@cocaine_owlbear @glyph The TNG production staff had, if they were lucky, *two weeks* to design and build an animation, which was then rendered on a Mac-II.

For another conspicuous example of poor TNG CGI, the episode "The Booby Trap" features a computer simulation of the Enterprise weaving its way through an asteroid field -- and it looks awful (so awful, in fact, that I made my own version of it: https://ewhac.org/amiga/animations/tngfly/ )

Point being: It didn't have to make sense, it just had to be *done.*