Going round an cetacean ellipse…
I'm building the entire Starship Enterprise interior at 1:25 scale
- Thread starter Mike Nevitt
- Start date
Going round an cetacean ellipse…
Pike was living large, with his historical hobbies on display.
Does he comment on any post? Or has he ghosted the site?The OP of this thread hasn't logged on in 9 months.
Did you guys scare him away?
True but that inner corridor is so small as to have very limited functionality. In fact in one episode it was simply used for the actors to loop round walk back on themselves, in order for there to be enough corridor to complete the scene! Route shown in red:
That's because the saucer is an oval and so therefore flatter on the fore/aft areas, whereas the corridor set was based on a circle. If you try to match the set to the port or starboard corridors it doesn't look too bad though (set shown in red)
Last edited:
He hasn’t visited the site at all since March.
Mr. Trek is preoccupied with building his model so it's not surprising he doesn't bother coming back here. It’s understandable.
Back some years ago I used to share my work on three different sites: TrekBBS, Hobbytalk and Treknographics. It gets time consuming particularly if you get involved in lengthy discussions. Gradually I stopped posting on other sites and focused on sharing my stuff here. It's just simpler, far less time consuming and leaves more time for other stuff like actually making models and other real life pursuits.
Sometimes I do share some of my stuff with a TOS Facebook group, but the ensuing discussions there are generally not as involved or insightful as they are here. Mind you Hobbytalk used to be a good place to interact until a particular regime started banning or driving people away for awhile. Supposedly it's better now, but I never went back.
Back some years ago I used to share my work on three different sites: TrekBBS, Hobbytalk and Treknographics. It gets time consuming particularly if you get involved in lengthy discussions. Gradually I stopped posting on other sites and focused on sharing my stuff here. It's just simpler, far less time consuming and leaves more time for other stuff like actually making models and other real life pursuits.
Sometimes I do share some of my stuff with a TOS Facebook group, but the ensuing discussions there are generally not as involved or insightful as they are here. Mind you Hobbytalk used to be a good place to interact until a particular regime started banning or driving people away for awhile. Supposedly it's better now, but I never went back.
Last edited:
I’ve been watching his videos… the man is passionate about his project.
I know there has been a lot of discussion about his choices but it’s his interpretation and it’s no better or worse than anyone else’s….
What this reminds me is how impressive FJ’s work on the original blueprints were given the technology and information(or lack thereof) he had available at the time. Was it “totally accurate” , nope. But it was the first and broke new ground. Never before had any ship “blueprints” been mass produced. He started a whole new genre. As a kid, I spent hours pouring over those blueprints so, In my own selfish way, I’m glad he’s using them as a starting point for his massive model.
I know there has been a lot of discussion about his choices but it’s his interpretation and it’s no better or worse than anyone else’s….
What this reminds me is how impressive FJ’s work on the original blueprints were given the technology and information(or lack thereof) he had available at the time. Was it “totally accurate” , nope. But it was the first and broke new ground. Never before had any ship “blueprints” been mass produced. He started a whole new genre. As a kid, I spent hours pouring over those blueprints so, In my own selfish way, I’m glad he’s using them as a starting point for his massive model.
I don’t think it is fair to say Franz Joseph’s work was “flawed”. He never said he was trying to document exactly what was onscreen. He said he was trying to make sense of what was onscreen. People can take issue with his choices to that end, but be fair to him and grade him on whether he achieved HIS objective, not the objective others much, much later would have preferred he pursue.
As a young teenager captivated and engrossed into seeing more of the starship Enterprise I was fascinated with onscreen it was rather disappointing to learn what I got was not the ship I saw onscreen. Yeah, the promotion of FJ’s work was misleading. So, yeah, on that level it was flawed because it didn’t deliver what I was expecting.
This needs quoting because it bears directly on what Mr Trek is doing. Franz Joseph - and Mr Trek - told us what they were doing. To both of them, the exterior form of the ship needed to yield to their visions of how the interior was laid out. I don’t blame them for what they did (or in Mr Trek’s case, what he is doing.) Within the confines of the choice to let the inside guide the outside, I reject a swimming pool and bowling alley and no mechanism of any kind behind the deflector dish and a hangar deck based on the wrong set of drawings that ignores giving the ship any internal structure into which the pylons or dorsal can connect. Those are criticisms of what FJ was actually trying to do. The fact he didn’t make the ship look like what was onscreen - when he went so far as to call it Constitution instead of Enterprise - doesn’t really bother me. It’s that Constitution has these problems. And the fact Pocket Books marketed a set of plans of Constitution as plans of Enterprise is on them, not Franz Joseph.
I don’t know what Mr Trek will call whatever ship he creates, and I don’t know what kind of problems his ship will have reflective of his vision. But as long as he’s upfront about the fact he isn’t trying to depict what is onscreen - which he seems to be - then my criticisms will be limited to what he is actually trying to do.
What surprises me is that nobody has tried to do what I set out to do - to take Jefferies’s own deck arrangement and the set plans he drew and put them inside the 11-foot model Richard Datin et al built. We are sixty years on and the tools are there and the interest is there, but everybody takes the Franz Joseph “out” of changing something. He had the excuse of not having 3d software to model what he was doing, and of being limited to technical pens and vellum as a medium on which to create. That excuse doesn’t hold anymore.
Last edited:
You walk into a bookstore and see the Star Trek Blueprints with a picture of the ship you see on television (every time you watch the show) on the cover of said package, along with a description claiming they detail every deck of the starship Enterprise, you damn well expect it will depict that very ship. When you later open said package and begin pouring over those drawings you start realizing it’s not the same thing you see on the screen every week, or maybe even every weekday, it dawns on you you’ve been had.
So the packaging is certainly misleading. And the contents are not what legions of buyers are expecting. It’s a marketing skeight-of-hand. As such it is flawed because many of us started seeing things that were off and not what we believed we were going to get. That doesn’t mean we still weren’t impressed by the overall execution and the level of detail.
The same goes for FJ’s technical manual. It’s really well done for what it is, but it falls short of what a lot of devoted fans, myself included, could do in regard to the subject matter.
I don’t fault Mr. Trek for doing what he wants, but it’s evident he is not recreating what we saw onscreen.
So the packaging is certainly misleading. And the contents are not what legions of buyers are expecting. It’s a marketing skeight-of-hand. As such it is flawed because many of us started seeing things that were off and not what we believed we were going to get. That doesn’t mean we still weren’t impressed by the overall execution and the level of detail.
The same goes for FJ’s technical manual. It’s really well done for what it is, but it falls short of what a lot of devoted fans, myself included, could do in regard to the subject matter.
I don’t fault Mr. Trek for doing what he wants, but it’s evident he is not recreating what we saw onscreen.
Last edited:
"Sargon here, McCoy. I'm in your deck six briefing room." (Return To Tomorrow)
I remember it being a smaller Briefing Room a little out of the way from the main traffic.
I thought I had him dead, but Sargon was a tricky one and fooled me. 
Last edited:
I totally agree on getting rid of the pool and bowling alley. It would make room for more in the way of realistic machinery spaces, tanks for gasses, etc. FJ probably thought the deflector dish's mounting pole was sufficient to contain the mechanism, and the engine pylons were super-strong for "future metal" reasons (the TNG reason would be structural integrity fields).
Ballantine Books.
FJ's work sold beyond all expectations, and Paramount later restricted all Star Trek stuff to their own publishing house, Pocket Books.The Star Trek Blueprints were not a rip-off! When they came out, we had nothing even remotely comparable, apart from The Making of Star Trek (whose text FJ devoured and followed closely). The Blueprints were endlessly fascinating— they were a wonderful thing, a new and better kind of hardware porn! They turbocharged the imagination. Finding the deviations from aired Star Trek was just part of the fun.
Or that there wasn't really a mechanism at all. It wasn't really until the Enterprise-D that we began to see what a large structure the navigational deflector was in terms of taking up a large amount of the ship's interior. David Kimble's cutaway for the refit Enterprise, the cutaway shown in Mr Scott's Guide to the Enterprise, and Andrew Probert's ship layout concept art all show the deflector dish as being practically flat, and there's not much room for any internal mechanism to penetrate into the secondary hull without the warp core getting in the way.
This was Matt Jefferies' own opinion – that the nacelle pylons were deliberately impossibly thin to suggest technology much in advance of our own.
There's a wide chasm between on the one hand one feeling disappointed that the Franz Joseph material fell short of a desired level of fidelity to the props and sets and on the other the material constituting a rip-off that tricked, misled, duped, and/or took advantage of fans to the point that they were "had." I can understand the former, but the latter isn't a justifiable position.
Ballantine Books.
Yes of course. I know better than that. I still have Pocket Books on the brain. That and, you know, demented.
Or that there wasn't really a mechanism at all. It wasn't really until the Enterprise-D that we began to see what a large structure the navigational deflector was in terms of taking up a large amount of the ship's interior. David Kimble's cutaway for the refit Enterprise, the cutaway shown in Mr Scott's Guide to the Enterprise, and Andrew Probert's ship layout concept art all show the deflector dish as being practically flat, and there's not much room for any internal mechanism to penetrate into the secondary hull without the warp core getting in the way.
This was Matt Jefferies' own opinion – that the nacelle pylons were deliberately impossibly thin to suggest technology much in advance of our own.
I think all this is justifiable from his point of view. The ship could be said to be entirely supported by its skin - a monocoque design. When I say I take issue with it, I am only saying it isn’t the direction I would go. I have often characterized that - from my perspective- it makes sense as a semi-monocoque design that depends upon both the hull and an inner frame for structure. That comes from my understanding of what we saw and of Jefferies as well. That’s how aircraft are usually built.
I even give Franz Joseph a bye on the dish because of the ambiguity at the time of what it was. Jefferies himself labels it both navigational deflector and main sensor. Is the dish the sensor and the ring structure behind it the deflector, or vice versa? Do both function as both, together? The former makes more sense from an appearance point of view, but the latter makes more sense functionally, and the last option makes the most sense.
In either case, one would expect not “nothing” behind there however, but rather some tie in to the main power of the ship to do the antigravitational job of deflecting.
It mighn’t have been intended, but the end result, well…
I didn’t get what I was expecting. On some level I felt cheated. I still have my blueprints and tech manual from so long ago, but I certainly don’t consider them definitive works simply because they’re not. Better work has been done since, but back in the day they were treasured because we were happy to get whatever we could get our hands on.
And here is the thing: FJ’s disappointing work on the shuttlecraft inspired me to try doing it better.
Really super screen accurate blueprints of starship exteriors, interiors, and props is a holy grail of fandom, no question.
But look at the number of man-hours that fans have invested. And to assemble an omnibus compilation with the breadth of the FJTM and blueprints with maximum screen accuracy would be a monumental undertaking still. Would the various authors even agree to have their work selected and included in such? What would be the legal ramifications of making it available? Especially when it comes to deck by deck layout, there would be humongous debates.
Just considering the tall order of these and other issues even today, and considering the fact that an interior layout of the starship never existed, an expectation of super screen accuracy in any thing published in the 1970s with the breadth of the FJ works was never a realistic expectation. Add to that that the show had folded already years before when these works were published.
Disappointment I get. Inspiration to do better I definitely get. To say that we owe an enormous debt to the vision of FJ is not to deny that these works left much to be desired. A benchmark on the scale didn't even exist before the FJ works. The jump from the diagrams and stage plans in TMoST to the FJ blueprints is like a proverbial quantum leap.
But look at the number of man-hours that fans have invested. And to assemble an omnibus compilation with the breadth of the FJTM and blueprints with maximum screen accuracy would be a monumental undertaking still. Would the various authors even agree to have their work selected and included in such? What would be the legal ramifications of making it available? Especially when it comes to deck by deck layout, there would be humongous debates.
Just considering the tall order of these and other issues even today, and considering the fact that an interior layout of the starship never existed, an expectation of super screen accuracy in any thing published in the 1970s with the breadth of the FJ works was never a realistic expectation. Add to that that the show had folded already years before when these works were published.
Disappointment I get. Inspiration to do better I definitely get. To say that we owe an enormous debt to the vision of FJ is not to deny that these works left much to be desired. A benchmark on the scale didn't even exist before the FJ works. The jump from the diagrams and stage plans in TMoST to the FJ blueprints is like a proverbial quantum leap.
