We welcome to the cave designer and illustrator Matt Cushman, the artist behind some of our favorite science fiction cutaway illustrations from Star Trek and Star Wars. Matt shares with Adam his new massive cross-section poster of the original USS Enterprise, sized as large as the original 11-foot filming model. We scrutinize the details of this incredible piece and learn all the ways Matt made sense of the interior layout based on what was shown in the original series episodes!
I admire the nerdaciousness of it all, but, frankly, Star Trek is not hard SF and never will be no matter how hard anyone tries to make it so. It's a fun exercise, and if it makes watching the show more fun for you, great! But please don't get into arguments about how many light years you can get out of 1kg of dilithium crystals (and not because everything would depend on the lattice structure OBVIOUSLY).