Buried deep within the rocketship was the control-room known (for reasons lost in the vanished past of the pre-Atomic era) as the Bridge.
"There's no rule that says the Bridge has to be at the top of the ship."
— Malcolm Reed, Star Trek: Enterprise, "Babel One"
"The problem won't be finding the Bridge; it'll be recognising it as a Bridge."
Callahan squeezed into the crowded flight deck. Grander starships, the handsome corporate-line giants that never saw the surface of a planet, never seared their gleaming hulls with the fires of reentry, could afford spacious bridges whose crews could lounge about with elbow room to waste while their captains strode about like officers and gentlemen, impressively upright and dignified. Not the Goose. There was the captain's station to port, with its terminal and repeater screens and the vector-shift board; the pilot's chair to starboard, and the engineer's tech pit squeezed in between structural members abaft the captain. A 'fresher stall and ration dispenser for short-handed watches—the only kind aboard the Goose—completed the crowded layout, just behind the pilot's station. There was barely headroom enough to seat Moses' one meter ninety without scraping his hat on the overhead, just legroom enough for a stiff stretch under the boards, and it had been the heart of Moses Callahan's universe for eleven years.
— The Shattered Stars by Richard S. McEnroe
