When I first heard the word "phaser," I thought it was spelled "fazer" because the weapon had a stun setting -- it could be set to just "faze" a person rather than kill them. That was in spite of the fact that "faze" is always used negatively (as in "it didn't even faze him"). So did I. It seemed a logical place to put them. That would have made the Enterprise a really tiny ship! That's because they're not hardcore Trekkies!
My first big error was the name of the show in the TAS era, which, before I could read, I thought was "Star Track." So did everybody my age, though. Later, I thought photon torpedoes were some kind of projected blobs of exploding energy with no material "body." When I saw TWOK I didn't realize the things they were loading onto that track were supposed to be the photon torpedoes.
This doesn't appear so. The turbolift was always to the left side of the captain's chair. It's the same here. It's the other way around. The turbolift shaft cap has always been a cylindrical structure directly behind the bridge module, not to the side of it (it's actually like that for NX-01 Enterprise). Then you have to educate them that what they've believed was wrong.
That the production crew decided the elevator doors looked better one wedge segment to port, and rearranged the set to accommodate better camera angles, has no bearing on the original intent of the design, and basic human design logic. It's easy enough to imagine the external cylinder as the vertical shaft, but that the car jogs forward and to port to meet the doors, while an auxiliary car is stationed to starboard for those "no waiting for the elevator" moments. the 36° offset is a figment of Franz Joseph's rationalizations for the 1975 technical manual, not evidenced anywhere in the actual show.
Not being an actual window like those aboard oceangoing vessels, the main viewscreen can be placed anywhere on the bridge like any monitor. In the end, the viewscreen is really just a big monitor and will show images from various angles around the ship. Not sure what you mean by this. But it does fit the actual show and the only reason to assume otherwise is to fit a notion that the viewscreen is like a glass window and absolutely has to be aligned along the ship's centerline.
On screen (canon) evidence would support the idea that the cylinder behind the bridge dome is NOT the tubolift. http://tos.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/0x00/thecage011.jpg
Turbolift car comes up thru the shaft, shifts forward and to port to the doors. When a person uses it, the car shifts back to the vertical shaft and drops, and the standby car immediately over to take its place at the bridge doors. This is Ziz's concept from many years ago, which made a light bulb go off over my head. It makes a ton more sense than the bridge being the only control center on any vehicle in history that doesn't face front.
The problem with that is that it doesn't fit into a 947-foot USS Enterprise. And of course, with the viewscreen not being a window (in the prime reality, at least), there's no need for it to face forward. Click!
Actually, if you look closely at that image you'll see the viewscreen isn't facing the ship's centerline there either. That's an interesting idea. But as far as it making "more sense" for the control center to face front, that only really applies to a vehicle that needs an actual front-facing window for manual flight. The main viewscreen truthfully eliminates this need and thus can be placed anywhere on a bridge. Agreed. There is that to consider...
Which is, of course, because the roto-matte composite shot from "The Cage" couldn't be precisely aligned due to the technical limitations of optical FX at the time. Agreed.
The point is that it's never been shown to be precisely aligned with the ship's centerline, so it's not a canon issue.
Me, too. When my friends and I "played Star Trek," we always called the shuttle the Galileo VII. We hadn't quite digested that Galileo II was the name of the shuttle in The Way to Eden.
The FJ picture I posted was used as a screengraphic in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, making it kinda maybe sorta canon and giving me the last word!
Back on topic, as a very young kid I thought the blue deflector on the classic movie Enterprise was the "window" at the front of the bridge, and they were just too damn lazy to make it the same shape on the set as it was on the model.
They did use a yellow-green make up for Spock and other Vulcans created by make up man Fred Phillips call LN-1
When I was a little kid, I used to think the TNG crew used to travel in two ships. A big Enterprise (the actual D) and a littler Enterprise. I don't know if I was getting the Enterprise(s) confused with a saucer separation episode or one where the ship was next to an Oberth or Miranda. But yup. Yay, childhood imagination.
I was a 70's kid who watched Trek on UHF channels, and since I lived on the edge of the country, there was usually t.v. snow when watching so it was hard to make out anything in great detail. Sometimes the show would fade in and out...due to that, when I was really young (3-5) I thought the main sensor dish was a propeller. I also thought the Romulan Commander was Spock's father when I was that age, I don't even think I had seen "Journey To Babel" either. I think it really had more to do with the fact that he seemed older and he had pointed ears. Although at that age, it's possible I had seen it and just didn't consciously recall it. I didn't think the whole saucer was the bridge, I think I thought the dome under the bridge was the saucer tho.