He could have even invented them, after studying the station. You can't tell me the Federation wouldn't want self-repairing ships, even if O'Brien would hate it
One of the things I liked best about The Orville was its homage to the TOS aesthetic. “Just go to IKEA, buy a bunch of tables, chairs, and bookshelves and paint them.”
Cheap sets are a key to the charm of Star Trek. When it gets too CGI-ey you know they’re off base.
Not as silly as literal flamethrowers on the bridge which spew fire when the outside of the ship is hit in any location.
I never liked the whole "we can't build a ship in which the bridge electronics are even semisafe" let alone believing that there's thick gaspipes in several locations.
The owner of the Cantina doesn't like droids, so my head canon is that he's repurposed scavenged droid heads as drink dispensers. Kind of a "drinking from the skull of your enemy" type thing.
This would have been my logic anyway. It's a rat hole bar in the middle of nowhere. Gotta reuse where you can and if you're going for cool aesthetic, droid head drink dispensers are pretty metal (pun intended)
K so I helped build that transporter room. And I helped build the one we built inside it because this one didn't look star-trek enough. Look closely at the Discovery's transporter room.
Also fun story: when I was working on this (with hundreds of others) one job that took forever was the rectangular black tiles that make up the back wall. I spent days, I think it was close to 1500 of them, plywood laminated to some sort of firm sound foam, run through the table saw for each of the beveled edges.... Carefully mounted to this bracket thing that the welding guys must have built. It was one of the earliest sets they wanted done, and they ended up using it for some early promo pictures of our hero....
One of the earliest released shots of Michael were in the transporter room, and dead centre behind her on the wall of a hundred tiles, is one super crooked tile. I can't find the pic right now, but it's obvious... I don't know how nobody saw it during the shoot, or at least in post....
I facepalmed so hard. All our hard work and we looked like we hired a toddler last minute.
I guess it makes a kind of practical sense from a production budget standpoint. They make some fairly complex props that are used in a single episode, so it's understandable they may want to use them a few times.