I had considered an irising diaphragm but didn't like how it looked in the closed position so opted with the cap instead. That's what the rails are for!
I'll sing one of my favorite songs again: It would be nearly impossible to build an 11' ship or whatever scale the shuttle deck was built at and not see all the seams and moving parts for these doors. But a ~950' ship (built in the 23 century no less?) I would wager that a lot of these things that are considered "magic" wouldn't be all that hard. Or no harder than building the ship and getting it to other star systems. All of those details might all be clearly visible when you are standing next to the doors. But move a few dozen or more feet away AND put it on a 1960's TV screen? Invisible!
You do know that technical obsession and an unhealthy amount of 3D palaver does not compute with "magic"
The TOS-E hangar doors are more like this dirigible hangar, which is now a resort: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Islands_Resort Check out this exterior photo in its high resolution version. You can see that the doors are concentric plates that slide past each other and stack as they open. The center doors have the tightest curve and the outer ones the largest... https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brand_Cargolifter_Halle.jpg#mw-jump-to-license
^^ And here is a nice view of that hangar with one set of doors open and one set closed, Really emphasizes just how hard it can be at distance to tell that they overlap. https://www.cidect.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/cargolifter01.jpg (aside: that thing is huuuuge!)
I think there's a difference between things that are shown as being far removed from real-world technology, and thus being magical, like transporters and holograms, and things that seem to operate in more realistic ways, like sliding doors and turbolifts. I don't think that something like the shuttlebay doors were ever meant to be confoundingly advanced technology. They were supposed to be fairly straight-forward in their apparent function.
Very true. And I have built hangar doors that can function knowing just those examples (in addition to the Franz Joseph plans as well as the example of the Motion Picture. But none of them QUITE look like the Enterprise. You can either decide that the model is awfully close and make tweaks or you can start making some other adjustments. It's nowhere near the gymnastics that have to happen to make other parts of the ship work. But they're not nothing.
Thanks @MGagen! These doors definitely look the closest to what the interior doors look like (with the overlap being on the outside for the Enterprise. I found some more nice high res images here in case others are interested: https://www.atlasofplaces.com/architecture/cargolifter/ You can tell if you look at the tracks at the base of the doors you can see the overlap although the ribbed? edges of the door hide the overlap if viewed from the side or head-on. It is pretty huuuuuge! You could fit a 950' Enterprise in there (maybe on it's back)...
Ah! There's the hangar deck that can "house a fleet of airliners" as suggested in "The Making of Star Trek"! Funny how several of those shots almost match the angle used in the original series!
Engineering-wise, does this hangar doors concept work equally well if the middle two doors are on the outside (suggested on the Datin Hangar Model) versus on the inside as with the cargo lifter, or does something not fit?
Mostly referring to when it was closed but yes you can tell. Question is, could you really tell if you made a model where the doors were the same physical size as the ones on the 11-footer? (Still hard to wrap my head around the size.)
It can work equally well with the setup on outside tracks (like the filmed Datin model) and on inside tracks as seen in the Cargo Lifter as the doors would be sized and shaped to work in such a way. *I use this same overlap sliding on the nacelle dome to open/close internal covers that expose the lighting... Yes, I can tell the difference as the camera gets close enough in some of the low res screenshots to see that they do not overlap in the exterior shots...
No, I mean reducing those big ass doors on the airship hangar to the size of the 11-footer's doors. You would be talking doors thin as a piece of notebook paper overlapping. IOW, I'm trying to find an out to crazy geometric door opening shenanigans...
LOL I see. Well if the doors were thin as notepaper then it would probably be nearly impossible to tell if they overlap. But I do plan to have some thickness to the doors so...
I thought BK613 meant that the doors *in the model* would be paper-thin (to represent 600mm-1m real-world thickness), making any overlap difficult to see. dJE