Was this supposed to be main engineering? From the looks of it, it just looks like two consoles blocking the rest of the Jefferies tube. And is Scotty supposed to be looking at the core? This just threw me off a little bit. My only guess is that the production time was cut really short and they didn't have a chance to redress it like they did for TUC. Thanks.
I don't think we need to interpret that as Main Engineering or anything specific. Scotty was putting out bush fires all across the ship; he probably had no time off for visiting his usual workplace, where his little people were pushing the usual buttons for him. Whether we're supposed to interpret that as something-or-other is a different matter, but I don't see the point. It's actually delightful to see that Scotty doesn't have to crawl on all fours in order to inspect and repair the deeper bowels of his ship, like in TNG! Timo Saloniemi
Well to be fair to TNG we did see the larger Jefferies tubes in TNG's "The Hunted" we also saw smaller jefferies tubes in TOS.
Well, we saw this for all of one camera shot in the first act of the movie. It's no surprise that they re-dressed an existing set for it (IIRC, TNG then inherited the set as its "larger" Jeffries tubes for season three before settling on the crawlspace sets). In some ways though I'm happier with this than the slapdash "redress" of the TNG Engineering set they did for TUC, leaving the actual warp core as-is while changing the displays, adding a few stickers, and covering up the rest with a crowd of extras wearing movie-era white worksuits. Granted, it was still TECHNICALLY the original TMP Engineering set in the first place, but they barely glossed over the rebuild they did for TNG. In any case, the TFF set could very well have been just one corner of Engineering. Or the impulse engineering deck, or something. The transcript has Kirk calling the "engine room", but pretty much every incarnation of Trek shows the engine compartment as having multiple areas and levels to play with, and this could easily be one of those for the Enterprise-A. Mark
You do indeed make quite a good point here. The sets for engineering in TUC were quite slap dashed and half-arsed. Heck, even in that picture above me you can see LCARS control panels; however Star Trek VI did do a much better job with sickbay in TUC, albeit with the lights turned off when Valeris was about to be exposed. Sickbay TFF had pretty exposed LCARS controls. That was just bad...
They should have changed the Light pattern for the TUC redress to make it stand apart. The Warp plasma on the Constitution refit's began on the lower part of the secondary hull. It then travel up all the way to the Impulse deck. But I guess most was diverted down the horizontal conduit when at warp. So the light should have all been rising upward.
...So, basically, what we saw in ST:TMP was the plasma conduits that took the energy from the warp core to the engines. And what we saw in ST:TUC is the actual warp core itself. Timo Saloniemi
To be fair, even in 1991 there was no way for the producers to know that decades later people would go through these movies frame by frame looking for the tiniest mistake in detail. Now that they do know, they compensate. With lens flares.
Back in 2005 when I was working with Shane on his revised Scott's Guide pitch to Pocket Books, we ended up putting that area off to the side of the core level.
Those GNDN pipes and consoles are really awkwardly placed, blocking access where major volume is dedicated to no other purpose except access. One is tempted to think it's the result of the half-baked and hurried refit that turned the old Yorktown into the E-A... Given a few more months, the pipes would have been bent and the consoles integrated to the walls. Timo Saloniemi
I like the fresh approach you've taken there! Are there other drawings available from that project? Timo, yes I agree; it adds nicely to the "half finished ship" notion.
Ditto. It reminded me alot of the random pipes sticking out and across the corridors on the Constellation in "The Doomsday Machine". Very rushed and half-baked.
Way cool! I love this overlay! Curse you Pocket Books for not allowing it to happen! Perhaps if you pitched it as "Geordi La Forge's Guide to the Enterprise" there would be less of an issue. lol I kid. But seriously, great job and thank you for sharing this!
Regarding those pipes, those corridors can be regarded as Jeffreries tubes of course, so it's expected to have that kind of a setup. But having consoles in the middle of intersections like that doesn't make much sense unless they're mobile. A normal corridor could be a step up from these jeff tubes, and those red and yellow pipes on the floor could just continue but under the floor. Here's a cross section view of how the TNG style core was going to fit. You can see the tall turbolift shaft there where our heros flew up with the jetboots. The project was Shane's, to update the ship to what was seen in current movies. These plans were going to be the Ent-A (TMP-Ent was coming from a fellow named David Zeils), trying to incorporate everything seen in TFF and TUC. At the time I voiced my opinion that forcing TNG style anything into TMP-era was a mistake, but he wanted it to be visually accurate to onscreen no matter what. I haven't talked to Shane in years, I mailed him recently, but no answer. So I'm not sure of his current state. Tim
I'd love to know more about the thinking behind the engineering principles there, since it seems different from both TMP and TNG. Since there is no room in the bottom for antimatter tanks (and even less room for matter at the top) I would guess that the parts of the core that TNG called magnetic constrictor coils (AKA the neon strip lights) are in fact the storage bottles for the matter and antimatter (arranged top and bottom of the central reactor respectively. From there, the three output tubes carry energy off to the Warp and Impulse engines. If my superstition is correct then it is an ingenious new solution to having to reuse so many TNG set elements
My thoughts was that Scotty was looking opposite the horizontal warp core, and that the angled glowing conduit behind was from the end of the core to one of the nacelles, as seen at the end of the core in TMP/WoK. Interesting idea, to unify what we see in STV and VI. Although I should nitpick that the entire TNG engineering set is seen in STVI and there's no way it'd fit as per it's location in your (fantastic!) schematics (not that the TMP set fit, either)