http://movies.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/twokhd/twokhd0261.jpg That screencap would seem to indicate that the horizontal shaft does in fact connect to the nacelles.
Absolutely, I don't think anyone would try and and argue otherwise. The reactor is almost certainly down at the bottom of the vertical shaft, and the shafts themselves are merely conduits to transfer the energy/fuel to different parts of the ship. Which is why it looks so darn weird when the conduit is bisected by a mere atmospheric containment door, which still (somehow) allows the warp engines to function!
The fun thing about the connecting-to-nacelles imagery is that it's forced perspective - and certain shooting angles reveal it to be that, ruining the illusion. Which means we could actually treat it as not being an illusion at all, but rather as the conduit "really" tapering and being exactly as short as the set element was. That way, Main Engineering could be located quite a bit farther aft than Andy Probert originally imagined - and the long corridor ahead of it would now fit inside the ship! ....Especially as that corridor, too, is made longer by an illusion that fails to work at certain camera angles, and thus could also be interpreted as "being as short as it actually is". Timo Saloniemi
Even if that corridor were as short as the one on the set (and the FP picture is some Engineer indulging in his hobby of wall painting) then the corridor STILL wouldn't fit into the Enterprise as per the "official" location - it's just way too tight against the deflector housing.
It is a close call. The vertical shaft can be moved aft as far as the (unseen) front wall of the cargo hold without violating the not-forced-perspective dimensions of the horizontal shaft or protruding into outer space, as long as we don't expect it to be vertical for deck upon deck above Main Engineering level... Perhaps Starfleet fights claustrophobia with interior-extending paintings? Timo Saloniemi
Or the inside is semi-TARDIS level technology and larger on the inside. They did encounter a temporal ship of some kind in Enterprise that was bigger on the inside, thus Starfleet does have an idea that it is (and will be) possible.
Well, that's why I said "official", since the green vertical strip on the dorsal is supposed to match up with the vertical engine conduit inside. Personally, I have no problem putting the engine room anywhere where it will actually fit!
Yeah. I'm sort of opposed to the existence of a "vertical engine conduit" in principle. Unless Kirk's warp drive is radically different from those of the later ships shaped like that, I'd prefer to see the upper end just sort of sneak its way to whatever machinery is in need of that power, rather than go ramrod-straight for the sake of being ramrod-straight. Why is that part of the ship marked in green when the "corresponding" horizontal part isn't? If it's a "belt of armor", the horizontal part of the conduitry would benefit from one, too, seeing how well Khan's phasers cut into the engineering hull. I'd prefer some other function for the color, and perhaps for the whole feature. An excellent place to run a turbolift between the hulls, say! And while there's no need to mark that out in green, either, it could be argued that in the narrow neck, the shaft is flanked by crew-inaccessible spaces full of machinery that might benefit from having special skin around it. Possibly not armor, but instead something sensor-transparent? Or heat-dissipating? Timo Saloniemi
Y'know. I never gave a second thought to it. It just seemed like the normal routine of a starship going into battle.
Didn't read all posts, so I apologize if I echo anyone else's ideas/notions. I would also imagine that even though Kirk and company stole the Enterprise for pretty much an outlaw endeavor, the ship's flight recorder can at least show that Kirk adhered to Starfleet regulations when the unexpected call to battle came. The Klingons were committing an act of war. Kirk might have been a renegade, but he still handled battle (and a potential prelude to interstellar war) by the book. (Think back on "Court Martial" where regulations required that a captain calls Red Alert before jettisoning the observation pod during an emegency in an unstable space phenomenon.). Personal opinion only.