Could you have more elaborate ideas from Next Generation onwards because of advanced techniques in CGI and VisFX?

Yeah, we produce 26 one-hour episodes of Star Trek a year right now, and the two principal constraints are time and budget. Over the last few years, computer generated special effects technology has advanced to the point where we can do a lot of our special effects on the computer and still afford to do it on our budget in time to air a weekly television programme. That�s only really become practical within last three or four years.

From about the 5th season of Star Trek: Voyager on, every new shot of the Voyager starship that you saw on television was a computer generated special effect. The beautiful, six foot fibreglass model that was built at the beginning of the series has been sitting in a box for years. That gave us writers much greater freedom in imagining story ideas and scenes. For example, we could have an alien attack Voyager and tear up half of the hull and blow out a couple of the decks. We would never imagine doing that with that very expensive, lovely model that we built at the beginning of the series. We couldn�t afford to repair it. But when that ship just exists on a disc in a computer you can blow it up to your heart�s content then just call up the file again when you�re ready to show it after it�s been repaired. We did our first special effects computer generated alien life form on Voyager, which was species 8472. And that technology continues to evolve, so I�m sure that we�re going to see more and more of that in � in the new series, which will be very exciting.