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My understanding of the battle bridge is that it is a more protected and armored bridge meant to be used when there was a risk of damage to the main bridge, such as during a battle, or to control the drive section after a saucer separation.

Why then is it not used when the Enterprise is entering a battle or expecting to be fired upon? We can see the main bridge is very vulnerable during a battle, being on top of the starship, and half of it gets blown away in Nemesis, so it would seem to make sense to evacuate the bridge officers to a safer location so the ship would not lose its command crew at a critical moment.

Why is this not done?

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    Because it was a crappy location to film in, badly lit and a bloody hassle to put up and take down
    – Valorum
    Commented Jan 11, 2018 at 21:23
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    Maybe in-universe, they didn't use it unless in a state of war in order to not send the wrong message to people they're communicating with? I only remember it being used in actual war or in simulations...
    – Quasi_Stomach
    Commented Jan 11, 2018 at 21:27
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    Are you asking for an in-universe or out-of-universe explanation? Out-of-universe, it seems that it the whole saucer separation plot device was just too time consuming to include and expensive to film. memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Saucer_separation
    – user22478
    Commented Jan 12, 2018 at 3:55

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The Battle Bridge would have been used only during the saucer separation mode, but this feature was rarely seen on screen

Saucer separation was planned as a regular feature during the early days of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Several story lines, including a B-plot for "When The Bough Breaks", were to use saucer separation. However, budget limitations at the time did not allow for extensive footage of the separated components to be shot, and it was also felt that separation slowed the progress of the story.
From Memory Alpha

Anyway, the set of the Ent-D Battle Bridge was redressed in multiple occasions to be used as the Main Bridge of other starships. Since the use of the Battle Bridge would be useful only during the saucer separation mode, I think that the production preferred to use an otherwise unused set for other purposes, and was probably deemed that once the Battle Bridge set was dismissed, there was no need to reassemble it, but instead leave it free for other purposes.

By the end of the third season of The Next Generation, the battle bridge set had also been redressed as the bridge of the Miranda-class USS Lantree in "Unnatural Selection", the bridge of the Ambassador-class USS Enterprise-C in "Yesterday's Enterprise", Starbase 173's courtroom in "The Measure Of A Man", and the cybernetics lab aboard the Enterprise-D in "The Offspring".
From Memory Alpha

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    Tangential, but in-universe it was ridiculously irresponsible to not separate the ship semi-regularly, since the justification for doing so in early episodes was to not send the families and other civilians on board into combat.
    – SudoSedWinifred
    Commented Mar 24, 2018 at 19:01
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    Another point of view, if you have to separate the ship semi-regularly, would not have been better to produce two distinct ships with different specific roles, rather than a single giant one that have to often perform a difficult and potentially dangerous maneuver?
    – Sekhemty
    Commented Mar 24, 2018 at 20:46
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    @Sekhemty: What are those two roles? I somehow always arrive at inherently entangled role-pairs, where completely separating the ships would defeat the purpose of one of the roles in the first place.
    – O. R. Mapper
    Commented Mar 26, 2018 at 14:54
  • Rethinking this after many years, "budget limitations at the time did not allow for extensive footage of the separated components to be shot" must have been the main concern. Just as you don't need to show every beam-out/beam-in, it would not strictly have been necessary to show the separation or joining, just the separated components at some point. Actually, it might be a bit of a missed opportunity - seeing how TNG had, in its later seasons, often an A/B plot with little relation in between, it could have been a logical extension (maybe even prevented a few plotholes) to have them take ...
    – O. R. Mapper
    Commented Nov 4 at 16:09
  • ... place on different sections of the ship, in different locations.
    – O. R. Mapper
    Commented Nov 4 at 16:10

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