"The Mind's Eye" Season 4 Episode 24

It's crazy that the entire engineering section on Starfleet ships is just right next to the warp core, with absolutely zero structural separation.

The number of times ships had to eject their warp core, or had the warp core go critical, or had other warp core related accidents, you'd think Starfleet would have learned not to exclusively rely on emergency force fields and that they would have simply built two separate sections for engineering and for the warp core.

But no, even after all those experiences, they instead even ditched the isolation doors when they designed the Intrepid class, and basically wrapped the engineering section around the open warp core.

Cause what could possibly go wrong with that approach, eh?

I feel like they do that all the time throughout the TNG era, owing to the fact that they didn't have a "science lab" set in addition to the warp core set which at any rate looked cool and they wanted to use it whenever they could.