The runabout on the stand at Image G.

The runabout was our puddle jumping, PT boat. Don’t confuse it with a shuttleraft. It’s fast like a starship, and it’s operational envelope is way high and to the right. When it came time to build the interior, clean and straight forward was where the runabout design ethic lived. The exterior has the benefit of that famous no-nonsense Sternbach sensibility. The interior carries that forward.

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No nonsense, and straight forward.

The control surfaces and displays are neat and sweet, without the extraneous-flashy-pinball-cosmetics-counter sauce that everyone is grumbling about on the web lately.

The sets were well advanced in displaying information as compared to TNG. Mike mandated that we ditch the traditional pola-motion for moving graphics, and make the switch to video playback. The Runabout data displays were interactive, and custom tailored to reflect the situation.

The  addition of faux aluminum vinyl appliques to the black plexi, punched up the look of the graphics by framing them with bright metallic Okudian T-bars.

Window covers saved money.

The side windows were a cool idea, but it was expensive to put warp stars outside the window in nearly every shot. So silly as it may sound, the runabout would drop out of warp during protracted plot exposition in order to save money. Later on we eliminated the problem with window covers. On Enterprise, Mike Okuda came up with giant video playback screens with warp stars. It worked brilliantly, and cost nothing.

A bucking bronco in the first season.

When the Runabout cockpit was built at the start of the first season, believe it or not, it was built on a hydraulic platform. In theory it sounded great. Viewers had grown wise to actors acting like the ship was is in turbulance. So if we put ‘em on a bucking set, that should help, right? Well, not really. On camera there was not enough rock n’ and rollin’ to shake people around sufficiently to make a difference… not to mention that the set was trashed at the end of the day… and that was the end of that.

The best solution I’ve witnessed was on the new Galactica, where they put the entire full scale Viper on a big air bag, and a couple of burly grips would rock the plane around. It was very effective, with no-impact on the set piece at all.

“Starfleet clean”  Aviators Roddenberry, and Jefferies would have approved.

Ease of filming – the front, and side sections were built to fly out, making camera access to the cast uncomplicated.

Clean and functional - the definition of good starfleet design.

Respectful of what came before – the definition of what followers of the show demand.

 

POST UPDATE:

Our buddy Jorg asks:

Thanks for the nice close-up shots of the interior, Doug!
Talking about modifications to the set: Whatt were the reasons for the redesign of the Runabout interior between DS9 Seasons 2+3 and 4+5?

Here is Mike with some insight into that question:

Over time, we modified the runabout to make it easier to operate and maintain.  Fairly early on (maybe right after the pilot), I realized
that a couple of video screens were positioned where they wouldn’t be seen very much, so I asked Denise to have them removed so we could use the monitors elsewhere. Even those two fewer monitors made Denise’s life easier.  She recalls that the set was designed to come apart for filming, and she and her video operators had to disconnect and remove each monitor every time they took the set apart. Denise says that her favorite video animation in that set was something that we called “flying boxes,” which she usually put on one of the monitors next to the windows, so you got a sense of motion, even if the
director chose not to shoot the window itself.  Denise had several different versions of “flying boxes,” showing different speeds of flight.  She even had a crazy version that she used whenever we were in the wormhole.  Remember that this was quite a few years ago, and
technology was more primitive.  Although the animation was computer-generated, we couldn’t use computers for the actual playback, so we used specially-modified 3/4″ video playback decks, running pre-recorded animation at 24 frames-per-second on modified video screens.  With our rigs, it was usually impractical to “switch” between different animation loops, so whenever there was a scene that called for a change in speed, Denise usually avoided using “flying boxes” in the set.  We liked flying boxes so much that we also used it on the Voyager bridge!

I loved the side window in the runabout set.  Whenever we saw warp
stars out that window, you really got a sense that we were flying
through space, even though our directors usually regarded it as a
frivolous visual effect.  I was really disappointed the day that Herman
was asked to build a shutter to close the window.  I feared that once
the window was closed, we’d never see it open again, and that was
pretty much what happened.  As Doug mentioned, it was years until we
were able to use video projection for warp stars in windows.  (The
technology to do this is simple, but it took surprisingly long to
gather the necessary hardware and to conduct the necessary tests to
make the tweaks so it looked good to us and to our colleagues in visual
effects.)

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