In “Take Me Out to the Holosuite”, captains Sisko and Solok form teams of their own crewmen and play a baseball game in one of Quark’s holosuites. Unlike most Holosuite programs, the real people involved are extremely spread out, with Rom (in the stands behind home plate) and Dax (climbing the center field fence) at least 450 feet apart at one point, with the dugouts roughly 200 feet apart along the opposite axis. We see the interior of various holosuites in prior episodes and they are nowhere near that large. Does Quark really have close to 100,000 square feet worth of holosuites, or does the holodeck have some special tricks to deal with this sort of situation?
I seem to remember the official explanation being that they’re not that far apart, but that the holodeck can use perspective tricks to seamlessly make them seem that far apart. You could run away from someone in one direction and never hit the wall while things shrink and enlarge to make you seem far away from your companions.
I could see that working for everything except for other people and objects brought into the holosuit.
I guess that could work if the holosuites either project a simulation of people/foreign objects once they get farther away in the simulation than in reality. Or, if it can do some really clever lensing magic with force fields to make the real world people and objects seem closer or further? That’s plausible, and maximizes the “reality” of what people are seeing.
This is the way I imagine it too, basically everyone gets divided up into their own little cubicles, with them essentially running on treadmills, every player gets their own view projected to them, and the physical ball is most likely ‘cloaked’ by the holograms, with force fields moving it around as needed through the various ‘cubicles’.
From Prodigy 1x17 Ghost in the Machine (go to 06:15):
Gwyn: “If we’re all stuck in one room, how is Zero all the way over there?”
Rok-Tahk: “Motion floor tracking, visual horizon manipulation. The Holodeck tricks the mind to create any scenario!”
Could have sworn there was a visual in the episode as well, but I can’t find it.
It’s admittedly a very low tech explanation but if all the suites are next to each other, perhaps they just have removable dividing walls to allow for different size requirements?
Maybe Quark has one big one that he charges extra for, except Sisko gets to use it for free since Starfleet doesn’t charge him rent.
It definitely breaks the explanations that we’ve gotten in-world for how the holosuites work. There’s even comments in other DS9 episodes about the walls being closer than they appear (Garak in Afterimage comes to mind). We never see a large holosuit inactive to get a sense of the walls, but the Vic Fontaine episodes also break this space with lots of people being fairly spread out.
I just watched Afterimage a few days ago, which is literally the episode right before Take Me Out To The Holosuite.
The magic of suspension of disbelief
I’m sure O’Brien could figure out a way to adapt a cargo bay to be used as a holosuite. That plus some other creative engineering solutions, I’m sure!