Star Trek's newest show, Starfleet Academy, is giving Robert Picardo the chance to walk onto the largest physical set ever built for the franchise, and he says the difference from those used on Voyager is nothing short of “awe-inspiring.”
During the Starfleet Academy blue carpet premiere, Picardo explained to TrekNews that the new show’s production scale is on a completely different level than what he experienced on Star Trek: Voyager. “Everything costs more now," Picardo explained. "We have the biggest set ever built for Star Trek, so it's amazing. It's awe-inspiring. You step into the atrium set of Starfleet Academy, and you are enveloped. You are in a different world.”
The atrium serves as the visual and emotional centerpiece of the Academy campus, designed to immerse both actors and viewers in a fully realized 32nd-century Starfleet environment.
When asked how the new sets stack up against Voyager’s, Picardo was candid about the sheer scale of the upgrade. “I mean, our sets, I was amazed at how real our sets felt, but they are toys size-wise, in comparison," Picardo said. Voyager’s Sickbay and corridors were famously intimate, but Starfleet Academy’s build pushes into feature-film territory, giving the production a sense of scope Picardo never had on the series which ran from 1995 until 2001.
Picardo also teased that viewers will get a clear sense of the atrium’s size in the first episode, thanks to a sequence that turns the set itself into part of the storytelling. “There's a moment in the pilot where you'll see a couple of our characters running through the atrium, and that'll give you..."
Picardo continued:
"You'll get a sense of how huge it is [...] Even I have to run around sometimes.” For longtime fans, watching The Doctor move from Voyager’s compact Sickbay to a sprawling Academy atrium should underline just how far Star Trek’s production design has evolved in the streaming era.
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