So cool. Do any of these have inertial dampening built in?

I just visited the Vitra Design Campus on Monday! It was a pretty awesome experience and I'm sure a of these chairs are in their overall collection too.

Any call outs for ones that are especially comfortable?

Sweet. I gotta get me one of those Worf sex chairs.

Now this is what I come to HN for.

I never realized that Worf's weird chair with the round things was an actual chair.

McCoy’s instruments were a salt and pepper shaker taken from the cafeteria.

Who was giving the set designer so much money lol

Loved seeing the Opsvik chair in Lower Decks.

Why would they ever need chairs in zero g !!!

The 60s were so wild. What happened?

The dedication is just insane haha!

This was unexpectedly fascinating.

This has internet-time-sucked me like it was 20 years ago.

At least now I can put a name to 'What the frak is Worf sitting on?'

This is the kind of niche old content the Internet was know for!

Kudos.

One thing I really love about Strange New Worlds is that they finally realized that fans love the beautiful, comfortable looking ships of the earlier series.

For a solid decade it was like all Star Trek ships felt like some "alternate timeline" from Next Generation in which the Federation is an endless war, and the ships are all dim and militaristic.

A huge part of the show was about exploration. And doing it in style. I love that about Strange New Worlds. It has captured a lot of great elements — another notable mention being the more episodic nature, and a return to more diplomatic narratives.

Not mine and the site has sadly gone down, but enjoy this archive of The Indeed Project: https://web.archive.org/web/20201112020739/http://www.skulld...

(Every time Teal'c says the word "Indeed" throughout Stargate SG-1)

No, nothing of that sort. I've got a couple websites still up with content back to the early aughts but they kind of just transformed into blogs as the years went on.

The comedy gets better. It's also a much lower stakes show - they're ensigns, not captains. That allows it to be a little more flexible.

No it stays heavy on the comedy.

It's a combination of comedy and a giant warm loving hug to the rest of Trek.

this is sort of dying. there are only one or two major prop houses still running. Sony just shut theirs down and they were one of the last studios to have their own prop warehouse. several specialty shops remain, but they seem much more limited in selection.

Less so than you may think, at least for the initial run for the show. Most mid-century modern furniture was designed to be cheap enough for the middle class/upper-middle class (although the show did tend to use more-expensive leather variants), which brought it relatively wide popularity. That popularity would later cause an increase in price as they became notable objects.

I also presume there's huge furniture rental places for movie studios in the neighbourhood.

They sure had a tremendous furniture budget! I guess the wardroom department was jealous!

And yet others, at least in isolation, don't look very futuristic at all. At most just kind of awkward.

IIRC, the doctor grows the fresh ingredients for Pike. There's a recent episode where he goes to meet the doctor (for other reasons I think) and he gives Pike some fresh greens. So essentially many tiny green houses.

That's addressed in the comments, it's probably a Sunbeam rather than a Hamilton Beach

Not especially, I worked in an IT support lab and most of the guys set their own schedules.

This is the dream, cast iron pans well seasoned and looked after will last practically forever and are a joy to cook with. Heck, even poorly looked after pans can usually be brought back to a long and delicious life. I envy you!

lol, I have that! I never noticed it on the show.

You're certainly not wrong there.

Ah, so the Enterprise-E got some safety upgrades as well!

Drumhead (where the warp core is sabotaged and there's a mcarthyist style investigation) had the infamous chair

This podcast was inspired by the chain in The Drumhead

https://trekmovie.com/2021/06/02/the-shuttle-pod-crew-takes-...

My daughter made me watch Nosferatu (1922) on a hundred year anniversary of the movie. Very interesting use of shadows.

One of the real skills of commercial model and prop making is know all the corners you can cut, and things you can reuse.

To take an example from Aliens, the ship is only seen from one side, so the model only has one finished painted side, and the interior sets scavenge loads of bits and pieces from computer cases and whatever.

You also shouldn’t underestimate the tradition of hiding Easter eggs in models and sets.

A good Belter never wastes anything.

they used a Thule or Yakima (don't remember) car roof box (something like that) https://www.thule.com/en-us/cargo-carrier/car-top-carrier/th... as a casket :D

now that you mention it, I can't think of anything more futuristic than using magnetic flux to induce current into an iron pan

a sous vide bath of vacuum sealed meat is rather dull in comparison to a good sear

Set phasers to “fry”.

On more ergonomic/modern office chairs, the arm rests can be adjusted forth and back for that reason (look for “3D” or “4D” arm rests).

I've had a tan one since I was a kid. I know we had it by the late '80s, dunno exactly when my parents got it. It shows no signs of wearing out, at least 35 years and a bunch of moves (plus some hard use—it wasn't just a toy box when I was a kid, but a toy itself! And a table, and a chair...) later.

If the new ones are still made like that, I'd love a few more at that price. But I have a feeling the plastic's been CAD'd down to as thin as possible to meet some minimum spec, like with everything else.

[EDIT] Oh, mine's slightly different: the handles aren't a molded element of the outside, but holes through the box itself, with finger-shaped curves. They're great, very secure to hold, though that does mean small stuff can fall out, and they can be tricky if the thing's packed too full.

Starfleet technology at its finest.

It's also just an artistic design choice. They tried very hard to make things look "alien" and "otherwordly" as much as possible, ranging from the set design to the costumes to the music to Starfleet sideburns.

For example sky can be any colour except blue, and doors can open every which way (except downwards, because that would require digging a hole in the set) and they make all sorts of sounds – as long as they're not "just" doors (they're "alien" doors!) They used those awkward holsters for phasers because pockets looked too "common".

Other more technical factors probably played a factor as well, but this also worked two ways and limited creativity: IIRC the origin skin colour for Vulcans was supposed to be red, but was changed to the off-white because the red didn't work on B&W.

As to the latter, my mom watched it on B&W originally, and then when it was rerun she had a color TV and was astonished that the skies on the alien planets weren't blue!

In the old studio days when they were cranking out a lot of films--many of which were probably fairly similar in style (e.g. Westerns)--it probably made more sense. I assume Netflix is mostly just writing checks to independent production companies. There's an overhead to storing and cataloging a bunch of props and I'm guessing there isn't a lot of return for Netflix to do so.

This is also a long standing production strategy for Star Trek.

One of the reasons the original series had so many episodes where they went to a planet that was just like Earth in some specific time period was the availability of props, costumes, and even sets. Entire episodes were written around this conceit: there's the episode where they land on a Nazi planet, the episode where they land on a Roman Empire planet, another episode where they meet an alien who turns out to be the literal Greek god Apollo, an episode where they land on the planet of the Prohibition-era mobsters, and an OK Corral episode just to name a few. From TNG onwards, the holodeck was used for similar purposes.

ST has a warehouse full of that stuff. Pictures, actual props, inventory lists and who to rent from, and original purchase orders. It is pretty detailed what they have access to for star trek especially after TNG. There are a few youtube vids where they show a very small sampling of what they have. Now some of the ToS stuff is more reliant on fan info. As a lot was cleared out in the 70s/80s for space for other things. A show like lower decks is all nostalgia type items so they are probably going thru that stuff very heavily.

I wondered if that was a part of it, but this particular Lower Decks entry makes me wonder. It seems like an amazing level of consistency between very different forms of production.

On the other hand, I suppose there could be a "Chairs of Star Trek" design handbook within the organization. This would be under the "Weird Shit" section.

Supposedly this "maneuver" was due to a combination of the early seasons using spandex and the actor having back issues (because they sized the costumes too small).

Not having arm rests is hardly dystopian. The chair I've used for approximately a decade now came with arm rests, but I chose not to install them, because they just get in the way and provide only negligible benefits. There are many other ways to rest your arms: on the table, on your legs, by crossing your arms, etc.

Starfleet is supposed to be filled with the most intrinsically motivated, hard-working, determined, smartest people in the Federation. For every Starfleet officer there are probably 100 people on Earth taking it easy and enjoying their post-scarcity utopia, but some people are just not wired that way.

I mean, there's an entire TNG episode about how Picard begrudgingly takes a vacation on the tropical "pleasure planet" of Risa and is completely miserable until he gets caught up in a wacky Indiana Jones type adventure. And an entire DS9 episode where Worf goes to Risa and decides he'd rather help some nutjobs sabotage the weather control system. These are not people who like to relax!

> it suggests people will relax so much less that arm rests are unnecessary

Or they relax SO often, that they don't need arm rests (because their arms are never tired, because they aren't working much)

I guess it is only a design choice. Not so sure about the positive outlook so. The federation is militaristic to the point of the military, Starfleet, running diplomacy. And the objectively bad stuff starfleet does, the prime directive for examole can amount to genocide by negligence, is done in the name of moral superiority. Throw in some hero worshipping and personality cult, after all rules only apply to certain people, never the heros... The Klingons are welcome allies, despite all the shit they did during the various wars with the federation, while the Romulans are the evil, honorless villains... Reading between the lines, there is a lot of cold war stuff in the universe going on.

DS9 had a wardroom, Sisko got promoted there

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Wardroom

Ah, but the quality was not on par with, say, Garak's works!

The networks were just switching to color en masse around the time that Star Trek came out and the penetration of color TVs was still pretty low--well under 50%.

I recall B&W TVs still being available as a budget option in the early 80s, though by then most middle class homes had a color TV.

(raises hand)

People get tossed out of their seats every other episode in star trek. I'm sure I've seen multiple "medical team to the bridge"s due to someone getting knocked loose by the ship shaking and hitting their head on a console.

Course, given the accelerations in Star Trek you are red smudge without them anyway. But then there is all the flowing around around the bridge, engineering, everytime a ship is hit... Maybe a seatbelt wouod have helped!

Or some space space suits, proper footware for away missions. Alongside clothing...

We had a B&W portable that lived on top of the refrigerator but was dragged into the dining room to watch Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy for weeknight dinners. The TV itself was from the 70s, but we were still using it in the early and mid 90s. It still had paint dried on its case from when my parents watched it while painting the rooms of the house.

Also, Star Trek uses a plasma grid to distribute energy, not simple electrical lines. I think I remember reading somewhere (this may have been fan theory) the sparks flying off are a pressure-release so it doesn't just straight explode.

That is a very old-school approach so. But it could be an in-uniberse explanation. Overall so, Federation, and Star Trek equipment in general, just seems so incredibly unsafe. Very easy to jury-rigg repairs and modify it so, especially the shield generators!

The "not a military" lines in early TNG are, while intended to reflect Gene's somewhat out there vision of an evolved Federation, so obviously wrong in the context of later material that the only coherent way to handle them is to either chuck them from canon, or to treat them as a bit of in-universe exaggeration and semantics wrangling that gets proven completely wrong by the time of Wolf 359.

> If quacks like a dick, it is a duck.

I assume there is a misspelling one place or another there, but, yes, much of that introductory paragraph was pointing out that fairly canonically Starfleet (or, extracanonically, Star Trek's creators) are in deep denial about the nature of Starfleet.

> Kithomer Accords, re-established between Cpt. Sisko and Chancellor Gowron, the first accords were Picard's job (could be wrong about that)

The First Khitomer Accords were negotiated between the civilian leadership of the Federation and the Klingon Empire in the wake of the disaster created by the explosion of Praxis; there was a conspiracy involving the highest levels of both Starfleet (led by Admiral Cartwright, the CinC Starfleet) and the Klingon military (led by General Chang [0]) to sabotage the negotiations, foiled by (among others) the crew of the about-to-be-decommissioned USS Enterprise-A under Captain Kirk, after he was rescued by his crew from his imprisonment on Rura Penthe, having been framed by the conspirators for the murder of the Klingon Chancellor Gorkon, who the Enterprise was to be escorting to the negotiations originally planned to be on Earth, which were secretly rescheduled and moved to Khitomer after Gorkon's assassination. (Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country)

> everything Bajor related, despite the planet being the most strategic important one in the Alpha Quadrant there was never an official embassy mentioned, everything was run by Sisko

Sisko's adoption by the Bajoran religion as the Emissary of the Prophets was frequently referred to as an issue with forced Starfleet and the Federation more broadly to deal with Bajor other than the way they would prefer to.

> - the ultimate peace treaty between the Dominion and the Federation

The Treaty of Bajor was very much setup (while the substantive content was not at all similar) to be an analog of the Japanese Instrument of Surrender, signed for the US by Gen. MacArthur. (To the point of Admiral Ross directly quoting MacArthur.)

> Just from top of my head, all major diplomatic treaties have been negotiated by Starfleet personell.

Clearly not, aside from the Khitomer accords, just a couple examples of many: In "Journey to Babel" (TOS), the Enterprise is transporting ambassadors from several Federation worlds to a conference on the admission of Coridian to the federation; the Treaty of Alliance between the Klingons and the Federation had Ambassador Sarek of Vulcan as the lead Federation diplomat, referenced in "Sarek" (TNG), etc.

[0] A clearly senior military officer described by Chancellor Gorkon as "my chief of staff", but I don't think its clear whether he was the Chancellor's CoS in a sense analogous to the White House Chief of Staff to a US President or whether his role was as a military CoS, or whether the distinction between the roles is foreign to the Klingon system of the time.

For anyone who hasn't seen it, before you get confused: First contact with the Dominion is made at the end of Season 2, though they are mentioned earlier than that. It's mostly character and setting building until then. Relations are tense for a few seasons, and hot war doesn't actually break out until Season 5 or 6. Series ran for 7 seasons.

And yes, this is the same Dominion War that was referenced in the last season of the Picard series.

I am the only Star Trek fan I know who was not a big fan of the dominion war arc. I really liked some of the later season episodes, but the arc itself was a bit of a letdown.

OTOH, DS9 is the only Star Trek that my wife will willingly watch with me; she finds the others too campy. As another data-point she likes the dominion war arc as much or more than B5, which was her favorite sci-fi series previously.

You picked well.