#minimapping

I have spent the last few weeks amassing a new set of screenshots for season one of Star Trek: Picard, to replace the lower quality ones I had somehow managed to pry off of Amazon Prime back in the day. And as I'm staring lovingly at images of anything and everything La Sirena, occasionally, I notice things I've never noticed before. Usually those are very small things, but every now and again, I discover something absolutely delightful.

So, I thought I'd drop in to share one of my latest observations!

I've probably mentioned before, and many others have, too, that when Admiral Picard (retired) first arrives on La Sirena, the ship is undergoing a bit of a refit or possibly some repairs.

For one, the transporter console is nowhere to be found:

The console is clearly mobile, we see it move around the deck on other occasions.

But apparently, when Picard arrived, it had been taken somewhere else entirely for a while.

Similarly, the chairs on the bridge undergo a lot of transformations throughout season 1 (so many, in fact, they deserve their own post), but one of the most stark ones is from episode 3, "The End is the Beginning" to episode 4, "Absolute Candor":

Clearly, while in orbit over earth, someone on Sirena decided it was a good time to reupholster all the bridge chairs.

Now, if you wanted to, you could find explanations that fit the canon for all of these changes -- the removed transporter console, the reupholstered bridge chairs, the amount of cargo that increases drastically between eps 3 and 4, all of it could have a perfectly logical reason.

However, as I was looking through my screenshots today, trying to find an image of one particular section of the port wall for my 3D model, I noticed another refit, one that had never caught my attention before. And this change, I think, even the most dedicated canon-wrangler will have a hard time explaining (not that we won't try).

Let's go back to Picard's very first arrival on the ship for a second.

I have, on occasion, wondered how they managed to film this shot. I've never thought about it too deeply, but it has always seemed vaguely off in my mind. The thing is: this shot should be impossible, because this is the port side of the upper deck, and there are quarters where the camera man is standing right now.

Of course, this is a film set, so many of the walls are wild and can be moved around to allow for all kinds of equipment and setup. Maybe that's what I subconsciously assumed happened with the shot of Picard's dramatic entrance.

Today, however, I realized the walls had not just been moved aside temporarily to allow access for the camera crew. Rather, when they were filming the ep 3 scenes taking place on the open upper deck, the quarters on the port side of the ship weren't actually there yet!

It's subtle and a little difficult to see, which is probably why I never noticed it until today, even though I've been staring at every inch of this ship for the better part of three years now. But if you look closely at the middle section of the port wall and zoom in (especially on the second image, right next to Agnes's right arm), you can tell that there is open space where the quarters would be built in later.

(Especially compared to the same section of the deck in later episodes.)

(See how much of the beams and the space in between them is blocked here?)

Now, I'm as happy to wrangle the canon into submission as the next detail-obsessed nerd, but I in this case, I have yet to come up with a fitting, canon-compliant explanation for the discrepancy between episodes. I think, in the end, I'll probably file it under: "these things can happen on a tv set" and move on. (Although if one of you wants to try their hand at a headcanon, I would be thrilled to read all about it!)

An interesting question, anon! I’ve wondered the same before.

The only obvious docking mechanism we ever see for La Sirena are the cargo(?) doors at the back of the ship.

(I really need to learn how to brighten images 🙈)

You can see the doors at the very bottom of the back of the ship here.

In the early planning stages, there was an idea that Picard would board the Sirena while she was in space dock, and in the concept art for this, Mark Yang (the ship’s main designer) envisioned a loading ramp for the aft cargo doors:

This ramp may or may not exist, given the massively increased clearance in the final design, but the doors are still there. I would imagine they can also function as an airlock and docking point.

Apart from that, it gets tricky. I’ve read a few takes (among others in Rogue Elements) of people who interpret the large vista windows running down both sides of the ship as proper access points.

I understand where the assumption comes from, given that the motley crew use these windows to get out of the ship on Coppelius, but I actually don’t think they’re meant to be used to enter and leave the ship.

I’m planning to write a much longer screed on this, but for now, let me point out that in order to actually get to those windows on the lower deck, you either have to jump down three feet from the mess hall walkway, move the cargo net containing Rios’s footballs aside, and then scale the sloped floor up to the window. Which is why, on Coppelius, they throw down some pallets to bridge the gap.

(On the upper deck you can’t get to these windows because there is immovable railing in the way. But again: more on this later ;9)

The only other possible access point I can readily think of might be at the nose of the ship. Sirena’s original phaser banks are located there (side note: The Eaglemoss magazine says there are additional, much stronger phasers in the outrigger impulse engines, but until we see those, they remain speculative beta canon 😋), but apparently, there was originally a plan to have some access point on the underside of the front of the ship.

I once again refer you to Mark Yang:

Unfortunately, it’s unclear whether this design choice survived from the days of the Araña Cósmica all the way to the final Sirena designs - let alone if anyone told the writers about this and it’ll end up in the show.

If there is an access point there, I imagine it would have some mechanism to dock with other ships or space stations, too.

So far, those are my thoughts on possible docking options for La Sirena. Perhaps somebody else has other thoughts and ideas?

A couple of days ago, I discovered a new piece of furniture in Captain Rios’s quarters!!

As I mentioned in my last post, after I finished taking screenshots of every La Sirena scene in season 2, I decided it was time to go through season 1 again and retake all my screenshots. I have much higher-quality videos now and can go frame by frame rather than relying on my pause-button reflexes on Amazon Prime.

So, I started with S1E3, “The End is the Beginning”, and I noticed something I had never noticed before: THERE IS A CLOSET OR WARDROBE IN THE CAPTAIN’S QUARTERS!!!!

It never shows up properly on screen, but when going frame by frame, I discovered this:

See that structure at the very left edge of the image? That is the typical frame of a piece of La Sirena’s furniture!

Now, from the furniture reference we got to see on the blu-ray extras, we know that the production department planned to build several styles of full-length wardrobe:

(Ignore the measurements on this, please, they are Very Wrong 😅). It’s impossible to tell from this scene how broad this particular piece of furniture is. It could be the Large Armoire (No. 4, bottom left), or the Compact Armoire (No. 6, bottom right).

For a moment I considered whether it could be the same closet Raffi has in her quarters, but that one is a shorter closet section on top of a set of drawers.

It’s not 100% certain from the image above, but in context, it looks like the frame of the wardrobe in Rios’s quarters goes all the way to the floor. (Once again, the image for context:

This would speak to a full-length "armoire”.

Since this still didn’t tell me much about the size of the wardrobe, I took context into account. In season 2, we see a slightly modified version of the large armoire in the quarters-turned-squad-bunks. The doors have been replaced (and become a lot hole-ier), but it’s definitely the same style of furniture.

This made me wonder if the production people built it from scratch or reused and modified an existing piece of furniture. If it was the latter, that might be a clue that the wardrobe in Rios’s quarters was indeed the full-width “Large Armoire”.

However, when looking for any other hint of this piece of furniture, this frame caught my eye:

Again, at the very far left, there is a hint of some piece of furniture there. It is extremely warped because it’s so close to the camera lense, so it’s difficult to tell what exactly is going on. But there can be no doubt that the piece of furniture is divided horizontally.

This doesn’t look like a full-length closet, it looks much more like it’s actually the two-part “bar unit” that Raffi has in her quarters, i.e. a set of drawers and a closet on top.

Now, if that were the case, what might be going on here is that Rios does, in fact, have two different pieces of furniture right next to each other. Something like this:

You can soooooort of see it when you hold the screenshot next to my model of the furniture.

It’s not super clear, but I’m going to stick with this interpretation for now.

I think it’s time to update my floor plan of the captain’s quarters! With this new information added, it probably should look something like this:

I.e. I found the lamp from Rios’s desk and it’s really beautiful but incredibly expensive for a lamp...

Source: https://traeproducts.com/view/umi-white

I was a little skeptical whether I had the right source at first, since it doesn’t look like the lamp on Rios’s desk has a foot, and there’s a power cord in this behind the scenes photo:

However, Amazon’s listing clarifies that the lamp has a magnetic base, which means the foot is detachable.

The power cord is probably just the charger, since the lamp runs on batteries. (The black lamp in the image above even shows you the charging port.)

Also, you can just make out the round on-button in the background here:

So, I’m fairly certain I have Identified The Lamp.

Ah yes. This one 🙈

Unfortunately, that room remains a mystery.

In the Set Me Up behind the scenes tour, production designer Todd Cherniawsky refers to it as Rios’s “ready room”, but I don’t know how official that is. It certainly doesn’t look like much of a ready room, which is why I’ve mostly stuck with calling it the conference room for now.

Since, as you said, it’s clearly filmed in the captain's quarters, things like the view out of the door or the angles of the walls and ceilings don't really hold any clues as to this room’s in-universe location.

The most obvious point of reference might be the slatted light at one side of the room.

I have often seen people refer to this as a half-shuttered window, which would mean that this wall, at least, must be part of Sirena’s outer hull. Also, it would have to be in a part of the ship that’s facing the sun after the crash on Coppelius (i.e. facing forward or possibly aft, given the angle of the light, possible paths of the Ghulion sun and shadows cast by the surrounding mountains).

However! If you look closely at the two times throughout the season that we see the light/window in Rios's quarters, this conclusion becomes less clear.

First: In ep. 3, "The End is the Beginning", Rios has Sirena in orbit around Earth, making repairs and waiting for Picard to beam up.

We don't get an establishing shot for this scene, so we don't know at precisely what angle the ship is to the sun. It's possible the light we can see flooding the room here is Sol’s sunlight coming in through a window. No contradictions so far. But...

Second: In ep. 8, "Broken Pieces", Rios holes himself up in his cabin on the way to Deep Space 12. La Sirena is at warp at this point (as we can tell from the window behind Enoch shortly before we see Rios in his quarters).

Even if there is light outside the ship from the warp effect, it wouldn’t create this “steady sunbeams through shutters” effect we see here:

All this has led me to believe that this fixture in Rios’s quarters and the conference room is not, in fact, a window, but a large light. Someone (either the Starfleet engineers who designed the cabins Rios added to Sirena when he got her, or some denizen of the ship itself) designed it to look like sunlight through a slatted blind, possibly to give the ship a more homey feel.

Unfortunately, this means the “window” doesn’t tell us anything about the position of the meeting room in relation to Sirena’s hull after all. Essentially, we have no hints of any kind about the whereabouts of the elusive “ready room”.

Of course, that isn't going to stop me from speculating :D (Wild mix of educated guesses and complete headcanons after the cut.)

Wow!!! Some great information in your posting. There wasn’t anything explaining the reason for the engines that were on the rear of the ship. If the two outrigger pods are the main impulse engines, then the smaller ones at the rear of the ship are boosters? Anyway a diecast model of the ship would look very nice on the book shelf indeed!

@nevernormalnormal​

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Thank you so much! :D

After I saw this in my inbox, I went back to re-read the article (discussed in this post) and looked at some of the footage of Sirena in flight. I think your interpretation is probably spot-on!

If I understand the article correctly, the arrangements of the engines would be something like this:

[design from the official star trek shop, labels added by me]

When she was built, La Sirena started out with impulse engines at the back and the big warp nacelles at the sides. At some point, someone added a rig at the back that allowed for large cargo modules to be docked to the ship and towed.

(Goodness knows I’m not an expert in starship design, but I’m assuming the rig would be the part at the centre back of the ship above (or possibly including?) the cargo doors, and maybe the two spikes next to it.)

The cargo modules were big enough to block the original engine, which is why, in the same refit, the pods at the side that are now the main impulse engines were added. So far the info given by the ship’s designer Mark Yang.

Extrapolating from that, I would assume that it might have been impossible or simply inconvenient to take out the original engines at the back of the ship. They can probably be powered down when Sirena is towing cargo (or anything else) but when she’s flying solo, they might get some power diverted to them to act as additional boosters.

In general, I find the history of this ship really fascinating! We know she’s a “Kaplan F17 Speed Freighter”, so she was probably designed to transport relatively small amounts of cargo at very high speeds. In an interview, production designer Todd Cherniawsky likened Sirena to an ancient tugboat. To me, that sounds like the modification that turned her into a rig for towing cargo came a good while before Rios acquired her. (La Sirena is at least 50 years old and Rios has had her for ten at the most.)

So, when Rios went looking for a ship, he found one that could do both: act as a respectable freighter, towing large cargo modules, which is probably not the most high-stakes or lucrative line of employment, but also transport presumably very valuable goods at speed. Also, if we’ve learned anything from Firefly and Star Wars, small, manoeuvrable, and above all fast starships are ideal for smuggling.

There is a lot to think about here and I can’t wait to see what else might be in the material published along with the model of La Sirena in April, and what they do with the ship in season 2!

Thank you so much for that fascinating question! (And for letting me badger you into putting it in the ask box XD)

We do indeed only see the starlight (what an excellent word!) in action in ep. 3, “The End is the Beginning”, when Rios leans back in his armchair and looks up to see a shooting star outside the window.

If you look at the wider view of the room you can see it’s not the only window, either, there are in fact two more:

Looking at the layout of the captain’s quarters, this (roughly) is the location of the windows on there.

Now, as to from where you can see the windows: You have a very good view of one each from the armchairs, the desk chair, and the bed (it’s not directly above the bed, but the recess seems shallow enough that you’d be able to see outside even when lying down). If you were standing and walking around the room, some of the windows might get concealed by the ceiling beams, but, as an example: sitting in the armchairs, you can still see the window next to the bed.

(Also: the furniture is all very moveable, so it’s entirely possible somebody at some point decides to push the bed a couple meters towards the portside wall to have it directly under the window XD)

So far the location of the windows with regards to Rios’s quarters.

Your question actually made me curious though. I vaguely remember looking at exterior shots of La Sirena a few months back, trying to puzzle out where the windows would be located, and not having any luck. But now that we have the amazing illustrations from the Eaglemoss magazine and a number of proper set plans, I took another run at it. Mapping the outline of Captain Rios’s quarters onto the outside of the ship is complicated for a number of reasons (one of which I will touch on below). Without getting too deep into the weeds of “for production purposes, Sirena’s interior is a bit bigger than it technically should be”, this is a slightly inaccurate but good-enough-for-the-moment depiction of where we would expect the captain’s quarters to be located:

As you can see, there is no sign of windows, or even shutters, visible in this topview of Sirena’s hull. That doesn’t necessarily mean that there aren’t any. When the ship crashes on Coppelius, light floods in through a whole lot of windows in the ceiling of the upper deck, which you can’t find on the hull either. (cf. this shot from ep. 10, “Et in Arcadia Ego Pt. 2″)

We see that other windows, e.g. the ones on the side of the bridge, get shuttered when Sirena goes into warp, and after the crash, Agnes tells Picard that Rios opened some shutters she hadn’t even known were there. From all this, I’d say it’s likely that during flight, the windows blend in seamlessly with the rest of the hull plating.

One final note on a little quirk introduced by the way the series was produced:

As I speculated in one of my first posts about the captain’s quarters (linked in the Masterpost), and we since got confirmed, the sets of Raffi’s and Rios’s quarters actually overlap. The wall dividing them (the one the arrow points to in the image below) got moved back and forth in between episodes. The configuration in the image below is for filming in Raffi’s quarters. For Rios’s quarters, the wall got moved one section to the left, cutting straight through the “Raffi’s Stateroom”-label. (This also means both sets use the same door. The door that should lead to the Captain’s Quarters, the right one on the set plan, is really a blind door.)

Superimposed onto the ship’s hull, it would look something like this:

Eagle-eyed readers will already have realized that this means the strip of the room with Rios’s armchairs and the window in question in it is actually the bit that is shared between the two sets. This means that the window also appears in Raffi’s quarters:

(You can just see it over Rios’s head.)

In universe, I would imagine this simply means that Raffi’s quarters have a little starlight as well, though the chair she set up for stargazing isn’t nearly as comfortable as Rios’s armchairs.

I hope this will help with all your window-related fic-writing needs :D

Ah yes, The Stairs. I tried to figure this out a while ago and ran into the same trouble you had: as far as I can tell, there isn’t a single clear shot of the entirety of either of the two staircases anywhere, not even in the behind the scenes footage. So, let’s extrapolate.

The closest to a full shot we get is this:

That’s ten steps in the staircase, meaning it’s eleven steps total to go up to the bridge or down to the mess. From this shot alone it’s not entirely certain whether there’s another step at the top or whether that’s the edge of the bridge’s floor already, but it becomes clear in other scenes:

There definitely aren’t more than ten steps.

So, the answer is that there are ten steps in the staircase at the front of the ship, meaning it takes eleven steps to go from one deck to the other.