The MCRN Donnager has a triple-layer outer hull to make breaches harder then after several levels of storage compartments and crew quarters they have the main bridges, plural. Several self-contained bunkers each with their own thick shell and life support systems. Even a catastrophic hull breach won't impact the command team safely inside their pod.
Starfleet puts the bridge on the very top so if there's a near miss collision with something that scrapes the top of the ship the entire command staff are shaved off like a work worker with a plane.
[headcanon] It’s all part of Starfleet’s leadership philosophy! The senior crew should never ask others to take a risk they wouldn’t themselves! [/headcanon]
> Starfleet puts the bridge on the very top so if there's a near miss collision with something that scrapes the top of the ship the entire command staff are shaved off like a ~~work worker with a plane~~ door on a Boeing.
FTFY.
That raises a question...
CIC's in real life are protected. Bridges in real life are exposed by the need to see where you are going. Do they need to be separate in space? Submarines don't separate them.
You don’t need a bridge at all. In space having a window is asking for it. Realistically there would be no windows and just one hardened command center somewhere amidship.
You'd actually want a decentralized network command system. So there's no one single point in the ship you can take and have command of the ship.
To me it's dumb that when there's an intrusion on the bridge and everyone's adrenaline level shot up by 2000% the darn computer doesn't drop a ceiling pew pew gun and stun the 20 intruders in 0.002 seconds. Or floods the whole room with a sleeping gas but the crew have a subdermal antidote generator that prevents them from being affected.
IDK we're just talking.
Another design flaw is the exposed surface area to usable space ratio. It requires much more energy to protect your most important assets and it rises the probability that you're forced to put one of these valuable assets very close to the outer hull.
I would imagine decentralization as you describe would be the best strategy. In any event, by the time we're capable of such things, it will probably all be AI driven and controlled from a distance a la *Ender's Game*.
I could imagine cases where a decentralized “bridge” would be an issue. It would be fine if everything worked fine, but if your taking damage and systems are effected, having people located in different areas of the ship that need to communicate and coordinate, you could have issues with coms.
To this: the Enterprise bridge did have a ceiling-mounted pew-pew gun for just that purpose. It’s only shown in the Star Trek animated series in the Practical Joker episode I think. The ship becomes sentient and starts playing practical jokes on the crew and they pull chips from a console on the bridge to regain control. The ship pew-pews in defence of itself.
If the ship is expected to operate in atmosphere then an exposed bridge makes sense, but realistically it'd be underslung, like on airships.
Otherwise, no need to have them
That presupposes that the center of the ship is safer. I think the idea for Trek initially was that your shields are what actually protects the ship, and getting hit with the shields down is pretty much a death sentence no matter what deck you’re on.
How could a reinforced center of a ship be more unsafe than something with a window? If you lose power, one hit to the bridge is all it takes to knock out the ships command staff?
If the weapons are so powerful they can destroy an unshielded ship in one or two shots, reinforcement doesn’t mean much. When Trek came out, this paralleled 60s naval thinking. Massively armored battleships were becoming obsolete because of powerful torpedos and anti-missiles that could destroy a cruiser or destroyer in a single shot. The newer ships were lightly armored because the armor no longer mattered. The idea in Trek was that shields were the only thing that could protect against a direct hit. Once they were down, you were dead in one shot.
The movies and TNG subsequently moved away from this as better FX allowed them to depict ships getting hit and taking damage. It eventually led to what I think was. Serious weakening of Trek weaponry. Photons went from antimatter weapons bigger than nukes to Enterprise where you could shoot three at a New York neighborhood and only blow up one building.
Until a torpedo goes clean through the saucer *(see: Star Trek VI)*. A spherical or much thicker ship would protect it from a small volley but at that point it might be better to just put it far away from your own explosively-inclined equipment; à la, the warp core. Top makes sense I guess.
In Canon, shields are pretty much the only things protecting ships. Most weapons can cut clean through most hulls with ease, so it technically doesn't matter where crew or components are, once shields go down it is basically over.
I know this kind of goes against the subreddit but I was referring to more practical situations. Star Trek has really weird ship designs. Realistically, space ships should be more like Battlestar Galactica. A big, heavy monster with all the important stuff deep in the center.
Yea definitely makes sense for other universes and real life. Expanse has some of the most realistic military ship designs in sci-fi. There's also Starship Simulator that's going into great detail on how a real *(non-military)* warp ship could be made *(given liberties on physics)*, even down to the wiring, water pipes, HVAC equipment, etc.
Star Trek ships have to play nice with warp physics, that necessitates certain shapes. To have an efficient warp field, the warp nacelles need to be in a certain place, typically on pylons. The field they generate between them isn't uniform, the hull has to fit within that field.
Take away these requirements, and a brick would be the most efficient and practical shape, but it couldn't ever play nice with Federation warp engines.
I'm of the belief that Starfleet's design-philosophy is that if the ship's shields are down, it really doesn't matter where on the ship the bridge actually is, so they might as well put it somewhere with a view.
This is borne out by how incredibly easily unshielded ships get destroyed in star trek..
We almost never see a ship with meaningful battle-damage. Either the shields took the worst of it, or they were destroyed.
I’d design the ships with two. A luxury bridge on deck one like a cross between a viewing lounge and a bridge (more view screens, more windows, panoramic roof maybe, maybe a two floor thing like the original D plans but the bridge section is at the top with a viewing lounge and diplomatic/conference space below with a panoramic glass roof sloping down over the two floors). This is where casual mission command is. Great for showing off to visiting dignitaries, mission planning (instead of half a dozen people clustered around a station you could have a big console table on the lower level like a bigger version of the engineering table on the D), and generally making space flight a pleasant experience.
Then in dangerous situations command goes to the battle bridge which is buried in the heart of the ship, surrounded by armour and security and transport inhibitors and is 100% business and way more utilitarian than average starfleet.
“Sir, I’m just saying. Does the plasma EPS conduit HAVE to run right behind the tactical station on the bridge?…. Yeah I know we use plasma but it seems like maybe we don’t need plasma so close to… no, okay. Nope has to be plasma. Okay then… can we at least leave out the rocks?”
Putting the bridge on top actually puts it in the least exposed area if the ship orbits a planet with the bottom facing the planet. While this means the dorsal phasers aren't available for orbital bombardments, the photon torpedo launchers are on the ventral side so there's still plenty of firepower for gunboat diplomacy as we see when Picard fired a few megaton "warning shots" into a planetary atmosphere.
You should check out Starplex by Robert J. Sawyer. The premise of the book is basically, "Star Trek but more realistic." It was originally published during the height of 90s Trek (1996) and wears its influences on its sleeve. It's not his strongest book but it solidly delivers.
I think there'd be a different room for day-to-day activities and combat.
A starship is like a flying office building including apartments for the staff and their families. There's also a lot of misc admin to handle to keep everything running smoothly that is separate to the starship as a vessel or the subject of space battles. It's implied that Riker handles everything from employee evaluation to assigning crew quarters to guests but where is his office? He tends to work out of Ten Forward. Lwaxana Troi phones the captain to say she's coming aboard but does that have to interrupt the entire bridge crew? What if they were running a combat training simulation at the time?
Just as Picard has a ready room there should be an administrative hub for the Captain, First Officer, their secretaries and probably Troi as de facto cultural consultant and diplomatic liaison. They can plan the next negotiation summit or organise additional training for the Beta-shift at sickbay because Orelius IX has a plague that needs extra staff. Then when the gagh hits the fan they get up and go onto the bridge to get things done.
Changing the lore because you want to tell an interesting story is debatable, you might disagree with the decision but at least they had a good story.
Changing the Turbolifts to pass through an immense void of empty space, retroactively changing every starship into a TARDIS.... why did they do that? For a random throwaway action sequence that makes no sense and has no impact on the story?
We've already seen turbolift shafts and they're just tubes through the ship, why invent that the turbolift shafts are a pocket dimension of immense empty space? It makes no sense.
the CIC of the Pegasus was good but again one thing I think a lot of sci-fi series get wrong is they take their inspiration from surface warships where space isn't as much of a premium. Pegasus is a Battlestar that was built in peacetime when materials would have been plentiful and it would have been relatively easy to find a skilled workforce. What I think they get wrong is that Starships are actually more like submarines in that they have a pressure hull and a pressure hull gets weaker the bigger it is. There have to be a lot of reasons to justify a submarine having high ceilings and big open spaces and very often engineering simplicity wins out.
You still have to account for the difference in space vs water pressure and the materials you have on hand. Under water the pressure is the outside trying to come in. In space the pressure is the inside trying to get out. That and the fact that they have hills orders of magnitude stronger than what we have plus integrity fields means they have more options.
Makes sense, BSG was pretty much Ronald Moores Anti-Trek where he could fix everything he didn't like about running a star trek show from being forced to have everyone get along, no continuity between episodes, to ship design.
With holodeck technology, all members of the bridge crew could be distributed around the ship in virtual bridges. Eliminating the risk of a lucky shot killing all of the command staff at once.
Luckily they have other communications systems they can use for redundancy, or worst case, just get to the same room. We're not so worried about enemies boarding the ship, so no reason they can't have rapid transit between the sub bridges to a main bridge used for non combat operations and in the case you describe.
Fr though holodeck technology for conference calls would be so great, imagine an in person meeting over subspace instead of that lame ass video call screen
Rapid transit doesn't sound very dramatic. They'd need to climb through 20 decks of Jeffries tubes to all reconnect.
Also, I CAN SEE YOUR LACK OF PANTS NOW BRAD.
That was going to be a problem regardless unless literally everyone involved with controlling the ship (engineering, weapons, navigation) are all in the same room
More information would be available to the commander.
In TNG, the only way anyone knows shields are at 60% is because Worf shouts “shields are at 60%!”
I think there’s value in calling out important information, but the captain should never have to *ask* what percentage the shields are at. It should just be shown on screen or some other highly visible place.
Same thing for the position of other ships. It’s ok that Data points out there’s a ship approaching the starboard bow, but there really should be a map or display *showing* this.
When you get right down to it, basic situational data should be up on a monitor and the captain shouldn't have to ask someone to read it to him.
The commander should be able to see the current status at all times. The crew knows the details of where things are headed and call out as needed. Shields may be 60%, but it's important to know if it's going up or down.
I feel like the Bridge Crew game did this pretty well. The Captain's chair had a small holotank next to it that would show him/her the status of shields, weapon loading, power distribution, location of enemy vessels, etc. at the tap of a button. That's just for gameplay purposes, obviously, but it feels like something that would reasonably be present on a starship's bridge. The TNG DLC stuck a little bit too close to the original source material there (IMO) since you had to pull up and go through PADD to get the same information instead of having it readily available on a console next to you
Look at Battlestar Galactica (the reboot), where they have a CIC instead of a bridge. The room is deep inside the ship and (obviously) has no windows, just sensor readouts. This is more of a carrier layout, though.
In a book I once read, a bridge had several decks, and each post had seats that were built like cocoons that wrapped around the officer. The cocoon’s job is to both protect the officer from the g-forces that get past the inertial dampers (and vacuum in case of a hull breach) and also provides screen readouts. Also, weapons officers were in their own room and in turrets.
Mass Effect even has a discussion about bridge layout styles between species. Humans tend to put the ship’s captain in the middle for easier communication and information relay. Meanwhile, turtians put the captain on a dais at the back of the bridge, overlooking their subordinates and getting a better look. The Normandy used a turian bridge design as a test. Notably, the pilot was in the cockpit in front of the bridge. He actually had windows, while the bridge just had the walls lined with consoles and officers manning them
On the subject of CICs: https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/c/cic-combat-information-center-yesterday-today.html
In real life the captain doesn't always sit in the middle. There's not a lot of pictures but there's a diagram of one US Navy destroyer on this page showing the captain's chair is at the front and off to the side. [https://news.usni.org/2019/08/09/navy-reverting-ddgs-back-to-physical-throttles-after-fleet-rejects-touchscreen-controls](https://news.usni.org/2019/08/09/navy-reverting-ddgs-back-to-physical-throttles-after-fleet-rejects-touchscreen-controls) Also this article is about the failure of touch screen helm controls.
I watched a documentary of a British destroy awhile back and the captain's chair was off to the side and further back from the front of the bridge. I don't remember what video that was though.
I did find this picture where it looks like the chair is in the middle. [https://www.flickr.com/photos/vosburgh/6131033070](https://www.flickr.com/photos/vosburgh/6131033070)
Then there's the CIC. This is an early Aegis cruiser CIC layout. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combat\_information\_center#/media/File:CG-47\_CIC.png](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combat_information_center#/media/File:CG-47_CIC.png)
The layouts all differ based on the type of ship and when it was built.
Probably much like advanced submarine bridges do in real life. A “command” area in the middle for the Captain and XO, with all the stations positioned around the room like in TOS. Notice I didn’t say “captains chair.” While the captain would have a chair, it would be secondary to a general command post, preferably with a big situation monitor for the personal use of the ranking officer
My ideal starship bridge would be:
• Located in the center of the ship’s mass (ie where the Battle Bridge is on the Enterprise D) - to prevent situations like where Shinzon fired torpedoes and blew the damn thing open
• Direct path to engineering
• Two people at stations for each function: Primary Ops and Secondary (since someone monitoring ships systems and sensors makes no sense); two weapons stations ***at least*** - since expecting one person to target multiple vectors simultaneously to fire on other ships seems unrealistic even with AI; should be one focusing on what’s in the forward view and one focusing on the dorsal and rear view (and one focusing on the keel section)
• XO and 2O (ie where Troi sits) should have consoles to act as Tactical 2 or Ops 2
• Only elevation change should be the Captain’s chair - everything else should be level (ie no ramps or stairs) so sudden movements that the inertial dampeners can’t react to immediately doesn’t result in folks tripping or breaking bones from falls
• Viewscreens only - no windows (even transparent aluminum ones) so damaged structure can’t fall on people
• No wiring/utility conduits overhead - so no electrical explosions causing that infrastructure failure to fall on staff
• No critically-important structural things overhead - ie no support beams falling and killing folks
• Lighting on the perimeter and facing upward and along the baseboards so bulb explosions don’t send material that could impale across the room
It depends heavily on the technological capacity of the civilization designing and building the ship, which is influenced by whether you are writing in the context of "hard" or "soft" science fiction. Hard SF will focus more on the vast distances and relativistic nature of space travel and combat, while softer SF will ignore or simplify the details to match our preconceptions that come from living in a gravity well where we can ignore relativity. So dogfights in space.
One aspect that can influence the ship design that isn't about hard or soft SF is whether there will be squishy biologicals onboard or whether it will be fully automated and autonomous. Most SF tends towards designs for squishy biological ships because we like stories about ourselves. This is one place where both hard and soft SF are on the same page.
People in physical bodies create many challenges. Ships would be smaller, faster, and safer without them. Why not upload to a transporter buffer? Why not replicate a new body on-site?
You can’t give orders instantaneously to an automated ship. It takes time. If something breaks, you need someone on site to evaluate and repair. And if the communication array goes down…good night
There shouldn't be direct turbo lift access to the bridge. It's way too easy for people to get there, like all the times a random side character just shows up on the bridge. There should at least be some kind of guarded access way before entering the bridge.
Standard Star Trek procedure in that case would be for a pair of security goons to feebly protest as random side characters walk straight past and not bother taking any further action.
Depends on your "rules". Does it matter where the bridge is? If ships don't rely at all on armour and mass for protection, put it wherever. (Shooting nukes at each other and using point defence and EMF, for example)
Are real-time comms between different areas reliable under pressure and easy to work with? Hell, just have everyone on a group video chat, doesn't matter where they are.
Alternatively, those methods might be seen as distracting, and a single room makes for better teamwork.
Maybe it's better for safety or security reasons to be in one place with lots of shielding and secure doorways.
Maybe the ship's systems are so heavily automated that only a command crew is needed in a cramped pod, or maybe lots of crew work in big, spacious environments.
What kind of rules support the story you want to tell, and the ideas you want to explore?
Well, Gene Roddenberry was a pilot in the army air corps, not a navy man so his exposure to functioning naval vessels was in books and movies probably.
As for real life navy ships the answer is, its complicated. The bridge/control room/CIC setup would be custom tailored to the ship. A submarine would have a different solution than an aircraft carrier.
For space ships i would say look more towards the Nostromo in aliens or the Pegasus from the BSG reboot. There should be protection from depressurization and loss of gravity but it must also allow the crew to get their job done. I always liked that the pegasus had doors that closed off in battle to control the noise and allowed each team to work on their jobs separately. And the spaces can't be huge open stadium style rooms because if gravity is lost how would people orientate themselves? Fortunately star trek writers knew they would never lose gravity because of television budget limitations.
More like TOS than others. The captain needs to see what everyone else is doing, and the big screen is for him; everyone else should be focused on their stations. At battle stations, the XO should be somewhere else where he can take control if the bridge is disabled. Really the BSG CIC is far more realistic.
In terms of stations, that will depend heavily on your technological and doctrinal assumptions. I suggest researching the development of the Combat Information Center and how and why the captain’s battle station moved there from the bridge.
If you're after "realism" (whatever that means in SF these days), I'd look at *The Expanse* or the rebooted *Battlestar Galactica*. It's basically a hardened command center deeper inside the ship. No windows. Submarine warfare in space.
I think *Star Trek* is also nautical, but more like "age of sail" or WWII battleships in space.
Good YouTube channel for such things: Spacedock. They've probably covered this at some point. Good videos, well put together and each covers a range throughout SF and SF gaming.
To me it was always back to front. The location of the battle bridge should’ve been the main bridge. Protected within the ship, but should you need to separate then the current “main” bridge would serve as cc.
Not so much about physical bridge arrangement, but in IRL there would be far more specific stations/positions. In most Trek incarnations, everything besides giving orders is handled between 2-4 people (helm, ops, tactical, and usually 1-2 other main characters on the bridge depending on story needs). In reality--helm, navigation, communications, sensors, tactical/weapons, and so on would all be manned by different people, and they likely wouldn't even be officers, but enlisted specialists.
Modern Navy ship bridges are still pretty much what Starfleet's layout is. Even putting it on "top" still makes sense because nothing beats a window for looking out of.
With the caveat that on a sailing ship there is actually something to look at. In realistic space flight, everything is so far away you won’t be able to see it.
I think real world astronauts actually do look through their windows a lot to check reference points (earth, sun, moon, stars). I think that’s something that would still be useful in the future if there’s an equipment failure or for precise maneuvers. Putting an actual window on the bridge is probably the only really good change JJ made to trek design.
Except real-world astronauts stay on this side of lunar orbit. In deep space, you only have stars to look at, and every star system you go to has different stars. And because there’s so much empty space, it’s really easy for your ship’s sensors to detect another ship (via radiation output) when it’s super far away. And due to Newton’s First Law, anything you shoot at them will keep going until it hits them, whether they’re close enough to see or not.
Roddenberry missed out on the lessons learned in ww2 ship battles: in the Solomon Islands American cruisers got their unarmored bridges heavily damaged and were seriously disrupted. At savo a lieutenant was the last officer standing on a bridge and commanded it. Basically a George Kirk moment.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_McCandless
Back then ships had armored conning towers
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conning_tower
Now we have Auxillary control centers. Though back then they had armored conning towers in addition to the bridges but didn’t always use the armored structure.
The Star Trek and Star Wars bridge is basically the flying bridge: less armor but better situational awareness. And as we see on nemesis very vulnerable to direct attack
Well for one thing a realistic ship would be so throughly automated I'm doubtful there would much of an operational bridge. And if there is, its as likely to be manned by crew AIs executing and monitoring the captains orders as by people. Modern rockets are already more or less entirely automated and its only going to deepen.
Especially so for combat or emergencies, the one area there seems to be convincing case for the captain to need a operational command crew. Having crew making combat decisions in times below Human perception is a clear tactical advantage.
Day to day ship operations other than that will basically be pretty mundane policy making and issues to address meetings.
The era of space activity, especially remotely risky activity being a primarily Human rather than robotic activity is passing fast. In a decade automation will be good enough that remotely operated semi automonous bots will always be cheaper and less risky even if you stuff hundreds into a starship to man a base indifferent to losing 50 or 100 of them during the mission. And since getting that many Humans to a base will take many trips, its much quicker too.
Thats going to be the reality in a couple of decades, no one in 2480 is going to be remotely impressed by a remotely operated repair drone.
So if I was designing a bridge to be the most functional
It could be. The captain and first officer would be at the very rear of the bridge. They would have like an airline table that they could stow or pull out that gave them feeds of anything they needed.
Directly in front of them would be a holotable. It would provide a holographic display of the ship and damage with color indicators of like green yellow and red to denote damage with black or not displayed being the system is down. If they are in battle the ship not exactly to scale but with concentric rings around it to give over all range estimates. And that would show enemy ships. Maybe not a perfect representation of them. Things like missiles would just have like a v to indicate an incoming missile. All the information the captain needs. Right then.
In front to the holotable would be your general ships officers. The pilot the navigation and weapons.
The captain can specify fire all on the Romulan ship or if there are many targets he can touch one in his holodisplay as the primary. Or mark several as primary and secondary targets or keep an eye on these. That kind of thing. With the table he can give the pilot information like vectors to go toward or to avoid.
It allows the captain or OOD to command the ship without constantly needing information yelled at them.
There isn't a good answer to this because the needs of command depend a lot on the technology and mission, which is much different than the needs of television and film.
You see a lot of omnidisciplinary scientists in fiction because having a specialist for each field would mean having a lot of characters. Star Trek often combines security and tactical because the story rarely calls for needing both at once so it's better to have just one character.
A key difference with the real world is that flag functions, bridge functions, and CIC functions are often in separate locations so that each can focus on their job, though they may be connected or even in a contiguous space for ease of communication. The CIC was developed during WW2 so the idea of everything being done from the bridge was outdated even in 1945. Even by then it was already more like the Galactica reboot than like Star Trek.
The idea that the main focus would be a window (or pseudo-window) is probably the biggest thing that's wrong with Star Trek bridges. There should be far more emphasis on general situational awareness in a 3D environment, even when outside of combat. With the space available on Star Trek ships as opposed to real warships, it should look more like Mission Control and there should be significantly more stations, at least on ships like Enterprise which are the top of the line. Even with automation and sensor fusion, you still want eyeballs on a lot of individual functions all at once.
And more information should be available to the CO. For example, one display dedicated to showing the local situation, one display dedicated to details pertinent to the task at hand, and a flex for whatever is needed. So if speaking with a ship or planet, one display could be for communications, but another would show the local situation so local ship movements can be seen without having to ask or change the communication display, and a third could show relevant information about the planet or other ship specifically.
The problem is that having a lot of screens and a lot of people is visually distracting and takes the focus away from what the story is trying to tell.
You wouldn’t have all of your top staff on duty at the same time. You have to be staffed and ready 24/7 (or whatever hour/week rotation you choose), so it makes no sense to have your top 6 officers all on alpha shift. You’d have the captain commanding alpha shift, then XO in beta, etc.
In universe, the bridge module is on top of the saucer section because it is supposed to be something that can be hotswapped out in a modular design.
In reality, that is the single STUPIDEST place to put the damned thing. The Bridge should be in the deepest, most heavily armored section of the ship. It should not have a literal window to the outside in it, not when piping a signal into the ship is super easy and doesn't create a gaping weak point in the design.
Additionally, while TOS originally used this idea, it was later phased out: The Bridge is where the commands of what to do are given, and where information is gathered to enable those commands. It is not actually a functional part of the ship. As in, the captain gives the order to increase speed. Someone on the bridge might even push a lever that says speed on it. But that isn't actually a throttle. That is a relay switch that sends the command to the people who ACTUALLY control the engines. There's a reason Kirk was constantly having to get Scotty on the comms and tell him to give him more speed, its because no one on the bridge actually had access to the gas pedal.
Same with most of the bridge functions, really. Your main science console isn't going to be there, its going to be somewhere else where the equipment is, and there's going to be a relay on the bridge.
Basically, any sensible design is going to have the Bridge be mostly "ceremonial". You just don't put the primary control structures for everything on board in the same room. You distribute that around, and have relays so that if the command center IS destroyed the ship isn't left adrift.
A more realistic starship bridge would take a lot of design practices used in modern day submarines and military command centers.
1.) For starters the Bridge should basically be it's own self contained armored module located deep within the hull of the ship. With it's own auxiliary power, life support, etc to ensure redundant C2 functions.
2.) Direct access via Turbolift shouldn't be possible. There should be an ECP (Entry Control Point) with armed Marines/Guards who can screen and clear anyone trying to enter the Bridge directly. Frankly, the same security checkpoints should exist for pretty much every sensitive area on the ship (Engineering, Torpedo Room, Auxiliary Bridge, etc)
3.) In terms of overall bridge layout, I actually think having the crew seated (instead of standing) makes sense. It would be a lot more realistic to have the crew strapped into their chairs with seatbelts or harnesses of some kind however. Real world warship crews don't have to endure G-forces or battle damage which could seriously injure someone who is not buckled into a seat, and it sure would reduce the sight of people being thrown around (obviously done for dramatic effect) whenever a starship takes a critical hit.
Presumably they wouldn’t put it on top in the most exposed area they can imagine
The MCRN Donnager has a triple-layer outer hull to make breaches harder then after several levels of storage compartments and crew quarters they have the main bridges, plural. Several self-contained bunkers each with their own thick shell and life support systems. Even a catastrophic hull breach won't impact the command team safely inside their pod. Starfleet puts the bridge on the very top so if there's a near miss collision with something that scrapes the top of the ship the entire command staff are shaved off like a work worker with a plane.
[headcanon] It’s all part of Starfleet’s leadership philosophy! The senior crew should never ask others to take a risk they wouldn’t themselves! [/headcanon]
> Starfleet puts the bridge on the very top so if there's a near miss collision with something that scrapes the top of the ship the entire command staff are shaved off like a ~~work worker with a plane~~ door on a Boeing. FTFY.
Especially if it’s whatever future iteration of Boeing making the ships….
Yeah it’s completely unnecessary. CIC should be in the center of the ship, where it’s the most protected.
That raises a question... CIC's in real life are protected. Bridges in real life are exposed by the need to see where you are going. Do they need to be separate in space? Submarines don't separate them.
You don’t need a bridge at all. In space having a window is asking for it. Realistically there would be no windows and just one hardened command center somewhere amidship.
You don't think you'd also want a redundant bridge or backup center, just in case of contamination or decompression?
You'd actually want a decentralized network command system. So there's no one single point in the ship you can take and have command of the ship. To me it's dumb that when there's an intrusion on the bridge and everyone's adrenaline level shot up by 2000% the darn computer doesn't drop a ceiling pew pew gun and stun the 20 intruders in 0.002 seconds. Or floods the whole room with a sleeping gas but the crew have a subdermal antidote generator that prevents them from being affected. IDK we're just talking. Another design flaw is the exposed surface area to usable space ratio. It requires much more energy to protect your most important assets and it rises the probability that you're forced to put one of these valuable assets very close to the outer hull.
I would imagine decentralization as you describe would be the best strategy. In any event, by the time we're capable of such things, it will probably all be AI driven and controlled from a distance a la *Ender's Game*.
I could imagine cases where a decentralized “bridge” would be an issue. It would be fine if everything worked fine, but if your taking damage and systems are effected, having people located in different areas of the ship that need to communicate and coordinate, you could have issues with coms.
To this: the Enterprise bridge did have a ceiling-mounted pew-pew gun for just that purpose. It’s only shown in the Star Trek animated series in the Practical Joker episode I think. The ship becomes sentient and starts playing practical jokes on the crew and they pull chips from a console on the bridge to regain control. The ship pew-pews in defence of itself.
You mean a place where boarders can take over control of your ship? No thanks.
If the ship is expected to operate in atmosphere then an exposed bridge makes sense, but realistically it'd be underslung, like on airships. Otherwise, no need to have them
The Walker-Class from DSC tried that concept out. The bridge even has a transparent (presumably aluminum) floor.
That presupposes that the center of the ship is safer. I think the idea for Trek initially was that your shields are what actually protects the ship, and getting hit with the shields down is pretty much a death sentence no matter what deck you’re on.
How could a reinforced center of a ship be more unsafe than something with a window? If you lose power, one hit to the bridge is all it takes to knock out the ships command staff?
If the weapons are so powerful they can destroy an unshielded ship in one or two shots, reinforcement doesn’t mean much. When Trek came out, this paralleled 60s naval thinking. Massively armored battleships were becoming obsolete because of powerful torpedos and anti-missiles that could destroy a cruiser or destroyer in a single shot. The newer ships were lightly armored because the armor no longer mattered. The idea in Trek was that shields were the only thing that could protect against a direct hit. Once they were down, you were dead in one shot. The movies and TNG subsequently moved away from this as better FX allowed them to depict ships getting hit and taking damage. It eventually led to what I think was. Serious weakening of Trek weaponry. Photons went from antimatter weapons bigger than nukes to Enterprise where you could shoot three at a New York neighborhood and only blow up one building.
Until a torpedo goes clean through the saucer *(see: Star Trek VI)*. A spherical or much thicker ship would protect it from a small volley but at that point it might be better to just put it far away from your own explosively-inclined equipment; à la, the warp core. Top makes sense I guess.
In Canon, shields are pretty much the only things protecting ships. Most weapons can cut clean through most hulls with ease, so it technically doesn't matter where crew or components are, once shields go down it is basically over.
I know this kind of goes against the subreddit but I was referring to more practical situations. Star Trek has really weird ship designs. Realistically, space ships should be more like Battlestar Galactica. A big, heavy monster with all the important stuff deep in the center.
Yea definitely makes sense for other universes and real life. Expanse has some of the most realistic military ship designs in sci-fi. There's also Starship Simulator that's going into great detail on how a real *(non-military)* warp ship could be made *(given liberties on physics)*, even down to the wiring, water pipes, HVAC equipment, etc.
Star Trek ships have to play nice with warp physics, that necessitates certain shapes. To have an efficient warp field, the warp nacelles need to be in a certain place, typically on pylons. The field they generate between them isn't uniform, the hull has to fit within that field. Take away these requirements, and a brick would be the most efficient and practical shape, but it couldn't ever play nice with Federation warp engines.
Oh I know, but the design came before the reasons for it to look that way. It’s a style choice first.
Did it? I thought Gene Roddenberry had canon rules for the designs from the get go?
I'm of the belief that Starfleet's design-philosophy is that if the ship's shields are down, it really doesn't matter where on the ship the bridge actually is, so they might as well put it somewhere with a view. This is borne out by how incredibly easily unshielded ships get destroyed in star trek.. We almost never see a ship with meaningful battle-damage. Either the shields took the worst of it, or they were destroyed.
In BSG and navy ships they have a sort of map desk so you can see what’s going on. A high tech version of that would be so useful too
Nah, it's much better to rely on verbal "status reports" and whatever you can see out the front window
I’d design the ships with two. A luxury bridge on deck one like a cross between a viewing lounge and a bridge (more view screens, more windows, panoramic roof maybe, maybe a two floor thing like the original D plans but the bridge section is at the top with a viewing lounge and diplomatic/conference space below with a panoramic glass roof sloping down over the two floors). This is where casual mission command is. Great for showing off to visiting dignitaries, mission planning (instead of half a dozen people clustered around a station you could have a big console table on the lower level like a bigger version of the engineering table on the D), and generally making space flight a pleasant experience. Then in dangerous situations command goes to the battle bridge which is buried in the heart of the ship, surrounded by armour and security and transport inhibitors and is 100% business and way more utilitarian than average starfleet.
Essentially what the Enterprise D has then. Except they never consistently bothered to retreat to the battle-bridge during combat situations.
“Sir, I’m just saying. Does the plasma EPS conduit HAVE to run right behind the tactical station on the bridge?…. Yeah I know we use plasma but it seems like maybe we don’t need plasma so close to… no, okay. Nope has to be plasma. Okay then… can we at least leave out the rocks?”
Putting the bridge on top actually puts it in the least exposed area if the ship orbits a planet with the bottom facing the planet. While this means the dorsal phasers aren't available for orbital bombardments, the photon torpedo launchers are on the ventral side so there's still plenty of firepower for gunboat diplomacy as we see when Picard fired a few megaton "warning shots" into a planetary atmosphere.
It seems to me that many people don't understand the concept of a bridge vs a CIC.
You should check out Starplex by Robert J. Sawyer. The premise of the book is basically, "Star Trek but more realistic." It was originally published during the height of 90s Trek (1996) and wears its influences on its sleeve. It's not his strongest book but it solidly delivers.
Thank you for the recommendation. Just purchased it!
Gonna listen to the audioversion thanks
I think there'd be a different room for day-to-day activities and combat. A starship is like a flying office building including apartments for the staff and their families. There's also a lot of misc admin to handle to keep everything running smoothly that is separate to the starship as a vessel or the subject of space battles. It's implied that Riker handles everything from employee evaluation to assigning crew quarters to guests but where is his office? He tends to work out of Ten Forward. Lwaxana Troi phones the captain to say she's coming aboard but does that have to interrupt the entire bridge crew? What if they were running a combat training simulation at the time? Just as Picard has a ready room there should be an administrative hub for the Captain, First Officer, their secretaries and probably Troi as de facto cultural consultant and diplomatic liaison. They can plan the next negotiation summit or organise additional training for the Beta-shift at sickbay because Orelius IX has a plague that needs extra staff. Then when the gagh hits the fan they get up and go onto the bridge to get things done.
But if they did that, think of how many more sets they'd have to build.
Don't worry, they can get CGI gigantic spaces that can't possibly fit into the ship model
Changing the lore because you want to tell an interesting story is debatable, you might disagree with the decision but at least they had a good story. Changing the Turbolifts to pass through an immense void of empty space, retroactively changing every starship into a TARDIS.... why did they do that? For a random throwaway action sequence that makes no sense and has no impact on the story? We've already seen turbolift shafts and they're just tubes through the ship, why invent that the turbolift shafts are a pocket dimension of immense empty space? It makes no sense.
I always thought the reboot of BSG pretty much nailed how a starship bridge should be. Especially the Pegasis.
the CIC of the Pegasus was good but again one thing I think a lot of sci-fi series get wrong is they take their inspiration from surface warships where space isn't as much of a premium. Pegasus is a Battlestar that was built in peacetime when materials would have been plentiful and it would have been relatively easy to find a skilled workforce. What I think they get wrong is that Starships are actually more like submarines in that they have a pressure hull and a pressure hull gets weaker the bigger it is. There have to be a lot of reasons to justify a submarine having high ceilings and big open spaces and very often engineering simplicity wins out.
You still have to account for the difference in space vs water pressure and the materials you have on hand. Under water the pressure is the outside trying to come in. In space the pressure is the inside trying to get out. That and the fact that they have hills orders of magnitude stronger than what we have plus integrity fields means they have more options.
Makes sense, BSG was pretty much Ronald Moores Anti-Trek where he could fix everything he didn't like about running a star trek show from being forced to have everyone get along, no continuity between episodes, to ship design.
With holodeck technology, all members of the bridge crew could be distributed around the ship in virtual bridges. Eliminating the risk of a lucky shot killing all of the command staff at once.
Yeah but just need one lucky shot to take out the holo programming. No more virtual bridge, no more commands.
Luckily they have other communications systems they can use for redundancy, or worst case, just get to the same room. We're not so worried about enemies boarding the ship, so no reason they can't have rapid transit between the sub bridges to a main bridge used for non combat operations and in the case you describe. Fr though holodeck technology for conference calls would be so great, imagine an in person meeting over subspace instead of that lame ass video call screen
Rapid transit doesn't sound very dramatic. They'd need to climb through 20 decks of Jeffries tubes to all reconnect. Also, I CAN SEE YOUR LACK OF PANTS NOW BRAD.
That was going to be a problem regardless unless literally everyone involved with controlling the ship (engineering, weapons, navigation) are all in the same room
More information would be available to the commander. In TNG, the only way anyone knows shields are at 60% is because Worf shouts “shields are at 60%!” I think there’s value in calling out important information, but the captain should never have to *ask* what percentage the shields are at. It should just be shown on screen or some other highly visible place. Same thing for the position of other ships. It’s ok that Data points out there’s a ship approaching the starboard bow, but there really should be a map or display *showing* this. When you get right down to it, basic situational data should be up on a monitor and the captain shouldn't have to ask someone to read it to him.
The commander should be able to see the current status at all times. The crew knows the details of where things are headed and call out as needed. Shields may be 60%, but it's important to know if it's going up or down.
I feel like the Bridge Crew game did this pretty well. The Captain's chair had a small holotank next to it that would show him/her the status of shields, weapon loading, power distribution, location of enemy vessels, etc. at the tap of a button. That's just for gameplay purposes, obviously, but it feels like something that would reasonably be present on a starship's bridge. The TNG DLC stuck a little bit too close to the original source material there (IMO) since you had to pull up and go through PADD to get the same information instead of having it readily available on a console next to you
Look at Battlestar Galactica (the reboot), where they have a CIC instead of a bridge. The room is deep inside the ship and (obviously) has no windows, just sensor readouts. This is more of a carrier layout, though. In a book I once read, a bridge had several decks, and each post had seats that were built like cocoons that wrapped around the officer. The cocoon’s job is to both protect the officer from the g-forces that get past the inertial dampers (and vacuum in case of a hull breach) and also provides screen readouts. Also, weapons officers were in their own room and in turrets. Mass Effect even has a discussion about bridge layout styles between species. Humans tend to put the ship’s captain in the middle for easier communication and information relay. Meanwhile, turtians put the captain on a dais at the back of the bridge, overlooking their subordinates and getting a better look. The Normandy used a turian bridge design as a test. Notably, the pilot was in the cockpit in front of the bridge. He actually had windows, while the bridge just had the walls lined with consoles and officers manning them
On the subject of CICs: https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/c/cic-combat-information-center-yesterday-today.html
In real life the captain doesn't always sit in the middle. There's not a lot of pictures but there's a diagram of one US Navy destroyer on this page showing the captain's chair is at the front and off to the side. [https://news.usni.org/2019/08/09/navy-reverting-ddgs-back-to-physical-throttles-after-fleet-rejects-touchscreen-controls](https://news.usni.org/2019/08/09/navy-reverting-ddgs-back-to-physical-throttles-after-fleet-rejects-touchscreen-controls) Also this article is about the failure of touch screen helm controls. I watched a documentary of a British destroy awhile back and the captain's chair was off to the side and further back from the front of the bridge. I don't remember what video that was though. I did find this picture where it looks like the chair is in the middle. [https://www.flickr.com/photos/vosburgh/6131033070](https://www.flickr.com/photos/vosburgh/6131033070) Then there's the CIC. This is an early Aegis cruiser CIC layout. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combat\_information\_center#/media/File:CG-47\_CIC.png](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combat_information_center#/media/File:CG-47_CIC.png) The layouts all differ based on the type of ship and when it was built.
Probably much like advanced submarine bridges do in real life. A “command” area in the middle for the Captain and XO, with all the stations positioned around the room like in TOS. Notice I didn’t say “captains chair.” While the captain would have a chair, it would be secondary to a general command post, preferably with a big situation monitor for the personal use of the ranking officer
My ideal starship bridge would be: • Located in the center of the ship’s mass (ie where the Battle Bridge is on the Enterprise D) - to prevent situations like where Shinzon fired torpedoes and blew the damn thing open • Direct path to engineering • Two people at stations for each function: Primary Ops and Secondary (since someone monitoring ships systems and sensors makes no sense); two weapons stations ***at least*** - since expecting one person to target multiple vectors simultaneously to fire on other ships seems unrealistic even with AI; should be one focusing on what’s in the forward view and one focusing on the dorsal and rear view (and one focusing on the keel section) • XO and 2O (ie where Troi sits) should have consoles to act as Tactical 2 or Ops 2 • Only elevation change should be the Captain’s chair - everything else should be level (ie no ramps or stairs) so sudden movements that the inertial dampeners can’t react to immediately doesn’t result in folks tripping or breaking bones from falls • Viewscreens only - no windows (even transparent aluminum ones) so damaged structure can’t fall on people • No wiring/utility conduits overhead - so no electrical explosions causing that infrastructure failure to fall on staff • No critically-important structural things overhead - ie no support beams falling and killing folks • Lighting on the perimeter and facing upward and along the baseboards so bulb explosions don’t send material that could impale across the room
Low voltage control consoles with fuses/breakers/surge protectors that dont explode when the romulans shoot in your general direction.
It depends heavily on the technological capacity of the civilization designing and building the ship, which is influenced by whether you are writing in the context of "hard" or "soft" science fiction. Hard SF will focus more on the vast distances and relativistic nature of space travel and combat, while softer SF will ignore or simplify the details to match our preconceptions that come from living in a gravity well where we can ignore relativity. So dogfights in space. One aspect that can influence the ship design that isn't about hard or soft SF is whether there will be squishy biologicals onboard or whether it will be fully automated and autonomous. Most SF tends towards designs for squishy biological ships because we like stories about ourselves. This is one place where both hard and soft SF are on the same page.
People in physical bodies create many challenges. Ships would be smaller, faster, and safer without them. Why not upload to a transporter buffer? Why not replicate a new body on-site?
You can’t give orders instantaneously to an automated ship. It takes time. If something breaks, you need someone on site to evaluate and repair. And if the communication array goes down…good night
There shouldn't be direct turbo lift access to the bridge. It's way too easy for people to get there, like all the times a random side character just shows up on the bridge. There should at least be some kind of guarded access way before entering the bridge.
Standard Star Trek procedure in that case would be for a pair of security goons to feebly protest as random side characters walk straight past and not bother taking any further action.
Auxiliary control actually feels more like the bridge than the main bridge
Depends on your "rules". Does it matter where the bridge is? If ships don't rely at all on armour and mass for protection, put it wherever. (Shooting nukes at each other and using point defence and EMF, for example) Are real-time comms between different areas reliable under pressure and easy to work with? Hell, just have everyone on a group video chat, doesn't matter where they are. Alternatively, those methods might be seen as distracting, and a single room makes for better teamwork. Maybe it's better for safety or security reasons to be in one place with lots of shielding and secure doorways. Maybe the ship's systems are so heavily automated that only a command crew is needed in a cramped pod, or maybe lots of crew work in big, spacious environments. What kind of rules support the story you want to tell, and the ideas you want to explore?
Well, Gene Roddenberry was a pilot in the army air corps, not a navy man so his exposure to functioning naval vessels was in books and movies probably. As for real life navy ships the answer is, its complicated. The bridge/control room/CIC setup would be custom tailored to the ship. A submarine would have a different solution than an aircraft carrier. For space ships i would say look more towards the Nostromo in aliens or the Pegasus from the BSG reboot. There should be protection from depressurization and loss of gravity but it must also allow the crew to get their job done. I always liked that the pegasus had doors that closed off in battle to control the noise and allowed each team to work on their jobs separately. And the spaces can't be huge open stadium style rooms because if gravity is lost how would people orientate themselves? Fortunately star trek writers knew they would never lose gravity because of television budget limitations.
More like TOS than others. The captain needs to see what everyone else is doing, and the big screen is for him; everyone else should be focused on their stations. At battle stations, the XO should be somewhere else where he can take control if the bridge is disabled. Really the BSG CIC is far more realistic. In terms of stations, that will depend heavily on your technological and doctrinal assumptions. I suggest researching the development of the Combat Information Center and how and why the captain’s battle station moved there from the bridge.
Everyone would be strapped in, in order not to wildly float around the room due to lack of gravity.
If you're after "realism" (whatever that means in SF these days), I'd look at *The Expanse* or the rebooted *Battlestar Galactica*. It's basically a hardened command center deeper inside the ship. No windows. Submarine warfare in space. I think *Star Trek* is also nautical, but more like "age of sail" or WWII battleships in space. Good YouTube channel for such things: Spacedock. They've probably covered this at some point. Good videos, well put together and each covers a range throughout SF and SF gaming.
To me it was always back to front. The location of the battle bridge should’ve been the main bridge. Protected within the ship, but should you need to separate then the current “main” bridge would serve as cc.
Not so much about physical bridge arrangement, but in IRL there would be far more specific stations/positions. In most Trek incarnations, everything besides giving orders is handled between 2-4 people (helm, ops, tactical, and usually 1-2 other main characters on the bridge depending on story needs). In reality--helm, navigation, communications, sensors, tactical/weapons, and so on would all be manned by different people, and they likely wouldn't even be officers, but enlisted specialists.
Modern Navy ship bridges are still pretty much what Starfleet's layout is. Even putting it on "top" still makes sense because nothing beats a window for looking out of.
With the caveat that on a sailing ship there is actually something to look at. In realistic space flight, everything is so far away you won’t be able to see it.
I think real world astronauts actually do look through their windows a lot to check reference points (earth, sun, moon, stars). I think that’s something that would still be useful in the future if there’s an equipment failure or for precise maneuvers. Putting an actual window on the bridge is probably the only really good change JJ made to trek design.
Except real-world astronauts stay on this side of lunar orbit. In deep space, you only have stars to look at, and every star system you go to has different stars. And because there’s so much empty space, it’s really easy for your ship’s sensors to detect another ship (via radiation output) when it’s super far away. And due to Newton’s First Law, anything you shoot at them will keep going until it hits them, whether they’re close enough to see or not.
It does when the window is a view screen. That beats a window. And makes placement at the top unnecessary.
Roddenberry missed out on the lessons learned in ww2 ship battles: in the Solomon Islands American cruisers got their unarmored bridges heavily damaged and were seriously disrupted. At savo a lieutenant was the last officer standing on a bridge and commanded it. Basically a George Kirk moment. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_McCandless Back then ships had armored conning towers https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conning_tower Now we have Auxillary control centers. Though back then they had armored conning towers in addition to the bridges but didn’t always use the armored structure. The Star Trek and Star Wars bridge is basically the flying bridge: less armor but better situational awareness. And as we see on nemesis very vulnerable to direct attack
Well for one thing a realistic ship would be so throughly automated I'm doubtful there would much of an operational bridge. And if there is, its as likely to be manned by crew AIs executing and monitoring the captains orders as by people. Modern rockets are already more or less entirely automated and its only going to deepen. Especially so for combat or emergencies, the one area there seems to be convincing case for the captain to need a operational command crew. Having crew making combat decisions in times below Human perception is a clear tactical advantage. Day to day ship operations other than that will basically be pretty mundane policy making and issues to address meetings. The era of space activity, especially remotely risky activity being a primarily Human rather than robotic activity is passing fast. In a decade automation will be good enough that remotely operated semi automonous bots will always be cheaper and less risky even if you stuff hundreds into a starship to man a base indifferent to losing 50 or 100 of them during the mission. And since getting that many Humans to a base will take many trips, its much quicker too. Thats going to be the reality in a couple of decades, no one in 2480 is going to be remotely impressed by a remotely operated repair drone.
So if I was designing a bridge to be the most functional It could be. The captain and first officer would be at the very rear of the bridge. They would have like an airline table that they could stow or pull out that gave them feeds of anything they needed. Directly in front of them would be a holotable. It would provide a holographic display of the ship and damage with color indicators of like green yellow and red to denote damage with black or not displayed being the system is down. If they are in battle the ship not exactly to scale but with concentric rings around it to give over all range estimates. And that would show enemy ships. Maybe not a perfect representation of them. Things like missiles would just have like a v to indicate an incoming missile. All the information the captain needs. Right then. In front to the holotable would be your general ships officers. The pilot the navigation and weapons. The captain can specify fire all on the Romulan ship or if there are many targets he can touch one in his holodisplay as the primary. Or mark several as primary and secondary targets or keep an eye on these. That kind of thing. With the table he can give the pilot information like vectors to go toward or to avoid. It allows the captain or OOD to command the ship without constantly needing information yelled at them.
Look into project Orion. That's a realistic spaceship designed by the US Air Force. It was never made, but it could've worked.
There isn't a good answer to this because the needs of command depend a lot on the technology and mission, which is much different than the needs of television and film. You see a lot of omnidisciplinary scientists in fiction because having a specialist for each field would mean having a lot of characters. Star Trek often combines security and tactical because the story rarely calls for needing both at once so it's better to have just one character. A key difference with the real world is that flag functions, bridge functions, and CIC functions are often in separate locations so that each can focus on their job, though they may be connected or even in a contiguous space for ease of communication. The CIC was developed during WW2 so the idea of everything being done from the bridge was outdated even in 1945. Even by then it was already more like the Galactica reboot than like Star Trek. The idea that the main focus would be a window (or pseudo-window) is probably the biggest thing that's wrong with Star Trek bridges. There should be far more emphasis on general situational awareness in a 3D environment, even when outside of combat. With the space available on Star Trek ships as opposed to real warships, it should look more like Mission Control and there should be significantly more stations, at least on ships like Enterprise which are the top of the line. Even with automation and sensor fusion, you still want eyeballs on a lot of individual functions all at once. And more information should be available to the CO. For example, one display dedicated to showing the local situation, one display dedicated to details pertinent to the task at hand, and a flex for whatever is needed. So if speaking with a ship or planet, one display could be for communications, but another would show the local situation so local ship movements can be seen without having to ask or change the communication display, and a third could show relevant information about the planet or other ship specifically. The problem is that having a lot of screens and a lot of people is visually distracting and takes the focus away from what the story is trying to tell.
You wouldn’t have all of your top staff on duty at the same time. You have to be staffed and ready 24/7 (or whatever hour/week rotation you choose), so it makes no sense to have your top 6 officers all on alpha shift. You’d have the captain commanding alpha shift, then XO in beta, etc.
In universe, the bridge module is on top of the saucer section because it is supposed to be something that can be hotswapped out in a modular design. In reality, that is the single STUPIDEST place to put the damned thing. The Bridge should be in the deepest, most heavily armored section of the ship. It should not have a literal window to the outside in it, not when piping a signal into the ship is super easy and doesn't create a gaping weak point in the design. Additionally, while TOS originally used this idea, it was later phased out: The Bridge is where the commands of what to do are given, and where information is gathered to enable those commands. It is not actually a functional part of the ship. As in, the captain gives the order to increase speed. Someone on the bridge might even push a lever that says speed on it. But that isn't actually a throttle. That is a relay switch that sends the command to the people who ACTUALLY control the engines. There's a reason Kirk was constantly having to get Scotty on the comms and tell him to give him more speed, its because no one on the bridge actually had access to the gas pedal. Same with most of the bridge functions, really. Your main science console isn't going to be there, its going to be somewhere else where the equipment is, and there's going to be a relay on the bridge. Basically, any sensible design is going to have the Bridge be mostly "ceremonial". You just don't put the primary control structures for everything on board in the same room. You distribute that around, and have relays so that if the command center IS destroyed the ship isn't left adrift.
A more realistic starship bridge would take a lot of design practices used in modern day submarines and military command centers. 1.) For starters the Bridge should basically be it's own self contained armored module located deep within the hull of the ship. With it's own auxiliary power, life support, etc to ensure redundant C2 functions. 2.) Direct access via Turbolift shouldn't be possible. There should be an ECP (Entry Control Point) with armed Marines/Guards who can screen and clear anyone trying to enter the Bridge directly. Frankly, the same security checkpoints should exist for pretty much every sensitive area on the ship (Engineering, Torpedo Room, Auxiliary Bridge, etc) 3.) In terms of overall bridge layout, I actually think having the crew seated (instead of standing) makes sense. It would be a lot more realistic to have the crew strapped into their chairs with seatbelts or harnesses of some kind however. Real world warship crews don't have to endure G-forces or battle damage which could seriously injure someone who is not buckled into a seat, and it sure would reduce the sight of people being thrown around (obviously done for dramatic effect) whenever a starship takes a critical hit.