TOS Enterprise Internals
- Thread starter yotsuya
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I may have suggested that idea (that the refit is a stripped down, sleaker and smaller ship than the original) myself from time to time...
Yes that was you. It is an interesting theory to me, since the 1701-A had a crew of only 300 in Star Trek 6, and I am becoming more connected to the idea that even if the refit made the ship bigger, the second Enterprise was smaller. The camera angles used seem to support this based on how much of the ship is shown in a shot, and some repainting.
Interesting history, and it seems plausible. However, my observation in support of he refit being smaller was not so much about TOS and more about the way your current project relates to other ships like the Excelsior.
In my view, even though the TOS Enterprise is almost certainly 289 meters, it could be a larger and not mean that every of other ship has to be scaled up accordingly. Sometime back, and this may have come from several commenters, I read an older thread that not only suggest the refit was smaller, but also that the Excelsior could be as long as 640 meters, while still keeping the Ambassador and Galaxy their official sizes. It was all about window scaling, which is a difficult frame of reference, but at least keeps the relative ships sizes however big the SEEM to be in the plot.
What I really want to see is an Excelsior scaled to a refit Enterprise so that the Excelsior's DEFLECTOR is the same size as on the refit, and then what the overall length of the Excelsior would be.
In "The Corbomite Maneuver," the phasers fire from what look like windows below the saucer hull. This arguably could make more sense, as them some of what look like windows are actually the openings for phasers. There is even a dark square that could be a photon torpedo tube, or probe launcher.
I personally see them as a mix. The saucer rim windows are not much of an issue for me I figured out how to deal with them. But there are ports on all the models that make no sense as windows do I intent to treat those as science portf things besides human eyes. And I found the ports align very nicely for the official lengths. Even on the Excelsior.
Respectfully, this argument just doesn't make any sense, as it is based on assessing a static bit of data on a fact known to be widely variable over time.
Pike's Enterprise had a crew of 203 at one point in the 2250s. Eleven years later, on Kirk's five year mission, the ship had a crew of 430. The count for early 2270s TMP per background chatter was 500, as I recall, for a ship readying to launch on a new long-term mission.
There's no telling how many people were aboard in TWoK, but one could probably make arguments for large numbers of cadets packed in like sardines, or small overall numbers since only basic operations were necessary for the training cruise. Then, of course, Star Trek III shows a 'crew' of very few.
That's a tremendous difference for the same ship. Even if the "crew of three hundred turning over their own bunks" or words that effect from TUC means the total ship population was three hundred, that need only imply that, just as mission differences seemed to change crew counts for the 1701 over time, the 1701-A . . . seemingly operating from HQ with staff retirement looming rather than being on a long-term exploration mission . . . didn't need a couple of hundred extra folks working in the stellar cartography, exobiology, and other similar departments.
For myself, I hadn't even considered the size of the crew as a factor, since (as you point out) it can vary so much.
However, Enterprise by the time of TMP had lost the wide, tall corridors of TOS to have them replaced by narrow passageways with visible support struts everywhere. Ceilings in TMP are lower all over the place. The Transporter Room is so short of space that there's exposed machinery everywhere, even on the floor.
These changes are all indicative of a ship with less space, not more.
Maybe they installed a brewery which takes up a lot of room.
SOT, but is the 500 for TMP canonical?
I always liked the Mr. Scott's corridor survival shelters and in-wall life support stuff and whatnot, actually, which I took at the time to simply be built over the old corridor walls, along with easier access paneling. So long as your corridors aren't producing traffic jams they don't need to be wide avenues.
Indeed, many concepts can come into play, here. Why was that the standard size when the ship was built? Was it like rail and there was equipment of a certain size they thought had to be able to be carted through? Did they standardize on a size allowing so many people abreast based on having squished all the crew quarters into one area and, like interstates, wanted to build them wide for rush-hour traffic? Why standardize at all, really?
Things like that could be different at different times . . . the equipment becoming smaller over the decades, crew quarter distribution changes, et cetera.
Overall, however, that seems a question of style, rather than a significant argument on total vessel size.
Again, this is more style than substance. Standard ceiling height in America has gone through changes based on various factors. Long ago, high ceilings were desired. Then in the 70s low ceilings were the rage . . . I've been in an office from that era that seems positively cramped by today's standards. In the 80s my school from the 30s was retrofitted with a fairly low panel ceiling. Now we're back high again, sometimes . . . you may have a residence with high structural ceiling or a business with high structural ceiling and then a lower panel ceiling beneath, or a place that deletes the panels and goes back high.
This has largely been a result of various mixtures of air conditioning, power cost, applications of ideas of convection, and style. Applied to starships and life support systems, the end results can land in many directions. Perhaps pre-TOS design was based on less efficient air handling (or less likely to function due to damage), or more conservative estimates of desired power utilization, or simple overestimation of what seemed "cramped" to the species being served.
Or, we could be looking the wrong way, and the issue is the floor. Perhaps a new type of more robust or efficient grav plating was desired, necessitating higher floors but with more than desirable benefits otherwise.
Either way, dropping the ceiling a foot on a starship could represent a positively massive change in volume shipwide, whether the concern is corridor/room air or equipment above/below.
Again, this is not definitive or even necessary, as it may be a matter of style or tech. Easy access in the room may have been desirable over having to go play elsewhere to resolve issues, or the new transporters of the TMP era may have necessitated a bit of a workaround to fit in the pre-TOS transporter room, or what-have-you. I can toss off a dozen reasons based on real-world examples.
Basically, the argument of less space is akin to suggesting an overall technological reversal in the movie era . . . after all, Kirk's huge ST2 communicator and the bulkier tricorder-gun thing look way less awesome than their 2260s and 2270s counterparts, right? Maybe they're the same volume but everyone shrank? Or, maybe they are just designed differently, perhaps with extra capability, for reasons that we simply aren't privy to.
That's what happened in reality. When the set was first built for Phase II, the corridors were big and square and very TOS-shaped, then they had the TMP corridors built inside of them. They were expanded back out to square on the curved segments for TNG, and then the straight sections as well for VOY.
I don't disagree that there could certainly be reasonable explanations for the smaller spaces I mentioned. But my general point was simply that the sets in TMP look and feel more claustrophobic than their TOS equivalents.
Applying Occam's razor suggests that smaller rooms is the result of less space on the vessel overall, which would certainly be the case if the crew compliment went from 430 to 500 personnel on a saucer of the same size.
However, these are just general trends and certainly nothing conclusive one way or the other.
The corridors in TOS and TMP are the same structural size. The angled inserts in the TMP set and the wall decorations are what make it feel smaller. Both have the same approx 7' headroom. The TOS A frame is much more confining than the TMP corridors.
As for the crew size, it isn't very important in relation to the size of the ship. I see it as more relating to the role the ship has in the fleet and the space needed for certain equipment. A ship needs a certain size crew to operate the basic funcitons. The sail frigate USS Constitution used to carry a crew of 450. That dropped to under 100 when she was demoted to a training ship and down to just a handful as a receiving ship. Now as a museum ship she is back closer to 100. That difference of 450 to 100 is the role. Those 350 crew were for the guns and boarding parties. A gun crew used to take around 5 people. So for the Enterprise I see the original 200ish complement to be the ones needed to run the ship (probably 50, mostly engineers and core systems crews) and the rest for the scientific side. With the dangers from the Klingons in TOS and TMP, they may have a larger security detail that was lacking in The Cage. Some of the ship's systems may have taken more space. 20 years is a good amount of time to see some ship's systems streamlined. The refit between WNMHGB and the series likely saw a lot of ship's systems replaced with smaller, more efficient ones, leaving more room for scientific crew and their instruments. We could also guess that replicator technology may have eliminated the need for large food stores and fresh water. There are a lot of reasons to find where those 200+ crew fit where they didn't before. And then in the movies the crew would fluctuate from the full complement in TMP to the training crew in TWOK, to the skeleton crew at the beginning of TSFS. In TUC their role may have changed yet again and the crew is reduced. If I were Star Fleet, I would have the Enterprise at that point doing custom missions where their highly experienced and reliable crew could be put to good use and changing out some of the crew for specific missions. The mission in TUC is diplomatic so the crew compliment would be down while the ship itself can still accommodate 500. And that isn't even counting guest quarters.
As for the crew size, it isn't very important in relation to the size of the ship. I see it as more relating to the role the ship has in the fleet and the space needed for certain equipment. A ship needs a certain size crew to operate the basic funcitons. The sail frigate USS Constitution used to carry a crew of 450. That dropped to under 100 when she was demoted to a training ship and down to just a handful as a receiving ship. Now as a museum ship she is back closer to 100. That difference of 450 to 100 is the role. Those 350 crew were for the guns and boarding parties. A gun crew used to take around 5 people. So for the Enterprise I see the original 200ish complement to be the ones needed to run the ship (probably 50, mostly engineers and core systems crews) and the rest for the scientific side. With the dangers from the Klingons in TOS and TMP, they may have a larger security detail that was lacking in The Cage. Some of the ship's systems may have taken more space. 20 years is a good amount of time to see some ship's systems streamlined. The refit between WNMHGB and the series likely saw a lot of ship's systems replaced with smaller, more efficient ones, leaving more room for scientific crew and their instruments. We could also guess that replicator technology may have eliminated the need for large food stores and fresh water. There are a lot of reasons to find where those 200+ crew fit where they didn't before. And then in the movies the crew would fluctuate from the full complement in TMP to the training crew in TWOK, to the skeleton crew at the beginning of TSFS. In TUC their role may have changed yet again and the crew is reduced. If I were Star Fleet, I would have the Enterprise at that point doing custom missions where their highly experienced and reliable crew could be put to good use and changing out some of the crew for specific missions. The mission in TUC is diplomatic so the crew compliment would be down while the ship itself can still accommodate 500. And that isn't even counting guest quarters.
True, but the A-frames were in the minority of structural supports and functioned more like open doorways than anything else, dividing up different sections of the deck
Perhaps this explains why TOS has a bunch of red shirts where the pilots only had gold, blue and yellow, aka tan/pink?
Still though, while everything said about fluctuating crew numbers makes a ton of sense, I might still be convinced that the 1701-A is smaller because of how it filmed, and its different role. Or maybe it really just is not fully-manned in ST:6.
In TMP, the reading numbers add up to 430, not 500, if I recall correctly. I think 500 comes from outside, though possibly official sources.
It is likely additional engineering staff for the refit. The new engine seems to require more people to maintain it. That or the potential radiation required more people to rotate in and out of shifts for safety reasons. This would also mean they would need a slightly larger medical staff and support crews. They might need for security (if they have a set ratio of guards to crewmembers), but only a few additional officers at the most for the added crew.
The only stretch of very short corridor we see.
There is definitely turbolift access on my cross section- two tubes, one on each side of the dorsal. They just barely fit and provide fluid access to and from each hull, and join into one tube within the upper section of the dorsal proper, where you see it on the centerline.
There was much discussion about impulse engineering at the time the illustration was done. It originally did not fit and did indeed run afoul of the undercut in the saucer. That is not the case in the illustration as you see it above. It is wholly within the footprint of the dorsal and thus is not precluded by the undercut.
Engineering as it is shown in the series is accessed from a curved corridor. I have thus always advocated the idea that the sets we saw reflect different spaces within the ship - one connected to the nacelles and one connected to the impulse drive. Primary engineering and warp engineering. Presumably warp engineering would “really” be accessed from a straight corridor. There would then be various auxilliary engineering rooms throughout the ship at fueling ports, matter, antimatter, and intermix lines, energizers and negative energizers, etc.
I’m not sure which engine room you are saying the turbolifts go through. Once again, you have to remember this is a cross section - on the centerline. The turbolifts are port and starboard of warp engineering in the secondary hull, and then come together on the deck below, where you see them on the centerline.
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You are right, there is room for the engine room itself to sit atop the neck. That isn't the issue. It is access to Engineering as seen in the series. The corridor outside Engineering can only be as wide as the dorsal because of the undercut. Even using your front rendition of the undercut, the floor of the corridor as you have drawn it has to go up about 2 feet to clear the undercut. I also see that you swaped the ladder and corridor placement, which would make the problem even worse if you correct that to match the set.
Also, while you quite nicely used the wide neck to have two turbo shafts go around the piece of engineering you placed in the neck, at the base of the neck you have the shafts lining up to the front edge of the dorsal and that is impossible. They would be outside the hull. I really see no need to have the bit of engineering be in the center of the neck. We are stuck with that in the TMP refit, but we aren't in the TOS version. But in the TMP refit, they left room for the turbolift to fit in front of the warp core (you just have to omit a corridor that doesn't fit). Your plan would work much better if you use the 1st season set design for the saucer engineering room (the ceiling is 3-4 feet lower) and raise the floor and then omit the DTD from the floor and the shaft in the neck.
Other than those issues around the neck and undercut, I think your cross section is one of the best I've ever seen. I like how you pulled in so much from Jefferies. Very well done. And nice job inserting some of the less well remembered sets.
I've admired your Enterprise work for years, although sadly even when I first found them I couldn't locate many threads on the development of this project. Did you ever get as far as sketching out basic deck plans?
There are a lot of sketches for deck plans that were a part of doing this cross section, and the first four decks were done (with Todd Guenther) with some roughly rendered in 3D by Tallguy. I’m not sure I’d do any of it that way now however. I’m now more inclined to do as yotsuya is doing and pull from “TOSiffied” TMP sets to create unseen spaces from the Jefferies ship, much as I did with Minor’s Phase II sets. It would require major rethinking of the guts and plumbing, however. I’d still want to stick with that Jefferies cross section, but massage it with information from Probert’s cross section.
I recall there were issues with the entry to impulse engineering, but I recall having dealt with them when that was entirely reworked. I also remember working on the turboshaft vis a vis the circular curvature of the secondary hull. Unfortunately I did that over ten years ago and I just don’t recall offhand what the thinking was, so I’m at a bit of a deficit defending certain details.
