TOS Enterprise vs. Refit/A...scale?

[Mytran]

On the old Enterprise, corridors were wide enough for crew members to lounge around, exchange gossip and other activities normally at home in a Rec Room.

The new administration wanted to put a stop to all that nonsense, and so provided an entire Recreation DECK, while at the same time made the refit corridors too small to comfortably hang out in.

 

[Ronald Held]

Should this thread be moved to the Tech board?

 

[Tribble puncher]

The question is - why would they bother? The existing corridor setup worked fine for 25 years so presumably there's already sufficient storage space on board, without making the corridors harder to traverse.
If that space were reduced however (like by scaling down the size of the vessel) then suddenly some additional cavities would be required, so it becomes worth the bother of installing all those K-beams and aluminium panels :-)

My Guess is all that lost corridor space went to Bigger/More Crew Quarters, Bigger Labs, Maybe more Rec. Facilities. (The Refit even had a miniature Park Inside!) I would Gather that Many Pieces of Equipment/Components would be smaller in the refit than the original due to Improved Tech and whatnot. That's my guess.

 

[Timo]

(The Refit even had a miniature Park Inside!)

The original TOS ship had a miniature park, shown in "Is There in Truth No Beauty?". We never saw a part aboard the refitted ship...

Sure, there were those blue-glowing windows at the lower flanks of the secondary hull that were supposed to be for an arboretum. But why would an arboretum glow blue? Or have windows, which would deprive the plants inside from the stable environmental conditions they require? Also, that location is in the engineering hull, close to the most likely location of the (incidentally blue-glowing!) warp core.

Also, the original ship already had lots of recreational facilities, including Rec Rooms numbering up to RR 6, with RR3 spanning decks from 3 to 5! Perhaps the refit did away with most of such facilities because the newer, faster ship would spend less time at transit or patrol? Or because all that refitting of important new mission gear simply did not leave room for crew amenities?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Tribble puncher]

The original TOS ship had a miniature park, shown in "Is There in Truth No Beauty?". We never saw a part aboard the refitted ship...

Sure, there were those blue-glowing windows at the lower flanks of the secondary hull that were supposed to be for an arboretum. But why would an arboretum glow blue? Or have windows, which would deprive the plants inside from the stable environmental conditions they require? Also, that location is in the engineering hull, close to the most likely location of the (incidentally blue-glowing!) warp core.

Also, the original ship already had lots of recreational facilities, including Rec Rooms numbering up to RR 6, with RR3 spanning decks from 3 to 5! Perhaps the refit did away with most of such facilities because the newer, faster ship would spend less time at transit or patrol? Or because all that refitting of important new mission gear simply did not leave room for crew amenities?

Timo Saloniemi

I wasn't aware the original e had a park on board that was shown. You learn new things all the time I guess....

https://www.bing.com/images/search?...&thid=OIP.M0e90fe81724b85a288a70a369aeef5efo0

Link is to a drawing done by Probert that shows that the windows are for the "botanical section". Maybe the windows glow blue because they are treated with some sort of filter that keeps all the bad stuff out?

 

[F. King Daniel]

If you watch TMP or WoK in HD, you can make out trees in those big windows, before the Enterprise jumps to warp.

 

[Mytran]

Well, tree-like shapes, anyway

 

[Mudd]

The TMP ship had a botanical park where those blue windows were, yes.

 

[Mytran]

No doubt that Probert intended there to be one, agreed.
However, his intentions did get somewhat distorted once Hal Michaelson took over and added all those ginormous extra set bits to give the ship that "big screen" feel. Taking the infamous long corridor issue engineering into account, those blue windows sit more or less exactly where the bottom of the vertical warp shaft would end up. Funny place to put some trees...

 

[Timo]

It's a forgotten injustice nowadays that Phylosians were once employed almost exclusively at flux capacitor maintenance, due to their resilience to Lambda radiation. Today, there are several Phylosian Admirals in Starfleet, but back then, frankly racist concerns resulted in a glass ceiling for the species. And glass walls.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Albertese]

It's a forgotten injustice nowadays that Phylosians were once employed almost exclusively at flux capacitor maintenance, due to their resilience to Lambda radiation. Today, there are several Phylosian Admirals in Starfleet, but back then, frankly racist concerns resulted in a glass ceiling for the species. And glass walls.

Timo Saloniemi

HA!

 

[Wingsley]

I don't know if this means anything, but the old Star Trek: The Motion Picture Official Blueprints from 1980 seemed to indicate not only that the then-newly-refit Enterprise was 305 meters long, but that she had a standard personnel compliment set at 500. If we accept that the TOS-era Constitution-class starships, such as the original Enterprise, had a standard crew of at/near 430 (or, at least, some of them probably did) this would suggest that the standard crew capacity of this new(er) version of the Constitution-class design had been substantially increased. This, in turn, would suggest more personnel would be stationed aboard these starships for both standard operations and upkeep duties, as well as for mission-specific assignments. This would be a very logical development for the TOS/TMP Federation.

 

[Mytran]

A larger crew of 500 would certainly explain why they needed to cram extra storage into the corridors!

However, in ST6:TUC Valeris mentions that they have a crew of 300 - we also see triple bunks for some of the crew. This would suggest that non-officers get a fairly minimal amount of personal space - although really, we never saw "ordinary" crew quarters on the TOS-E, so we have no base point for changes.

 

[Wingsley]

Can anyone pull up Valeris' exact quote? I do not remember this.

 

[MarsWeeps]

A larger crew of 500 would certainly explain why they needed to cram extra storage into the corridors!

However, in ST6:TUC Valeris mentions that they have a crew of 300.

Can anyone pull up Valeris' exact quote? I do not remember this.

[Enterprise-A galley]
SPOCK: Any progress?
VALERIS: None. We have got a crew of three hundred turning their own quarters inside out, but the killers may still be among them. Surely they have disposed of these boots by now. Would it not have been logical to have left them on Gorkon's ship?

EDITED TO ADD:
Even though Valeris said they have a crew of 300, I'm pretty sure it was just for that "diplomatic" mission and not a normal crew complement.

 

[Maurice]

Can anyone pull up Valeris' exact quote? I do not remember this.

Google Star Trek 6 script

 

[Avro Arrow]

I don't know if this means anything, but the old Star Trek: The Motion Picture Official Blueprints from 1980 seemed to indicate not only that the then-newly-refit Enterprise was 305 meters long, but that she had a standard personnel compliment set at 500.

There's computer chatter in TMP that runs down the crew status, and if you add up the numbers, it comes out to right around 430. I think the exact number may have been 431, but it's been a while since I've heard it.

Not sure if that survived to the DE, but it was in the original version.

 

[Albertese]

[Enterprise-A galley]
SPOCK: Any progress?
VALERIS: None. We have got a crew of three hundred turning their own quarters inside out, but the killers may still be among them. Surely they have disposed of these boots by now. Would it not have been logical to have left them on Gorkon's ship?

EDITED TO ADD:
Even though Valeris said they have a crew of 300, I'm pretty sure it was just for that "diplomatic" mission and not a normal crew complement.

You could interpret this either as a crew of 300, all of which are turning their quarters inside out, or alternately, that the ship has a larger crew, 300 of which are not on duty and instead have been ordered to toss their quarters. The other 150 who are then on duty will search when their shift is over in an hour or two.

Which would make a crew of 450, which is closer to what we've come to expect.

That said, there's no reason not to expect the ship only needed 300 people for their particular one-off mission.

--Alex

 

[Wingsley]

If a starship is designed and configured for a standard crew of 450 to 500, then a mission-spec crew of 300, give or take, would hardly be a skeleton crew.

 

[lomitus]

OMG...I can't believe this thread ended up taking on such a life of it's own! LOL! I hadn't even checked back after that first response...

For the record, my interest was simply regarding how big to make the space doors on my 3D space dock model for my little animation project...really didn't mean to start such a huge debate on this, LOL! In short, I was using the movies Search for Spock, The Voyage Home and Undiscovered country for my visual references, so I wanted to make sure that the refit/1701-A wasn't significantly taller or wider than the original...which is what seems to be the case.