TOS Enterprise WIP

[TIN_MAN]

That looks great! keep up the good work.

P.S. IIRC there was a reference in TAS to "transporter # 2" so there were at least two Xprtrs on the ship.

[Captain Robert April]

I'm pretty sure there's a TAS reference to "Transporter Room 4" as well.

As for the impulse engines, as intriguing as that layout is, that's a helluva lot of room to be taking up. Especially since it seems to be only to account for piece of a set that wasn't necessarily meant to be taken entirely literally.

[blssdwlf]

Thanks guys

@USS Mariner - yep, that's where I looked to get better views of it.

@Mytran - I wonder if that Briefing Lounge would still exist in-universe after the two pilots or did it get replaced by the conference room layout...

@Captain Robert April - Maybe alotta room, but I figure they'll get it back in TMP with the redesigned giant recreation complex

[Gagarin]

Indeed, tis a lot of room for the impulse engines.

I like the general arrangement, very creative. Not just a line with a bunch of smaller lines or some bubbles with a funnel. Great job on it, it's just huge for my sensabilities.

They got a lot of mileage out of those A-frame/Butress parts, didn't they?

I think a more interesting or creative possibility would to take that column structure and put it somewhere else - which several of those in the same room. The choreography of that scene would have been much cooler if that was the case. Think cooling systems or power converters? Or huge plasma injectors?

Just another avenue you could take with the poetic license of deck plans =).

Re: transporters - I rather liked FJ's setup of having several, and then having some cargo transporters and some evac transporters. Because our heroes always knew which way to go and which 'transporter room', I fankwank to say that only 1 main transporter was kept online at any given time while the other 2 or 3 were powered down, undergoing overhaul, or were being calibrated again to come online. I see it as one of those technologies that only has a certain number of 'cyles' before you have to do teardowns to see what's broken. And you'd want to limit the number of cyles each unit had - so you'd rotate - so all would be fairly ready if they had to be put to use at the same time (you wouldn't burn through 1 transporter and then go to the next, you'd want them to evenly wear like car tires).

So every duty shift knows what transporter would be designated as 'active'.

[blssdwlf]

Regarding knowing which engine room or transporter to go to... I thought this was a funny bit of dialogue from SG-1

Jonas Quinn: Hey, Major? How do I know what color to wear?
Carter: We call each other every morning.

[erifah]

I can't help thinking of Galaxy Quest, where those cool aliens made a fully functional and completely operational starship, based on what they saw on a cheesy TV show and thought was real...

[blssdwlf]

erifah wrote:

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I can't help thinking of Galaxy Quest, where those cool aliens made a fully functional and completely operational starship, based on what they saw on a cheesy TV show and thought was real...

Albertese coined it in an earlier post:

"What would the Thermians do?"

[Mytran]

Captain Robert April wrote:

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As for the impulse engines, as intriguing as that layout is, that's a helluva lot of room to be taking up.

Only by TNG standards. Compare to how much living space the Apollo rockets had compared to their engines (not fuel, just engines). And these puppies have to push the ship to near lightspeed!

Regarding Transport Rooms:
For years I stuck doggedly to the opinion that there was only one Transporter Room on the original Enterprise. After all, Kirk only ever said The Transporter Room and everyone knew where to go.
However, after scrutinising nearly all the episodes in greater detail, the only sensible way to account for the differrent appearances is that there are at least two different Transporter Rooms in the series (and perhaps another one in WNMHGB, due to the different corridor).

Gagarin wrote:

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Because our heroes always knew which way to go and which 'transporter room', I fankwank to say that only 1 main transporter was kept online at any given time while the other 2 or 3 were powered down, undergoing overhaul, or were being calibrated again to come online. I see it as one of those technologies that only has a certain number of 'cyles' before you have to do teardowns to see what's broken. And you'd want to limit the number of cyles each unit had - so you'd rotate - so all would be fairly ready if they had to be put to use at the same time (you wouldn't burn through 1 transporter and then go to the next, you'd want them to evenly wear like car tires).

So every duty shift knows what transporter would be designated as 'active'.

That's pretty similar to my own solution on the matter. After all, there's a tremendous amount of energy being cycled through those Transporter "circuits", why wouldn't they need regular repairs and replacements?

However, I think that the time it would take for an overhaul is pretty much the same as the lifspan of an active Transporter Room; this restricts ship operations to having one on the go at any given time, which explains why there are so many story situations which depend on there only being one Transporter.

[BK613]

Thinking back to my Navy days, on one side of our main engineering space, we had the ship's three generators and on the other side, the condensers for the ship's boilers (plus the desalination plant and the main seawater pump.) In the mddle, the propulsion turbine. IOW, an asymmetrical arrangement.

I say all this to suggest that, instead of a mirror engine room that we never saw, that the space is filled with other engineering equipment and maybe that will help tie in the strange corridor.

[blssdwlf]

@Mytran - That makes sense on the transporter rooms. The ship probably only has one transporter circuit that is shared between the multiple transporter rooms so they might do something like the one that is active has priority. The circuit seems to support de-materializing more than 6 people at a time ("Day of the Dove", maybe even other eps) but perhaps the safety limit is to materialize only 6 at a time?

@BK613 - I like the idea of equipment not necessarily mirrored but for now I'm going to mirror the engine room itself for placement just to see how far I can take it

Right now, I'm working on the idea that the Engine Rooms seen in "The Naked Time" and "The Ultimate Computer" are in the primary hull while all the other rooms more than likely are from the Engineering hull.

[erifah]

blssdwlf wrote:

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Albertese coined it in an earlier post:

"What would the Thermians do?"

I wonder if the Thermians had a web forum like this to hash out the details for the NSEA Protector?

[Mytran]

BK613's thoughts on an asymmetrical arrangement is something similar to what I initially had in mind, although it's good to know that it exists in real life too. I'm keen on getting some real-life parallels into my Enterprise. When I first drew up the twin Engine Room plan my primary goal was to reconcile the Tubes Section, since they are off centre from the circular corridor. Duplicating them seemed a viable solution, and I thought that the secondary Engine Room I'd created (aside from monitoring the Tubes) could be something to do with engineering support (fabrication, computers etc).
But it has to be said, I do like blssdwlf's double setup!

blssdwlf - Regarding the Transport "circuit", I think the limitation on how many people to reconstruct is not a safety one, it's purely practical; there's only 6 pads!

[Shaw]

Mytran wrote:

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Only by TNG standards...

Actually, by TOS standards.

The propulsion technology seen in TOS didn't require much space... either in the Enterprise or it's shuttlecraft. It is a shortcoming of later Trek that they didn't significantly advance over TOS technology (or in the case of the TOS movies, took a step backwards).

People often recon TOS to have larger equipment than the show's creators had intended because of the later Trek series and movies. I think there was more there than FJ had in his plans... but not by much.



blssdwlf, you have some interesting ideas and thank you for sharing them with us. But I do have one question... how does someone get from the primary hull to the secondary hull with your impulse engine configuration (and not get fried while doing so when the impulse engines are in operation)?

Best of luck with your project! I love following all attempts at figuring out the layout of the TOS Enterprise.

[Mytran]

Good point about the shuttle, that is one compact engine! Of course, it was not fullfilling quite the same role as the Enterprises' impulse engines, which had to operate continuously and over far longer periods of time (2 months, in TPS). It may well be that the E's setup had extra components and backup facilities that were simply deemed not neccessary to the standard operating practises of a shuttle.

Franz Joseph (as Shaw pointed out) doesn't allocate a lot of space in his cutaway for impulse engines. But what clues are on the outside?

There's the "spine" (which I coloured blue for clarity), a red outline leading to the base of the "teardrop" and shortly after that a bright yellow rectangle, outlined in red. What to make of all these?

The spine could be an anchoring point for the saucer (I think it actually was on the model). Or it could be a reinforcing strut for the impulse engines. Or perhaps it's some sort of power transfer conduit. The long red outline carries on in this direction and looks even more conduit-like. Finally, the bright yellow rectangle screams "danger!" and so could be an engineering hatch as well.
Factor in the L-shaped hatches and that's a fair amount of engineering space overall. Is it all impulse engines? Who knows!

[Shaw]

Mytran wrote:

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Who knows!

You mean like Jefferies?

I do see the appeal of the Throwing Spaghetti Against the Wall thought process... but it seems a little messy to me. I constantly see people get attached to pet theories and watch them overlook the obvious trying to make them work.

I'm not going to go into anything at length here (I generally avoid posting in other people's threads on the TOS Enterprise because it is best for them to figure things out on their own), but I'll leave you guys with this quote...

"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts."
- Sherlock Holmes, A Scandal in Bohemia

Again, blssdwlf, best of luck on this endeavor.