The Engineering systems monitor duplicates in simplified form the Chief Engineer's primary status displays from Main Engineering. These displays include the warp propulsion system, impulse propulsion system, and related subsystems. The purpose of this station is to permit the Chief Engineer to maintain supervision over engineering systems while on the bridge. This is particularly critical during Alert situations that may require the Chief Engineer's presence on the bridge while simultaneously requiring that officer to maintain a close watch over the status of key systems. During most routine Cruise Mode operations, bridge monitoring of these systems is the responsibility of the Flight Control Officer and the Operations Manager. Although this station is normally configured for passive systems status display, priority access by the Chief Engineer or senior staff can provide full control of virtually all engineering systems.
The console is linked to the engineering systems through the bridge's dedicated optical data network (ODN) trunks, but an additional measure of redundancy is provided by dedicated optical hard lines, which permit direct control of key systems in the event of major control systems failure. In such a case, the main computer cores would be assumed to be unavailable or unreliable, so manual control of systems would be enabled with support from the bridge Engineering subprocessor.
In Full Enable Mode, this station is capable of individually addressing each control and servo device (as well as Engineering command software) in all propulsion systems (subject to safety restrictions), giving the Chief Engineer enormous flexibility to reconfigure system operations in response to unforeseen situations. This station is normally unattended, except by the Chief Engineer or key Engineering personnel, although most of its displays are readily accessible to both Ops and Conn through their respective control programs.