I was going over the original Whitefire deck plans of the Enterprise D, checking out areas never seen on film and looking over the entire ship. I noticed there is a spot on starboard side with what's labled a 0-G Vertical Transporter. Does anybody know what this is or have blueprints/diagrams of what it might look like?
...And why it would be needed, when gravity inside a starship can be manipulated at will anyway? We have room-by-room gravity anomalies in ENT already, then controlled manipulation in DS9 "Melora", and handheld local-effect antigravs in TOS plus warnings about variable gravity in TNG. Surely whatever gets beamed aboard could arrive in a gravity field and orientation of its choosing? Timo Saloniemi
0-G vertical transporter sounds like a drop shaft. basically an open vertical tunnel, probably with handholds, that you can hop into and float up or down to another deck.
Those might well be a feature of Trek ships, even though we for obvious reasons never saw one in action. Say, the suspiciously flimsy three-sided ladders joining the decks of the TOS ship might be mere handholds for pulling oneself up or down in zero gee. And while zero gee inside Archer's ship is always an anomaly, the exterior does have those big hatches for vertical cargo shafts on both sides of the saucer. Why this would be called "transporter" is a question perhaps worth asking, although the word ITRW is generic enough... Timo Saloniemi
I think my first exposure to the concept as a kid was through the French animation "Il était une fois... l'Espace" - the French always were hot on technocracy and anime-style machine worship. A lot of that Albert Barillé stuff has seeped through to newer pieces like Wall-E, too. Although the corridors of that ship for some reason were full gee, just with hovering robots. When did live action scifi go null-gee big time? After "2001", Disney's "Black Hole" had some, but did we really have to wait until "2010" till Hollywood again dared toy with indoors freefall? Timo Saloniemi
Are there people up in the nacelles? I could swear I remember people being up in the nacelles in that episode where Troi found that deaf lady in the wall. I guess I always assumed the pylons holding up the nacelles on the D were not full of rooms just because there's no windows, so do you just start your shift hurling yourself up a very long and curved zero gravity tunnel to get to your job? Also it feels like every night would be "Oh hi it's nice to meet you, where are you stationed?" "I work in the left nacelle" *wonk wonk*
Whether it's safe to be in those rooms when the ship is at warp is currently unclear. But the engine wasn't exactly shut down cold in "Eye of the Beholder" where we saw such a room. As for no windows in the pylons, well, Kirk's ship does have some! Timo Saloniemi
There are no window withon the pylons of the Enterprise-D. There is only the turbolifts inside each side, no other rooms. As far as NCC 1701-A, there would appear to be 3 small 'windows' on the pylons. However, upon further research of the deck plans of the ship, there are no rooms inside thw pylons. They are filled with the warp plasma transfer conduits and a single emergency maintenance shaft that runs up the pylon to the Nacelles. Perhaps the windows are simply an 'anti-claustrophobia' ports so the engineer has something to look out of while ascending the tall narrow spaces. But no rooms in the pylons of any Star Fleet ship
And conversely, does a window have to be marked by a rectangle? A big deal was made in "Mark of Gideon" about shutters. Perhaps much of the surface of a starship is in fact smoothly and almost seamlessly shuttered transparencies, explaining e.g. the inconsistencies in Excelsior class porthole placement? Timo Saloniemi
I'd go a step further to say that most of the rectangles and circles we see are NOT windows at all. Given that the windows we see in COK don't match the ones on the exterior, along with the fact that Kirk has to open up the shutters in MOG are strong indicators that all windows on the Enterprise stay shuttered when not in use and that viewing stations are themselves a rarity on board. A ship with windows in every room that has an outer wall simply wouldn't have these issues and Kirk would not need to go to these lengths
We don't know that and it's unlikely there's nothing in there, the horizonzal part of the pylons is a full deck in height, there's no reason not to use that space, as soon as they go upwards rooms would become smaller but it would make semse if they still allowed access to the plasma conduits or if they put a few rooms there for the people in the nacelles, like a bathroom or a small break room to eat something.
Of course, it may be that spaces that back in ENT were eminently personnel-accessible would grow less so as time passes and automation gets better. It is still a bit unlikely that turbolift would be the only way to access a Galaxy nacelle, though - but it is possible that the alternate means of access is much less user-friendly than in Archer's Enterprise, just as the crawlway Jeffries tubes in TNG in general are much more user-hostile than the full-height ENT access corridors. I'm all for extra spaces in the Galaxy pylons, as we fail to see the pair of vertical portholes in the "Eye of the Beholder" set even though it's prominent from the outside. Whether Kirk's pylons had "spaces", or just lots of portholes adjoining a simple shaft because the hull there is really thin (covering an ancient gap in the structure between two strongbacks ), or glowing sensors or vents of some sort... Well, everything is possible. But "odd porthole placement" is a recurring theme in Trek, and some of the most prominent examples come from TOS and now the near-concurrent DSC. Timo Saloniemi
Also you notice in TNG that all visible windows as seen from inside (except in 10-Forward) are all oblong, not squared. Check Ed Whitefire blueprints. There are zero rooms in the pylons or the pylons themselves would have been detailed. The plans only reveal a turbolift that is labed 'Nacelle emergency access turbolift'.
The Ed Whitefire plans are official. Rick Sternbach ended up taking those plans and refit them after FASA let their contract expire and he published them under his name. Ed did get the copyrights, though.
Yeah, official non canon tie in merch. They don't matter for the sake of this discussion, only on screen material is canon everything else is not, the novels are official (i.e. licensed) too, doesn't mean they're canonical.