I wouldn’t be surprised if the room Scotty accidently beamed into was some sort of water reclamation or recycling area. It was probably neve seen in TOS because of budget constraints. I bet the pipes are made of transparent Aluminum. Like some of the earlier posters have suggested to make troubleshooting blockages or other problems before they become serious.

Scotty is a character with a cheeky sense of
humor and he was just making light of a potentially dangerous situation. He is a brilliant engineer who is a bit goofy at times.

Part of that, I’m sure, is related to the limited budget of a TV series, where props need to be reused and turned upside down so a phaser one week is a med scanner the next week, and so on. But TOS seemed to convey more of a sense of grit, especially in the guts of the ship.

Pipes make perfect sense to me, even in the 23rd century. You have to get Stuff from Here to There. Without TNG-like replicators, and without constantly beaming things all over the place, how do you do it? Ductwork and plumbing. Even in the 24th century, I don’t know if I’d buy transporter-enabled toilets. Seems like overkill for something that could more easily (and reliably) handled the old-fashioned way.

The handwheels are a different issue, though. They exist now because we don’t have cheap, ubiquitous servomotors that can put out the torque required to close off big old pipes like that, and the big wheel gives a human operator enough leverage to do the job. But surely that wouldn’t be a problem in the 23rd century. If you need to open a valve, you press a button and a piece of machinery does the hard work.

I suppose we could imagine those handwheels aren’t handwheels at all but just some kind of circular user interface? ;-)

I mean come on guys, lets take a moment to understand the differences between Science Fact and Science Fiction.

I think personally they are going for a level of realism onboard the Enterprise that really hasn’t been shown in previous series, The engine room i can imagine will look a lot like a futuristic version of a naval ships engine room and then you have the hi-tech stuff the higher up the ship you go until you reach the technology-heavy bridge. Maybe it was a problem for your shows that everything felt too hi-tech? I mean, sure, it has to be futuristic but it think some of the realism was lost amongst the technology, certainly i felt that the being the case with Voyager. Anyway, it’s another team’s style, i think it works in some ways better than Star Trek of old but as with everything in Star Trek and other sci-fi, it’s really up to the viewer to cast their own opinion.

Once again, thank you for sparing the time to chat to the fans =/\=

I’m just giving you my opinion, You could design the Enterprise any number of ways since we have no idea what the future will really look like – we could still be using pipes and valves (or wheels) or we could be using something completely new, we could be flying around in space ships named Enterprise, or we could get robots to do it for us, It’s Science Fiction and this is just another teams take on what the Enterprise should look like, Rick Sternbach had different ideas, some great, some not so great – i think suggesting that the Enterprise shouldn’t have this or that, pipes or hand-valves (Sheeesh!) is nonsense because why not since the future is there for us to design any way we want to.

Not sure of the extent of Mr. Sternbach’s design responsibilities with previous Trek , but whatever he had his hands in sure looked a lot better then what Chambliss gave us. If the previous Trek group had their hands on the amount of money JJ’s group was given, we’d have either top-notch classic design or top-notch 23rd century design.

back to the point in hand though, pipes and wheels are still being used today and have been used since their conception, they work better than anything else and There’s no reason to think they wouldn’t be used on a star-ship like the Enterprise – if it’s not broke, don’t fix it – and just for argument’s sake, Star Trek of the past (designed by you or someone else) has had some pretty questionable technology put onboard the Enterprise – lets not forget the joy stick that was used in Insurrection – I’m not sure why now people are starting to get their knickers in a twist and question it – especially someone who’s worked on Star Trek!!!

It’s sad to see that someone who’s worked on Star Trek take this kind of attitude but i guess we’re all entitled to our opinions.