It's a fair point, really it should be called the M/AM reactor room.
Donny's Refit Enterprise Interiors (Version 2.0)
- Thread starter Donny
- Start date
Well, yes, but it's a control room for the engines. Anyway, "engine room" is vernacular. Strictly speaking it's called "main engineering." It's not like the TOS engineering set had an actual engine within it. As I said, it already fits the model I'm talking about, a control center for an unseen engine elsewhere. It's only from TMP onward that the conceit of putting the reactor directly inside the control room was adopted.
This is an art thread, so I didn't think a question meant to spark creative thinking would be amiss.
As I've stated many times before, I don't mind my threads getting off-topic at all, as long as it stays on Trek or other similar sci-fi and doesn't skew into politics or religion or whatnot. And please, no bashing of one iteration of Trek over another, including talking ill of CBS. 
It's what we do while we wait. Did they ever call it the engine room? Or just engineering, main engineering, the engineering spaces, etc.?
I think that what was shown in "One of Our Planets Is Missing" is a perfectly good starting point. The catwalk through the hall of energizers is visually interesting. The nacelles are rather long, so that section needn't run all the way down. Heck, you could take a similar layout to TOS main engineering and work it into each nacelle, perhaps with its hall of energizers extending much, much further back, as if down a major portion of the length of the nacelle, on the other side of the fence.
DItto for TMP main engineering. You could have two copies of TMP engineering, one in each nacelle, as the starting point for "two main engineerings," and you could turn the vertical shaft in each into an angled feed down the support pylon to the secondary hull.
Just some ideas.
Off the top of my head, Kirk: “Engine room, well done Scotty” right after the Reliant explodes and the Enterprise goes to warp.
EDIT: Nevermind. Christopher beat me to it with many more examples! Also, what a handy site.
Yeah, it's an invaluable research tool for me as a Trek novelist. Saves a lot of time searching through episodes on Netflix.
Tangential anecdote: Despite 'engineering' being correctly translated as 'ingeniería' for decades in dubs and subtitles, Netflix inexplicably translates it as 'reactores' (aka, 'reactors') on their Spanish subtitles.
Then again the entirety of their subs are awful for Trek, often it seems as if whoever did them misheard words and knew nothing of Trek. On one episode of DS9 they translated 'warp' as if it was the word 'war', with the resulting sentence being the Spanish for "We've dropped out of war".
Then again the entirety of their subs are awful for Trek, often it seems as if whoever did them misheard words and knew nothing of Trek. On one episode of DS9 they translated 'warp' as if it was the word 'war', with the resulting sentence being the Spanish for "We've dropped out of war".
Unless what we saw in TOS was the reactor. They kept it vague, which helps. Not trying to argue the point, just acknowledging that's where the TMP artists took their cues, rather than making it up wholesale.
Are you referring to the huge, inverted V-10 motor behind the hex screen in TOS engineering?
To muddy things further, TWOK introduced the additional term “energizers” that was directly involved with warp propulsion energy. Only time the word was ever used, IIRC.
From The Doomsday Machine:
PALMER: (to Spock) Sir, Deck seven reports power failure in main energisers.
Apparently, the English like to use "s" instead of "z" a lot.
Cool! Totally forgot about that one.
I think your answer comes in the one time - “Day of the Dove” - Spock is heard saying “reactor number three” is “near engineering”. If there is one reactor in each nacelle, and a smaller reactor in-hull that supplies all non-propulsive power, and is also used when needed to balance and/or supplement the output of the two nacelle reactors, then you have a workable system that doesn’t involve the big, bad warp reactors being in hull, but still has an integral component of warp engineering right there where the corridors lead and people are working. It’s not like having a reactor in-hull is unbelievable - modern naval vessels have them. It’s those warp nacelles and the power they might require that seems incongruous with habitable space.
Yeah, I believe that the Okuda text commentary said that the line as written and shot was "Stop engines." Then they realized that the line didn't really make any sense for a ship travelling at warp speed, so they had to ADR it with something similar to match Shatner's lip movements.
Kind of similar to them retroactively making Spock and Saavik speak in Vulcan when they were discussing Admiral Kirk, now that I think of it.
The same happened with the Vulcan speech in TMP - but it was a bit obvious because the subtitles reflected the original English as shot! IIRC for the director's cut the subtitles were changed a bit so it wasn't as obvious.
By the way, I called the vertical tubes in that "energizers," and also ditto the similar tubes in the TAS nacelle, but I have no knowledge that that's their official name. I've never seen an official name for those tubes; in the FJ Tech Manual, they're called "MAGNATOMIC FLUX CIRCULATION TUBES."Are you referring to the huge, inverted V-10 motor behind the hex screen in TOS engineering?
Good thought. These energizer tubes then energize the stuff in the top horizontal chamber which have translucent segments to show the glowing energy inside it. Looks like a short "warp core" to me, but we have nothing else on it as to whether the 5 piece glowing segment goes backward to the engines pylons or upward to the neck pylon or both.
When Spock fried the star drive and we get Scotty's "My bairns. My poor bairns.", the sparks and flashes came from the top rear of the pipe structure indicating it has something key to the power flow to the engines.
Maybe that's what the assemblies behind the rear grille in the TOS set were meant to be. In the Drexler "In a Mirror, Darkly" cutaway, those are the power transfer conduits leading up into the nacelles, so that the triangular assembly is basically the lower half of an X shape with the nacelle struts as the top half.
I'm sure there's a good deal of shielding between them and the crew, though. Also, it's far easier for a ship surrounded by ocean and atmosphere to vent waste heat from a reactor than it is for a ship in vacuum. Contrary to the "space is freezing" myth, vacuum is an insulator. Being in space is like being inside a giant Thermos bottle. With no medium to conduct or convect heat away, a ship can only lose heat through radiation, the least efficient, slowest method. And an antimatter reactor would presumably run a hell of a lot hotter than a nuclear one. Putting it directly in the middle of the pressurized crew compartment would just create too great an overheating problem. It's far more sensible to put it in a separate pod with a fair amount of vacuum between it and the inhabited section. (And with sizeable heat radiator fins, a design element that any realistic spaceship would need but that SF ships almost always omit. Although the Enterprise's nacelle pylons could possibly serve that function.)
The problem with trying to rationalize starship designs by appeals to Earthbound engineering is that it fails to consider the different physics and conditions in space and how those would create different problems and opportunities. One of the great things about Matt Jefferies's ship designs is that they look like ships that could only exist in weightless space. Too many later ship designs in Trek and elsewhere fail to live up to that.
If you want to think about how to design a realistic spaceship, there's probably no better starting point than this: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/index.php
