"Late 20th century"?? More like mid-century, if not early. Pink was a "girl's color" waaaay back when I was a kid, which was well before the late 20th century.
How was USS Grissom destroyed so easily?
- Thread starter PhaserLightShow
- Start date
I've wondered this myself. If you take off the "pod", you get something not unlike the tug from Franz Joseph's book. The support pylons are just connectors to the bottom hull, with room for a couple of lifts (barely), Jeffries Tubes and power connectors. The warp core is all contained aft of the tiny saucer in that engine deck. The ship could easily be a very old one, albeit refitted to modern decor - suggested by the three digit registry number.
Also, the ship may have evolved in the following century, acquiring a more potent warp drive that no longer fit aboard the ship proper - hence the rather explicit warp core in the ventral pod in "Hero Worship".
OTOH, having a warp core down there would nicely explain the ST3:TSfS belly shot that blows up the entire ship. And if the design really is old, the early engineers may have had a big incentive for putting the newfangled antimatter reactor in a separate pod, along with other crew-hostile stuff such as those sensors that emit all sorts of exotic radiation!
Timo Saloniemi
OTOH, having a warp core down there would nicely explain the ST3:TSfS belly shot that blows up the entire ship. And if the design really is old, the early engineers may have had a big incentive for putting the newfangled antimatter reactor in a separate pod, along with other crew-hostile stuff such as those sensors that emit all sorts of exotic radiation!
Timo Saloniemi
Can of worms? I do not see any cans or worms.That said, I don't necessarily think that 23rd century registry numbers are strictly sequential, so the ship needn't be that old.
But that's another can of worms...
@PhaserLightShow
I was thinking the three digit registry was more an indicator that it was part of that semi civilian service. Starfleets NOAA type operation probably had a designated registry block assigned to them that would be well away from the combat vessels. As older ships were repurposed into more civil utility and research roles that might have their numbers changed to reflect that.
Or the thin vertical thing at the bottom of the pylons. LaForge points at that very thing when saying "the core", too.
Of course, he spoke of the computer core in the preceding sentence, and no doubt the writer intended "the core" to be the same thing. But Burton gestured appropriately towards the saucer when mentioning the computer, so I guess all's well that ends well.
Other remarkable things: that deck structure works well for the supposed 120m size for the ship, but doesn't match the twice-as-many-decks impression we get from the actual model. Then again, the "decks" visible through that hull damage on the model probably aren't: some of the structures are part of the no-proper-standing-room rim region of the saucer, and may well be shelves for equipment instead. In any case, the red areas here don't match the much heavier damage on the model, but do match the damage from the dialogue (corpses indicated in the red areas, not in the non-red ones, for starters).
Perhaps LaForge's diagram here isn't showing damage, but instead the areas where corpses were found? The engineer does speak of the "shearing planes" of the damage and gestures appropriately, but on the image of a starship that is particularly intact at those very planes. Which in turn roughly match the damage to the model.
Timo Saloniemi
Of course, he spoke of the computer core in the preceding sentence, and no doubt the writer intended "the core" to be the same thing. But Burton gestured appropriately towards the saucer when mentioning the computer, so I guess all's well that ends well.
Other remarkable things: that deck structure works well for the supposed 120m size for the ship, but doesn't match the twice-as-many-decks impression we get from the actual model. Then again, the "decks" visible through that hull damage on the model probably aren't: some of the structures are part of the no-proper-standing-room rim region of the saucer, and may well be shelves for equipment instead. In any case, the red areas here don't match the much heavier damage on the model, but do match the damage from the dialogue (corpses indicated in the red areas, not in the non-red ones, for starters).
Perhaps LaForge's diagram here isn't showing damage, but instead the areas where corpses were found? The engineer does speak of the "shearing planes" of the damage and gestures appropriately, but on the image of a starship that is particularly intact at those very planes. Which in turn roughly match the damage to the model.
Timo Saloniemi
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The damaged model with four decks on the saucer doesn't make sense, as the ship would have to be about 300 metres for that and that and absolutely nothing else on the ever show supports such a size. Then again, the windows wont work on 120-metre ship. Ex-Astris-Scientia has a good article on the subject. Conclusion on that is that 150 metres would be a good compromise and solve most issues. I agree with that.
Most of that type confusion stems from the horrible scaling issues they created when they ported some of the smaller ship models from the TOS movies to use in TNG. The Grissom doubled in size when it jumped to the small screen. The Klingon BoP mysteriously became a huge battlecruiser. even the poor Miranda and Excelsior's suffered some scaling issues. Granted this is understandable. They were telling a visual story using the models at hand, not creating a technical manual.
The Oberth was screwed from the very start - there are no scale-establishing features other than those window rows, and those suggest a ship at least a thousand meters long!
We probably ought to disregard the "windows" altogether: not only do their placements create scale issues, their teeny weeny size implies a massive starship. Which of course is possible in ST3, but nowhere else. Better just consider those pinpricks of light "sensors" or whatnot. It's not as if we'd ever see any windows from the inside, after all.
(We do see an opening clearly establishing a vertical wall on the bridge bordering on empty space, though, in "The Naked Now". This calls for a ship dozens of kilometers long if we're to pretend we just missed the bit of verticality at the stem of the shallow dome.)
Timo Saloniemi
We probably ought to disregard the "windows" altogether: not only do their placements create scale issues, their teeny weeny size implies a massive starship. Which of course is possible in ST3, but nowhere else. Better just consider those pinpricks of light "sensors" or whatnot. It's not as if we'd ever see any windows from the inside, after all.
(We do see an opening clearly establishing a vertical wall on the bridge bordering on empty space, though, in "The Naked Now". This calls for a ship dozens of kilometers long if we're to pretend we just missed the bit of verticality at the stem of the shallow dome.)
Timo Saloniemi
Other concepts that changed from script or intent to filmed...
Saavik was supposed to be one of the Starfleet conspirators in Star Trek VI.
The Kzinti ship or uniforms were NOT supposed to be pink in TAS.
So, which trumps which in these cases? What we saw onscreen or what the writers intended? Was Saavik really the traitor? Were the Kzinit ships not pink?
Saavik was supposed to be one of the Starfleet conspirators in Star Trek VI.
The Kzinti ship or uniforms were NOT supposed to be pink in TAS.
So, which trumps which in these cases? What we saw onscreen or what the writers intended? Was Saavik really the traitor? Were the Kzinit ships not pink?
1. Onscreen trumps all.
2. Saavik was not the traitor, Valeris was.
3. The Kzinti ships were, unfortunately, pink.
I have no supporting evidence of this, but I still suspect that Grissom got that registry because it was supposed to be a Scout, so the model makers gave it a number just a bit higher than than the highest Scout registry in FJ's Tech Manual (625, IIRC).
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