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In Praise of the Sci-fi Corridor
brumgrunt writes "Technically a corridor in a science-fiction movie should just be a means of getting from one big expensive set to the next, and yet Den Of Geek writes lovingly of the detailed conduits in films such as Alien, Outland, Solaris and even this year's Moon by Duncan Jones."
Don't you mean a syfy corridor?
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
A friend of mine who films his own movies has a corriodor in his basement. He says that corridor is one of his primary sets.
The same was true with Trek. If they weren't on the bridge, they were in some damn corridor. One of the things I liked about DS9 and Babylon 5 was that they had lots of "open" sets, and tried to avoid corridors as much as possible.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Have you seen the ISS? The future is looking pretty organized. http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/177653main_UTBI1.jpg
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
You can't really fault Trek for having so many corridors when most of the shots occur on the ship. If the space ships of Star Trek are anything like U.S. naval vessels, then they are mostly corridors connecting rooms. The rooms will be cargo, berthing, galleys, a few work shops, engineering, and the bridge. If the ship supports fly ops, it will have a hanger and flight deck.
The important thing is that there will be no "open" decks. Everything will be enclosed, much like a modern submarine. Space will be at a premium due to life support considerations, so rooms will be small and packed together. Plus, depending on how long it takes to get around, there is the matter of food and water storage, recycling systems.
In ST:TOS, the Enterprise would often be "three weeks out" from the starbase of the week. It had a crew of about 1,000. So, the ship had to have enough food, water, and air for 1,000 people for three weeks. Even with the "replicators", there would need to be source matter to create the food from. Let us not forget waste handling. Ejecting it from the ship means loss of material, water, and air. Storing requires voids. Recycling it requires space for the recycling equipment.
Also, a ship moves through space so it must have engines and fuel. The bigger the rooms, the bigger the ship, the more mass the ship has, the bigger the engines and the more fuel it needs.
Most people forget many of the details required for life because those details are taken for granted on a planet.
Corridors are the natural result of building large space ships with large crew compliments. Even a large cargo vessel will be some huge empty spaces for the cargo and a large space for engineering both connected to a small crew section which will be mostly small rooms off of corridors.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.