early 90s. The trouble was, where do you literally base these stories? Do you have them follow a crew on a ship, or are they a team at a base/space station? Pretty much your only options. Paramount wanting to "do something different", creating stories with "more interpersonal conflicts" (a theme they would follow for quite a while), also wanted to go away from the ship-based storylines. What else was left?

I feel like Kim and Quark would get along

You underestimate Star Trek designers.

Even real construction works that way

Right the Cardi ships are never massive.

It’s different enough they could still use it!

Similar for sure. I actually like that about it. Makes it feel old… and it is old

And if you think about it, Cardassians don’t even have a ship as big as the Galaxy… and they were designing it with their ships in mind.

Maybe the pilons where designed to work with/as conveyors and that could transport a lot of material. We need to Start thinking three-dimensional, ship docking with the top side just letting the ore flow into the cargo bay. Ships flying in from the top would still keep a lot of room. Now you could say "why the opening to the side and not the top, ship just flying in with bottom up"...well, if they want to have an option for passengers transfer the loading through the roof the side port makes in space the most sense.

They do! Rarely but it is seen on the show

That seems like more moving parts that could break though, less durable

We are seeing one of the biggest ships docking on a station that it was never designed for...and that's where the discussion could actually be over. The galaxy class needs to fly in from the side and actually blocks all pylons for the room required to navigate,the intrepid can just fly in from above. We are talking about an airport designed for A320 size jets and seeing a docked A380 /747 complaining how terrible the airport is designed as it blocks three docking ports...it was never intended to house those big jets. For federation Designed stations the outward pylons would make sense to house six galaxy class ships

Right it was designed to handle ore haulers

In as much as it is a wheel?

Why couldn’t it be? Docking port too big you think?

You actually going to try to tell The Sisko where he can and cannot park his pimp hand?

In fact, the defiant should not be able to dock anywhere in the station. too small and does not have a proper docking port to let people through the only thing they use It's the deflector disk probe launcher that makes no sense unless they crawl like worms through it.

Well we do see a runabout docking at one of thd upper pilons in the episode empok nor

@@Colin_ That makes even less sense.

Even if it was designed that way you’d need variable shield sizes to accommodate different size ships. Still not as good defensively

As for why you'd logically ship ore up to be refined, there's many reasonable answers. It's possible the refinement process yields an unpleasant pollutant as a byproduct. In space, you can just jettison that out into the vacuum, planetside not so much. This is something missed by Mars/Moon/Asteroid mining critics. Yes, it's cheaper to mine on Earth, but it's also way more polluting (or rather, polluting of places we potentially care about). It's possible some part of the process wants a vacuum which is much easier to achieve in space. This seems unlikely from the perspective of current science, but you never know. Matter loss from repeatedly pulling a vacuum is less of an issue for some place that refines ore since ores are usually oxides so oxygen shouldn't be in short supply. It's possible the ore is strategically significant or valuable once refined, so access to it should be controlled. This is easier to do on a space station than a ground facility since you probably need explicit permission to be within a few hundred kms rather than a ground facility someone can just walk up to. This logic could also apply to something used in the refinement process. In Star Trek, moving things up and down a gravity well doesn't seem to be a big issue, so you shouldn't look there to figure out why something is the way that it is. It's like asking today why isn't everyone living on a farm and growing all their own food, wouldn't that be a lot more transport and cost efficient? For people in the developed world, it's generally not an issue to supply a grocer and have people purchase food from there instead, so food access is much less of an impediment to a settlement's location than in the past.

Figures!

What about for defense though?

@@GiantFreakinRobot What about it?

@@GiantFreakinRobot The defense argument of fitting the station architecture to a shield bubble makes a certain amount of sense, but it is somewhat complicated by the fact that it wasn't a military station. It was, confusingly, an ore processing facility. Because for some reason shipping millions of tons of raw ore to orbit made more economic sense than putting hundreds of tons of equipment on the ground near the source of the ores. Just being in orbit meant it was immune to the militia raids on foot that were the primary security problem for the Cardassians during the occupation. And it was apparently a free port even before the Federation took over administration. The insular and somewhat xenophobic Cardassians would have been quite lukewarm about expending a lot of military resources to protect a Ferengi merchantman. It's unclear how many Cardassian ships actually docked at Terok Nor during routine operations, or where exactly all that refined ore actually went since the economy of the 24th Century was written to be anything from vague and inconsistent to utterly baffling. I think we all might be massively underestimating the importance of the Cardassians just sort of thinking the sphere shape looked cool. They like the idea of sticking a gaudy fascist eyesore in the Bajoran sky that any kid with a telescope could look at and see the glory of the Cardassian architects guild. Perhaps they really wanted to build a solid sphere shaped like the Death Star, but budget cuts meant the sphere never got filled in.

They do have their own style!

What part of it is wrong? You think the pylons should face out??

It’s busy fighting the Shadows. Maybe Zathras can get a used B3 for you.

Why do you say that?

Well no matter which way they face the pylons only have one airlock

You think they should have been!

I always wondered why they never did this but I suppose such an articulating model would have added cost and complexity both in universe and real life. Shame as it would have been awesome to see a pylon rotate out for a large vessel like a Galaxy or Sovereign.

He did not design the look of the station.

​@@GiantFreakinRobotToday I learned that it was going to be based on the Tower of Babel idea. What Babylon was named after? Bit on the nose, perhaps?

​@michaelhutchins1844 Umm JMS has used the name "Babylon 5" for years as an easter egg. I think he started doing it in Captain Power but I haven't seen it in years but I do own the complete DVD set.

@@GiantFreakinRobot I think you’re missing the point of my comment. There would be no DS9 to design if they didn’t first steal the idea from JMS and pretend it was their own.

At least you hate Discovery, as is proper.

What about them?

@@GiantFreakinRobot who needs pilons when you could just transport over 😁

Just a wheel?

@@GiantFreakinRobot A BIG wheel.

@@somebuddyX Only if The Big Wheel station has a ship permanently assigned to it called the Proud Mary.

You did not watch the whole video

@@GiantFreakinRobot I did after sorry buddy. Assume I talking to everyone else. When u heard yoyr intro I jumped ahead of myself Forgive me but like u this argument drives me CRAZY

@@Peaceforall20111 Actually, the pylons curve inward so as to harmonize with the horizontal ring shape, and to all fit within the television screen 'picture frame' area; i. e. television is a visual medium therefore the pylons cure inward because of visual aesthetics, not because of philosophy or engineering.

@@scottfw7169 I could possibly believe that, except for the fact that we know that there were functional things going on in those pylons if you’re gonna say it was aesthetic only I find that hard to believe perhaps in the design of the people in the shelf, but I do not think that would be the case in universe

@@Peaceforall20111 See, there's the thing, I am talking about the designers of the props, not the fictional point of view of any show characters.