Deck Plans VI: The Undiscovered Bowling Alley

Discussion in 'Fan Art' started by Captain Robert April, May 30, 2008.

  1. Captain Robert April

    Captain Robert April Vice Admiral Admiral

    Why would they jump through so many flaming hoops just to save a briefing room?
     
  2. AudioBridge

    AudioBridge Captain Captain

    Joined:
    Sep 6, 2001
    Location:
    USA - Nemo me impune lacesset
    Replace the number of people you can stuff in the briefing room with photon torpedoes and the space seems even more valuable over the long haul.

    And by that logic, why jump through so many flaming hoops to make the bridge face perfectly forward? Has it occurred to anyone that perhaps the captain can have his bridge oriented however he likes around the turbolift? If Kirk is concerned with seeing who enters the bridge he has it his way. If the next captain doesn't care he can have the workstations moved so that it is behind the captains chair. No big deal.
     
  3. TIN_MAN

    TIN_MAN Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

    Joined:
    Aug 26, 2007
    If your first sentence was intended to bolster your second, then it fails to do so as it has nothing to do with it, or anything, regarding this discussion. If you're replying to my answer to Ziz then you're forgeting that the example you give of "designer intent" was never established onscreen, the examples I'm giving were!

    As for that second sentence, You do realize, don't you, that saying something over and over again doesn't make it any more true, don't you? If we're to make any real progress and refrain from going around in circles, let's dispense with this straw man once and for all.

    First of all, the placement of the "nub" is not, and has never been, the issue. Because all the facts we have -both onscreen and off- reinforce each other to the effect that the nub is exactly where it is supposed to be, which is exactly where MJ wanted it to be, because it's the T/L housing at the top of the shaft which, in turn, is also exactly where MJ wanted it to be! And pay close attention to my next two points, as they're really the heart of the matter. Not only did MJ never change his mind about these arrangements, but niether should we, and for the same reasons, because there is not, nor has there ever been, any self-controdiction -onscreen or off- about these elements and they're arrangement!

    Those who try to make this issue one about the position of the "nub" on the model, instead of the T/L alcove on the bridge set, have got the horse before the cart. The problem all along has been that the position of the alcove is in the "wrong" place to allow for a forward facing bridge and a T/L cab that lines up with the outer housing and vertical shaft as we we know it to be! This, if anything, is the only thing the zoom in shot from "The Cage" can be used to prove?

    Now, I hope the above is clear enough, so let's move on and dispense, once again, with the "nub is only there for symmetry" argument. Aside from being just speculation, and therefore inadmissable as evidence or proof of anything related to the present discussion, it's largely errelevant! Since it's position agrees with every fact we know about the location of the T/L shaft and upper housing, going back to the earliest days of production, where else would it be? Even if symmetry had ever been a consideration for relocating it after the bridge miss-match was noticed (if it ever was) this says nothing about it's original location. Since symmetry concerns only apply to the 11 footer, then explain why the 3 footer, which was completed and filmed before the 11 footer was finished (or not as the case may be) also had a symetrical nub? This would have likely been before time and budget constraints forced the need for the "reverse the film trick" solution due to lack of detail on the big model, so the 3 footer stongly suggests, if not proves, that the placement of the nub has nothing to do with symmetry, and everything to do with designer intent!



    Only three things on your long list are actually facts!



    I'm not sure that all this is strictly factual, but I'll let you have it. This makes sense as it suggests that it was the comparison of the bridge set w/the bridge dome that indicated to MJ that the ship, as concieved, was too small and needed to be doubled in size? whether a discrepancy was noticed between T/L positions at this time is unknown? But that the 3 footer was finished this early does add weight to my point above about the nub.



    Only the second part of this is is strictly factual as far as we know, as for the first part? It depends on what you consider evidence, since we agree that the bridge was intended to face forwards, and it's demonstrably a fact that the "nub" is the T/L housing (and which you agree it probably was) then this alone is evidence that it is the T/L alcove on the set that is missplaced, and therefore must have been moved at some point. Add to this the likely reason for such a move had to do with "dramatic" considerations" and "prefered camera angles" niether of which MJ or PG would have had any final say so in, and its not hard to make a case. Also the number of consoles would be equal on both sides, and balance out the design better, with the T/L alcove behind the C/C. Also the break in the railings line up better this way as well, not forcing one to walk in and around to access the lower level. all these and others besides tell us that there's something not quite right with the bridge as we have it.
    One last consideration, for what it's worth, MJ's Phase Two concept drawings of the bridge show a T/L behind the C/C configuration, showing that he at least was not adverse to the Idea, and so this suggests, at least, that he may have designed the original that way as well? On the the other hand, it's likely that Pato Guzman was the one who designed the basic elements of the bridge, while MJ did most of the console design, and of course, the details for the model, so perhaps we have here a hint of rivalry or disagreement between the two, as to where things should go? Of, course this doesn't help us much?



    And again, it also underscores that the position of the T/L alcove, not the "nub", is the fly in the ointment here. Since the T/L housing is clearly visable here, and in other onscreen evidence, in the form of the T/L position display, among others, then this combined evidence holds more weight, certainly more than any fan speculation to the contrary.



    I've already dispenced with this straw man, this is speculation, not fact, and it will always remain so, no matter how many times you repeat it!!!! As for what they'd say if asked? I wouldn't ask, as they're opinions are of no value to me, but if pressed they might just as easily say the bridge is rotated! And it's precisely because it's a trivial matter to them, that I wouldn't ask in the first place!

    OK CRA I'm outa time for now, I'll be back to address the rest of your post when I've got time. Ta-ta for now.

    ****************************************************

    OK I'm back now,


    Well, yes. But this is not to say that just because a thing can be done, it should be done. This accomodates what we saw in "The Cage" but I'm not convinced yet that this is ultimatly the right technical way to proceed?



    This may have played a factor? More likely it was because by this time the theoretical size of the fictional ship was firmly established, and the hieght to width ratio was inconsistant, so this was an attempt to 'fix' the problem? Unfortunatly because of the three "windows" added to the second pilot version dome, it was cut down so as to eliminate these intirely, which left a dome that was too low (although about the right diameter).

    This is a false choice, for several reasons, first of all; You're forgeting that it is generally agreed that bridge domes are modules that can be "plugged in" or removed with relative ease. so this would make the redesign easier, and it's possible, but not likely, that the bridge was replaced altogether? Second of all, there's nothing nonsensical about it, and only the lateral shafts behind the bridge would need to go, and in any case the enertial dampeners don't have to be modified. The bridge is vulnerable either way, but it still gets lowered abit this way, and there's just as much hull around as before, plus its now a smaller target which is probably the main consideration anyway!
    As for your second option, you'd lose more than a few feet of shaft and the briefing room, you'd lose for all intents and purposes, all of deck two! Besides if we look at this from strictly a fictional point of view, then none of this would be designed the way it is in the first place!

    Finally, you're overlooking a another alternative, which I prefer, and that is that what we see on TV is an imperfect dramatic production, where budget and time constraints forced capitulation to these realities and mistakes were made. But in the ideal situation of the fictional universe as concieved, these mistakes were not made, so the bridge faces forward because the T/L is behind the captain's chair and and everything else matches up perfectly! So any deck plans ought to reflect this Ideal fictional ship, not its onscreen counterpart with all the associated inconsistancies!
    This, IMHO, is the achilles heel and fatal flaw in carrying the "way we saw it onscreen" aproach to extreems. It forces us to leave common sense behind and lose ourselves in a maze of our own devising by insisting that things must be "just so", all the while reinventing and reinterpreting anything that doesn't fit until we've convinced ourselves that it "really does make sense"!
     
    Last edited: Aug 25, 2009
  4. Captain Robert April

    Captain Robert April Vice Admiral Admiral

    Is it your contention that the photon torpedoes are stored directly under the bridge? Or that somehow, losing one briefing room has some effect on the photon torpedo storage down on the lower level of the primary hull? Which was probably identical to the amount of storage space they had before they lowered the bridge?
     
  5. Captain Robert April

    Captain Robert April Vice Admiral Admiral

    There is if you're trying to face the bridge off to port. Which is what you're trying to do. That's contradictory to what was shown on screen, namely that the bridge faces forward.

    And rearranging the insides to fit that goddamned nub isn't?

    Everything fits fine under the larger pilot dome. It's what happened after the pilots is where things get interesting.

    BUT IT DOESN'T MATCH WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE EARLIEST DAYS OF PRODUCTION! When the bridge was built, the ship was still considered to be 540' long; before they'd finished production of the first pilot, they'd inflated the size up to 947'.

    And through it all, and all the way to "Turnabout Intruder", the bridge was considered to face forward. That you came to a different conclusion is your problem, not the show's.

    You think they just sprung the fact on Roddenberry that only one side of the big model would be finished? You think that little tidbit didn't get mentioned on the budget report? Frankly, this sort of thing sounds just like the sort of thing Roddenberry would've thought up himself, because he was always pulling production tricks like this out of his ass. So the whole thing about how the model had to be symmetrical would have been in the planning FROM THE MILLISECOND THE FINAL DESIGN WAS APPROVED AND RODDENBERRY SIGNED OFF ON THE CONSTRUCTION BLUEPRINTS!

    Again, the symmetrical aspect of the model and the use of reversed decals would've been part of the plans from the get-go.

    The only thing that is "demonstrably a fact" is that it's a piece of dowel rod attached to a wooden hemisphere on a model spaceship. Anything else is strictly supposition, no matter how logical that supposition is arrived at.


    There's not a single shred of evidence that the turbolift was ever anywhere but where it's always been. Not even Pato Guzman's conceptual painting shows how you get onto the bridge.

    The placement of the turbolift had everything to do with dramatic concerns, and Jefferies being the professional that he was (and Guzman being long gone by this point), quite possibly put it there on his own, without any prodding from anybody higher up.

    This is starting to remind me of the little debate that was raging about any supposed influence the German film "Silent Star" (better known in the US as "First Spaceship On Venus") had on the development of Star Trek, specifically the set design, with all sort of "evidence" being cited as "absolute proof" that MJ was influenced by that film, and anyone who denied it must be blind.

    Then Mike Okuda emailed me to tell me that he asked Matt Jefferies about that very question and it turns out he never saw the film in the first place.

    The whole topic kind of whithered away after that.

    1) The Phase II ship is significantly different than the original ship, so a direct comparison is ludicrous. Also, by the time he was brought in to do the redesign, FJ's stuff had been out for a few years and the damage had been done. So the two nubs on the dome, if anything, were there to make it abundantly clear that the bridge faced forward, and nobody was gonna come along after the fact and screw with that idea again.

    2) Go back and study your history. Pato Guzman left the show very early, but even when he was there, the bridge was always Jefferies' baby. Other than being a round room with a large viewscreen at the top of the ship, Guzman had very little to do with the designing of the bridge. Jefferies, on the other hand, was always very specific about how he designed the bridge, the approach he took, and the concepts behind the thing. Oddly enough, the one thing nobody apparently asked him about was the frelling turbolift, at least not in any interview that's ever surfaced.

    I'm not operating on fan speculation, I'm operating on the producers' decision, that the bridge faces forward. Period, end of discussion on that end. It faced foward. Deal with it. Your examination of your AMT model, lo, these many years ago, was flawed and brought you to an erroneous conclusion.

    The opinions of the people who actually made the show are of no value to you? Who the fuck died and made you king of all Star Trek?

    I'd like to remind you that neither Rick Sternbach, Andrew Probert, nor Mike Okuda were working on Star Trek at this time. Nobody did those kinds of comparisons in those days (in fact, I think the first time anybody actually did an overlay of the exterior of the ship over the bridge set was when Rick did this for Voyager; that's right, not even TNG went into that level of detail).

    I'm not forgetting anything. In fact, the whole concept depends on the whole "bridge module" concept. In short, all they did was deepen the socket.

    No bridge in the entire history of shipbuilding has ever faced anywhere but dead ahead. Pointing it off to port is therefore nonsensical.

    You do if you don't want your bridge crew to get space sick every time they go to warp and are pulled to the side instead of straight back. Good grief, have you even watched the damn show?

    By that logic, why not just put 'em in environmental suits and have the control panels out on the hull? They'd be impossible to hit and have an unobstructed view of their surroundings! :wtf:

    Have you seen Deck 2? There ain't much there in the first place.

    Maybe, but we're not discussing how any of us would design the thing, we're discussing the thing as presented.

    Which brings us to this gem...

    Revisionist twaddle.

    And as such, has absolutely no place in this discussion.
     
  6. AudioBridge

    AudioBridge Captain Captain

    Joined:
    Sep 6, 2001
    Location:
    USA - Nemo me impune lacesset
    No, just trying to point out how important every lick of space is on a ship like the Enterprise. If maximizing space isn't an important part of your project, then nevermind :)
     
  7. Mytran

    Mytran Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Aug 5, 2009
    Location:
    North Wales
    Whew, put those phasers down before I get hurt! ;)

    Can't offer much more than that I'm afraid, as both arguments have very good merits and it's also a question I've been wrestling with for years. However, I think that trying to revise the ship into what it "should" or "ought" to have been is a bit of a slippery slope...After all, if it was built sensibly not only would the lift be at the back of a forward facing bridge, but there'd also be more than one exit, the dorsal would be thicker and stronger, fewer windows on the engineering hull, wider pylon/nacelle attachment points, etc etc etc.
    And yes, there'd be a bowling alley :lol: :lol: :lol:
     
  8. TIN_MAN

    TIN_MAN Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

    Joined:
    Aug 26, 2007
    Oh, I agree completly, that's what I said above...
    "Besides if we look at this from strictly a fictional point of view, then none of this would be designed the way it is in the first place!" My whole point regarding this aspect of the issue is that this is not our sandbox were playing in, and we have to take things as they are and were intended to be, and not inject excesive real world logic into it, because then we might as well go play in our own sandbox where things can be just exactly like we want them to be.
     
  9. Ziz

    Ziz Commodore Commodore

    Joined:
    Sep 25, 2001
    Location:
    NY
    But if you're not going to put any kind of "real world logic" into it, then the whole project is reduced to simple manual labor of drawing on paper what was seen on screen. Where's the creativity in that?
     
  10. Captain Robert April

    Captain Robert April Vice Admiral Admiral

    Maximizing space also means not wasting it on something you don't need, like another briefing room. Plus, we're not talking about an Apollo command module. The Enterprise is the size of a modern day aircraft carrier. Live a little.
     
  11. TIN_MAN

    TIN_MAN Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

    Joined:
    Aug 26, 2007
    I didn't say we weren't going to put any "real world logic" into it, I said we shouldn't inject excessive "real world logic" into it, there's a differance. In fact, one of my main points in this discussion all along, has been to advocate using "real world logic" in how we go about choosing the best alternative to the bridge miss-match problem, while staying within the bounds of the structures as we have them. Also, there's a difference between creative thinking and creative accounting, starting out with a pre-concieved notion and then forcing things to fit this notion by reinventing and repurposing established design, is an example of the latter! and in any case, the real creativity in a project like this is in designing the 90% of the ship we didn't see onscreen.
     
  12. Probert

    Probert Starfleet Design Red Shirt

    Joined:
    Apr 5, 2006
    Location:
    Earth, N. America, 21st Century
    Sorry, but TNG actually did pay attention to that level of detail.

    [​IMG]

    Exteriors & interiors that don't match are a pet peeve of mine so I do as much as I can to get all that right. Rick & Mike were pretty much with me on that... not to mention Herman Zimmerman. When I suggested to Herman that the transporter stair-step should also serve as a lift (equal access), he priced out what it would cost to drill through the concrete and make it actually work.

    Now back when Star Trek first appeared, nobody expected it to be the breakthrough 'next-level' of Science Fiction it became. And in those days, nobody even imagined people would be hypothesizing about their little production... probably not even Gene... forty years after it was canceled. Nowadays, designers are more aware of that level of delightful scrutiny and (hopefully) design for it.

    Andrew-
     
  13. Ziz

    Ziz Commodore Commodore

    Joined:
    Sep 25, 2001
    Location:
    NY
    Andrew, while you're here, can we get your $0.0728 (adjusted for inflation) on the TOS bridge alignment issue as someone who's worked on at least two incarnations of Trek? Aside from the various mathematical arguments of bridge/dome size, which version makes more sense - drop it into the hull facing forward and have the turbolift cheat sideways on its journey or twist the whole bridge sideways to gain the couple of feet of height on the next deck down?
     
  14. Probert

    Probert Starfleet Design Red Shirt

    Joined:
    Apr 5, 2006
    Location:
    Earth, N. America, 21st Century
    Like Captain Robert April says, all bridges face forward. I was shocked and really thrown when first seeing how Frans Joseph's plans tweaked the orientation to port, fitting (more or less) the exterior detailing. I don't like it that way and wouldn't be too put off if it were reoriented forward (sliding & adjusting) to redesignate the cylindrical detail as something else.

    Andrew-
     
  15. Captain Robert April

    Captain Robert April Vice Admiral Admiral

    I stand corrected on the matter of TNG.

    Now, to pass on Rick Sternbach's two slips' worth:

    Facebook is a wonderful thing. :D
     
  16. Ziz

    Ziz Commodore Commodore

    Joined:
    Sep 25, 2001
    Location:
    NY
    I spoke to Rick in person at WonderFest a few years ago and showed him my (still in progress) work on The Ultimate Bridge (stupid me for not getting a pic of him with it!) We discussed this and he agreed with me and Probert - the bridge faces forward, the turbolift slides sideways at the last second. Sink the bridge a few feet into the hull to make it work.

    So, Rick Sternbach and Andrew Probert both agree with a forward facing bridge. Can someone get Okuda in here? If he says it faces forward, we've got a Trifecta of Trek Technicians (say that three times fast!) and we can finally put this issue to rest.
     
  17. Captain Robert April

    Captain Robert April Vice Admiral Admiral

    I've asked him...
     
  18. Mytran

    Mytran Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Aug 5, 2009
    Location:
    North Wales
    Since the T.T.T. seem to be accelerating towards a conclusion I'll just throw this thought out there - has anyone ever tried to fit the bridge (rotated or not) into the specs for the originally envisioned 540' enterprise? If space was ever going to be at a premium, I'd imagine it's on that ship!
     
  19. Mytran

    Mytran Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Aug 5, 2009
    Location:
    North Wales

    That's a fabulous picture, thanks very much for posting it. I never realised there was a navigation light right behind the bridge like that - although wouldn't it be constantly flashing light through the transparent dome of the bridge?
     
  20. TIN_MAN

    TIN_MAN Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

    Joined:
    Aug 26, 2007