How many transporter rooms on TOS Enterprise?

[Just a Bill]

Another reference from later in The Savage Curtain. Here it seems that the back-wall/console-wall angle is slightly acute, and the goosneck-wall/door-wall angle is slightly obtuse.

[Robert Comsol]

Sorry for being late to my "own" thread. Part II of my text comment on E-Deck 12 kept me busy (obviously, I felt compelled to provide a lengthy justification why I put a retcon design inspiration from ENT into the TOS Enterprise deck plans ).

"Elaan of Troyius" - 90° with flat screen
"The Enterprise Incident" - ?
"Is There in Truth No Beauty?" - 90°
"The Tholian Web" - 90° (with flat screen)
"That Which Survives" - ?
"The Mark of Gideon" - ? (view from transporter platform recycled footage from "Let That Be..." !!!)
"The Way to Eden" - ?

Does anyone, by any chance, have an accurate complete reconstruction of one transporter room seen in the series.

These variations seem worth fixing for comparison.

Bob

[Just a Bill]

Which angle are you suggesting measurements for? It's hard to pick out much of anything in the Elaan of Troyius shot that looks 90 degrees, but the goosneck/door angle seems very obtuse. (I'm starting to wonder if we aren't all looking at the same things here.)

[blssdwlf]

I guess this is one way of showing that there were multiple transporter rooms!

[Mytran]

Yeah, but loads more than previously thought! Or are Scotty's engineers just really short of things to do?

[Robert Comsol]

For a basic reproduction of a transporter room with the accurate proportions, I'd first like to see the basic configuration of the one we've seen in the 1 3/4 seasons.

As for the Season Three variations I'd think that the one from "The Savage Curtain" ('gooseneck wall' at a 90° angle to the entry wall) is the basic model (the transporter room is essentially a rectangular room, so I think this "feels right").

The wall with the extra monitor console and "Spock's viewer" appears to be flexible (as in real life). Since the console probably allows you to take readings on who or what just arrived on the platform, certain situations might require discretion, therefore they have the option to move this extra monitor a little outside the field of vision of a new arrival.

Apparently, as Mytran pointed out, the "Let That Be..." transporter room is still of a different kind.

The one that keeps bugging me (thinking ahead of its location in the deck plans) is the transporter room with the nearby turbo lift at the end of the transporter room corridor. At the beginning of "Elaan of Troyius" the turbo lift ride takes almost one minute and two thirds of that time is horizontal travel.

Bob

P.S.
What's the gooseneck thingy for? A video camera?

[Mytran]

Nothing wrong with a long horizontal ride - it's simply testament to the long and convoluted path a Turbolift must sometimes take!

[Robert Comsol]

Mytran wrote:

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"Nothing wrong with a long horizontal ride - it's simply testament to the long and convoluted path a Turbolift must sometimes take!"

The problem is this: According to the unusual alignment of the Season One Engine room studio set (port saucer hull stern) and bearing in mind that the studio sets are basically 120° angle slices of a circle, the deck plans in the saucer will probably have Y-shaped turboshafts between (most) ends of the circular corridor.

The top of the "Y" faces towards the bow and this transporter room near either top of the "Y" will look like a sore thumb. Alternately it'll be near the base of the "Y" on the starboard side (opposite to the port side Engineering Control Room), given the length of horizontal ride.

Maybe I'm too pessimistic whether the actual location of the "Elaan of Troyius" transporter room will look good or not.

Bob

[Mytran]

Maybe the usual turboshaft route is undergoing maintainence and it had to take the long route round?

[Robert Comsol]

Mytran wrote:

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"Maybe the usual turboshaft route is undergoing maintainence and it had to take the long route round?"

Actually, that is the kind of rationalization I'll do my best trying to avoid whereever possible.

The problem with the transporter room is its outspoken rectangular basic frame so to speak. Mirror it to the port side Season One "Engineering Control Room" ("The Naked Time") and it will look better than looking displaced at an angle within the saucer.

While it's still just an option, I imagine the "Elaan of Troyius" transporter room (i.e. the one from "Charlie X" and "This Side of Paradise") to be on the starboard side of the saucer stern, the yellow door opposite the transporter room's door would be an access door to the back of the wall panels of the Engineering Control Room.
In contrast the transporter room from "Day of the Dove" would be near the "Elaan turbo shaft" but around the corner (these two transporter rooms would be head-to-head with their transporter platforms).
To have two transporter rooms in such close vicinity (and next to the plasma energy feed from the engineering hull!) would - again - merit the door labels "transporter section", IMHO.

Of course, there wouldn't be place for a second Engineering Control Room (necessary?) but I wonder how this kind of arrangement, despite being screen-accurate, would look like.

Bob

[Just a Bill]

Robert Comsol wrote:

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Actually, that is the kind of rationalization I'll do my best trying to avoid whereever possible.

You don't need a maintenance event to justify a turbolift cab detour. Normal, day-to-day crew activities pretty much dictate that you can't always take the most optimal route. The turbolift routing computer must have a predictive algorithm that attempts at all times to balance two objectives: minimize travel time, and minimize wait time.

As soon as I give my orders and my cab whooshes away, the lift computer starts doing three things: (1) managing my cab's route (which may change based on other cabs in motion) for safety and optimization; (2) removing the empty cab from my destination to make room for my arrival; and (3) dispatching a replacement cab to my departure point. So each turbolift ride involves not one but three cab routes. This is happening simultaneously for multiple crew members, all over the ship, and many of their routes overlap and intersect.

I would think it a foregone conclusion that my wait time, travel time, and actual route taken will all vary for any given combination of departure and destination points, even if there was never a maintenance event. Thus we are not burdened by having to assume that the lights we see sliding past the cab window represent the optimal route.

(P.S. Don't forget that each hull will probably need one or more "cab depots" where several cabs can be tucked out of the way, facilitating both #2 and #3 above. Each such depot can probably just be a "spur shaft" where a few cabs can be lined up like unused boxcars. Hmm, I may actually have seen something like this on blueprints or a cutaway at some point in the last 40 years.)

[Robert Comsol]

Just a Bill wrote:

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"Don't forget that each hull will probably need one or more "cab depots" where several cabs can be tucked out of the way, facilitating both #2 and #3 above. Each such depot can probably just be a "spur shaft" where a few cabs can be lined up like unused boxcars. Hmm, I may actually have seen something like this on blueprints or a cutaway at some point in the last 40 years."

You might want to take a look at this thread from not too long ago.

I think turbo lift cab depots Franz Joseph style (other than those for repair and maintenance) would be a waste of space, better to aim for a system with circulating cabs with as little dead ends as possible.

Bob

[blssdwlf]

@Just a Bill - that's an interesting idea. A good spot for those cab depots... the neck

[Just a Bill]

Robert Comsol wrote:

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You might want to take a look at this thread ... turbo lift cab depots Franz Joseph style (other than those for repair and maintenance) would be a waste of space

Okay, I read the entire thread (thanks for the link). Plenty of interesting theories there, but the idea that dedicated cabs "follow" key crew members is problematic. It might work in TNG times, but in TOS the ship does not "know" where individuals are. You can scan for life signs and try to pick out a Vulcan among Romulans, or eliminate heartbeats until you can deduce that Finney isn't dead, for example, but the ship does not "know" the wherabouts of the captain until he punches an intercom panel or something. (And even then, it still might not. I don't recall any evidence of the ship's computers maintaining this kind of information, and in fact that plural — computers— reminds me that in the 1960s TOS, there really isn't even a concept of a "central brain" running the ship; that concept would have to wait for TNG and audience familiarity with networked computing.)

Anyway, maybe I'm missing something here, but I don't see how avoiding cab depots saves any space, really. If you don't have "spurs" or garages or some other dedicated space that's not needed for actual cab routing, then the alternative would seem to be the idea that all shafts are double- or triple-wide to allow cabs to "pass" each other — and that seems massively more space-wasteful to me than a few depots sprinkled here and there.

The fact that we never see anybody waiting for a cab — turbolifts open instantly 99.9% of the time — suggests that the number of cabs at least equals the number of termini (or the number of routinely-used termini; you probably don't need predictive, instantaneous cab availability when leaving the Christmas ornament storage lockers). Now, possibly the ship could continuously monitor life-signs and only maintain ready cabs at termini in sections that are actually occupied; but based on the typical hustle-and-bustle activity depicted aboard the Enterprise, it seems safe to conclude that the majority of sections are usually occupied anyway.

In addition to the baseline number of cabs presumably being somewhere around the number of termini, we need extras to account for peak usage (shift changes, battle-stations calls, evacuations...), maintenance downtime, decommissioning, battle damage, etc. Surely the total number must then exceed the number of termini; and all those cabs need to park somewhere. If where they park is defined as opportunistically "anywhere" in the shaft network that makes sense at the current moment, then this means the entire network needs to be constructed with major redundancy to accommodate passing, rerouting, and parking. I recognize that this still could very well be the best answer; but it sounds far less space-efficient than a small number of dedicated garages where cabs can be packed together out of the flow of traffic. And is it even feasible to implement your deck plans with double-wide shafts everywhere?

Every time a cab leaves a terminus, another cab needs to replace it (and promptly, as in the Lazarus-followed-by-redshirt example). Where does this replacement cab come from? We can't just steal it from the next-closest terminus; that only creates a cascading vacancy effect that is wasteful of energy, increases the number of cabs in motion at any time, and complicates overall network logistics. Far simpler to deploy a replacement from the depot nearest the departure point, while sending the evacuated cab from the destination point to its nearest depot.

Of course, whenever possible, for efficiency's sake the routing algorithm will try to take advantage of localized "ionic" relationships, or complementary needs, where one terminus must get rid of an empty cab and another needs a replacement, and a reasonably short path exists between them that will not impact other occupied cabs in transit. But that's an ideal case, not the norm: the baseline algorithm will need to be able to count on always having a place to dump a cab that needs to be gotten rid of, and another place from which to fill an empty terminus immediately. If we don't have garages or double-wide tubes, then what's the alternative?

One way or the other, the network needs more space than just the baseline pathways, don't you think?

[blssdwlf]

Just a Bill wrote:

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The fact that we never see anybody waiting for a cab

Not so. There is at least one time that I can remember and it is from "The Naked Time". They just took crazy Sulu from the bridge and twenty or so seconds later Kirk attempts to take the turbolift and there is none waiting for him. He has Uhura to "clear that tube" and finally after a little more time goes by the turbolift door opens.