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?
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.
The magic of suspension of disbelief
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.
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?
