Building Andromeda's Bridge.

[missferal]

Andromeda: Building the 50th-Century Bridge

Ken Rabehl is a designing man, literally responsible for building the Andromeda from the ground up.
In this week’s Dispatch from Andromeda, Rabehl tells SPACE.com’s Don Lipper about designing the bridge, developing the High Guard aesthetic, building "train world" and his hopes for seeing more of the Commonwealth’s glory days in the second season

SPACE.com: Your first job was to create a new bridge for the starship Andromeda?

Ken Rabehl: That was one of the first tasks, yeah.

SPACE.com: Almost everyone is familiar with the layout of the Enterprise's bridge. Was that a jumping off point?

KR: Yes, there were discussions with Allan Eastman and Robert Wolfe. We started off saying what we didn’t want, but that wasn’t so important [because I had] a clear direction [regarding] the atmosphere they wanted to create. This ship, this High Guard vessel, about a kilometer long, was supposed to be very elegant, beautiful. I thought it would be jewel-like, extremely sophisticated and dangerous at the same time. So my mind started immediately filling up with images that were actually quite far away from Star Trek, in the sense that they had very gray-white vacuum-formed shapes are that are very functional. And I started to lean more towards gold and bronzes and tried to get more curves and beautification of arches and images like that.

My very first concepting was beyond our scope of [construction] time, unfortunately, so we started trimming down to what we could do, [but] in the end we did move away from that Star Trek look. So the influence of Star Trek was there, but in my mind it wasn’t that hard to detract from it pretty quickly and move in a different direction.

SPACE.com: Was your original design more Art Nouveau, with lots of curves and swoops?

KR: It was a touch of Art Nouveau, but I would rather say it was more arches, more shiny curved arches with graceful sweeps between and consoles that were not so brutally functional. More delicate and flowing, more or less as they are now.

If anything, I think the biggest change between what we have now and what I originally envisioned, is there [are] less really physically curved surfaces. Because of the nature of working with that type of material, we have to turn things into planar surfaces and take curving walls and section them off, which isn’t really what I wanted, but it ended up being okay for what we are doing.

We had no choice. It is still maintaining a look, but I did envision plenty of curves and shinier surfaces and more floating-looking consoles.

SPACE.com: Did you look at it from a point of view of a set, or as the bridge of an aircraft carrier or submarine?

KR: One of the comments that Robert Wolfe made was that he didn’t want anybody sitting. His model for that concept was that on nuclear submarines there is a more standing-oriented sort of environment. We carried that concept into the bridge where all of the stations are standing stations, so that would probably be the only real 20th Century military model.

The interview is continued with: "In the space navy"
at http://www.space.com/sciencefiction/...hl_001201.html

[Curupira]

I think I like the Andromeda better then the Enterprise It's just a cooler ship!