Where was the TOS engine room?

[Captain Rob]

A good example of too futuristic would be the Gem Hadar bridge. An empty room with a couple of guys standing around wearing headsets with eye pieces. Hows that for a cheap set.

 

[Shaw]

Do we? After all, we're enjoying an universe fundamentally based on the 1960s looks: in this particular case, we accept and indeed favor the looks of a 1960s industrial plant, as used for the TOS engineering sets.

Maybe I'm missing something here... what about the TOS engine room has a 1960's look?

And how, by comparison, have breweries changed so much that a 1960's brewery looks different from one in 2009? I haven't watched Laverne and Shirley recently, but maybe that would have been what you would have want for a TOS engine room.

In the end, the stipulation for the production team of TOS was that nothing should be recognizable. The scratch build TOS engine room worked (both then, and better than what we got recently) for that very reason.

One of the moments I recall the most from my first viewing of STXI was watching Kirk get chased around the brewery and seeing the back wall and a window to the outside. For the next few minutes all I could think about was that Star Trek has sunk to the level of Space Mutiny. And I was sure (though thankfully it didn't happen) that there were going to be tons of jokes including the question of why they didn't just use the NuBSG effects the same way that Space Mutiny had use BSG effects.

Work them together along with some CGI and set dressing elements would give you an engineering section that would seem like it was designed for the purpose of warp space flight.

Yet we don't know what requirements "warp space flight" would set. However, we know what machinery in general looks like: consoles and vanity covers in some places, exposed piping and cabling in others, both efficiently hiding the real working parts which we typically don't understand much.

Theoretically, piping and cabling might grow obsolete in 200 years. But TOS is built on the premise that it doesn't. Theoretically, control consoles might be abandoned in 200 years, too. But again, TOS shows us they aren't. A "truly futuristic" show would be a major step away from Star Trek - and probably a false step for STXI to take, although that's something of a separate issue.

Which was the point of making use of equipment that is both real and also far outside of people's normal experiences.

Have you looked at some of the equipment used at SLAC? We are talking about some things that actually do what is really needed in the fictional Trek world.

But, again, I actually think that type of stuff matters to the audience.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Timo, my comment about the brewery was meant to be a sarcastic dig at the majority of die-hards reaction to it. See what it did here already!
I personally thought the STXI engineering areas looked great (same for the Kelvin's power plant), with an epic sense of scale. You could really believe Ben Finney was hiding out for days and days in there without being found! It would be great for the "Enemy Within"s Kirk fight, too.

Please don't let my sarcastic comment turn this thread into another brewery war, people!

 

[Timo]

Maybe I'm missing something here... what about the TOS engine room has a 1960's look?

The consoles, chiefly: flat grey panels with painted-on graphics for connecting the colored lights and buttons for clarity seem very typical of that era, just before cathode ray tubes and other monitors appeared, but after the heavy switches and round metal casings went out of fashion... That, and the scale and scope of the consoles, before the age of miniaturization. The stuff in TOS looks very convincing for the monitoring center of something vast and impressive - but only for the 1960s-70s, not for the following eras of ever-bigger computer screens tightly surrounding people seated in office chairs.

And how, by comparison, have breweries changed so much that a 1960's brewery looks different from one in 2009?

I'd wager not at all - save for their control rooms. But it's an interesting question.

One of the moments I recall the most from my first viewing of STXI was watching Kirk get chased around the brewery and seeing the back wall and a window to the outside.

I missed that one - but the room where Kirk confronts Uhura, with tanks to both sides of a corridor, had very distinct GNDN pipes that emerged from those tanks, then terminated in flanges right behind consoles that would prevent those pipes from ever being utilized. So much was left unattended or half-baked there...

Which was the point of making use of equipment that is both real and also far outside of people's normal experiences.

That would definitely be superior to the cramped and cardboardish set of TNG and its successors. Whether one could get mileage out of particle accelerators and the like, though... Some scenes would probably have to be shot on location for each episode, to connect the events with the settings. Great for movies, difficult for TV shows. Perhaps pure CGI art modeled on particle accelerators would be the way to go now...?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[FalTorPan]

One of the moments I recall the most from my first viewing of STXI was watching Kirk get chased around the brewery and seeing the back wall and a window to the outside.

I was bothered by the Budweiser truck in the hangar bay. (Kidding! It was a Schneider truck. )

 

[RobertScorpio]

I don't know what you want in the way of an answer...

I can tell you where Matt Jefferies thought it was... The engineering decks were the double height deck level of the secondary hull (deck 16) and the forward bulkhead of the engine room was 177 feet back from the front of the secondary hull and extended back to nearly the forward bulkhead of the hangar bay (225 feet from the front of the secondary hull).

I don't know what Okuda or Drexler think, but Jefferies was pretty explicit about the location (and in my book, it is his ship).



Here is a basic reference to where Jefferies saw the deck levels... And I finally plotted out the position of engineering (rather than attempting to read it from my notes ).

Click to enlarge​

I think I've gotten all this right this time.

I am absolutely no expert on this, but once I read the question I immediately thought it was where that diagram said it was. I remember, when I was much younger, seeing that diagram, or something like it elsewhere,and have ever since thought it to be there...

Just as I think sickbay, and I may be wrong, is located in the 'neck' that connects the saucer with the second deck..is that right or wrong?

Rob

 

[F. King Daniel]

Sickbay's on deck 7, the lower of the two decks in the rim of the saucer.

There's no room in the neck for anything other than a lift shaft and observation rooms.

Google Franz Joseph's Enterprise blueprints. They were put online by his family after his death, and although a few of the assumptions he made (like...the location of the engine room ) are a little outdated, they're well worth a look.

 

[TIN_MAN]

Sickbay's on deck 7, the lower of the two decks in the rim of the saucer.

There's no room in the neck for anything other than a lift shaft and observation rooms.

Google Franz Joseph's Enterprise blueprints. They were put online by his family after his death, and although a few of the assumptions he made (like...the location of the engine room ) are a little outdated, they're well worth a look.

Onscreen evidence suggests deck five for sickbay, which works quite well with Jefferies loft lines as reconstructed by Shaw above.
Here's the only place online, I think, where the Joseph plans can be found outside of tiny thumbnails...
http://www.ottens.co.uk/forgottentrek/tos_1.php
(about halfway down the page, just follow the numbers)

 

[RobertScorpio]

Sickbay's on deck 7, the lower of the two decks in the rim of the saucer.

There's no room in the neck for anything other than a lift shaft and observation rooms.

Google Franz Joseph's Enterprise blueprints. They were put online by his family after his death, and although a few of the assumptions he made (like...the location of the engine room ) are a little outdated, they're well worth a look.

Onscreen evidence suggests deck five for sickbay, which works quite well with Jefferies loft lines as reconstructed by Shaw above.
Here's the only place online, I think, where the Joseph plans can be found outside of tiny thumbnails...
http://www.ottens.co.uk/forgottentrek/tos_1.php
(about halfway down the page, just follow the numbers)

Thanks for that link..brought back some memories. I used to have that paper back book that had those pics...

Rob

 

[Navigator_NCC2120]

^
Here is a link to Franz Joseph (Schnaubelt) Enterprise blueprints. The guy that put them online is not a relative of Franz but he did get permission from Franz's daughter Karen Schnaubelt Dick. The guy that put them online is a member here on TrekBBS with screen name Jag2112. You can find most, if not all, of the Star Trek Blueprints on his website here.

Here is a webpage with interviews of Franz and his daughter about Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry, and their mishap over the blueprints.


Navigator NCC-2120 USS Entente
/\

 

[F. King Daniel]

Great interviews! The thought put in to the blueprints is bewildering.

That's probably the page I got them on. The details are hazy other than "blueprintsblueprintsblueprints!!" that I immediately saved to my HD.

 

[plynch]

If someone has written these, my apologies for the repeat.

Canon: Enemy Within - where would Kirk "id half" go to evade a search, Spock asks. Kirk "superego" says "the lower levels, the engineering deck."

Canon: Day of the Dove: Anger-alien exists from side of secondary hull directly after engineering scene.

Isn't there a web page with this and more evidence out there? Think I've seen one.

Be well!

 

[Timo]

There's no room in the neck for anything other than a lift shaft and observation rooms.

OTOH, Deck 12 seems to be where Kirk has his quarters in "Mudd's Women" - and that more or less has to be in the neck, as Deck 11 would be the lowest level of the saucer proper in the more modern interpretations, and much of Jeffries' original work probably assumed significantly fewer saucer decks (see Shaw's lines).

Basically, "Mudd's Women" could be taken at face value, as the only corridor we see on Deck 12 is a straight one, without long transverse elements in evidence. Perhaps Kirk only moved to upper decks later on - his Deck 5 or Deck 3 quarters might have been under repairs or modifications in the immediate aftermath (in stardate terms) of "Where No Man", or of some in-between adventure that inflicted damage to the top decks.

While Kirk's accommodations get something like three possible deck numbers (Deck 5 is explicit in "Journey to Babel" and Deck 3 might be implied by Captain Spock living there in ST2, and by fellow senior officer McCoy supposedly having his quarters on that deck), the engineering spaces curiously don't get deck identity in more than one episode - "Day of the Dove". There, Klingons are said to hold Engineering by holding "Deck 6 and starboard Deck 7" while the heroes hold decks above that.

...Which is curious by itself, since it sort of implies that Deck 7 is above Deck 6 and thus contested by the heroes. The writers in that episode might have been thinking that Deck 1 is at the very bottom... Meaning Decks 6 and 7 would actually be in the secondary hull, just like the VFX of the episode suggests.

Of course, not even that episode outright states that Engineering would be on some specific deck. It merely states that control of Decks 6 and 7 gives the Klingons control of the ship's warp engines. And of course this would be true in all interpretations of Engineering location, since it would stop our heroes from physically accessing the secondary hull...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Captain Robert April]

Anyone seen my blueprints lately?

 

[F. King Daniel]

No. But let me tell you this: even if they somehow reconcile every single piece of TOS weirdness and randomly named deck numbers into a cohesive whole, and make it mesh with all the later technical assumptions in other Treks flawlessly, I'll probably still prefer FJ's. Sorry.
I guess I've got a little of that "misguided loyalty" Christopher was talking about earlier

Place links for absorbtion!

 

[TIN_MAN]

Deck 3 might be implied by Captain Spock living there in ST2, and by fellow senior officer McCoy supposedly having his quarters on that deck),

This is why I don't put too much value on "throwaway lines" from dialogue, especially one-offers. By this time there were plenty of reference sources TPTB could have used to pick a more appropriate deck from, but no, they just ignored it and pulled "deck 3" outa thin air which, of course, contradicts said sources.
I'd much rather have a well thought out set of deck plans that make some kind of logical sense, regardless of whether those making the shows/movies care to use it.

the engineering spaces curiously don't get deck identity in more than one episode - "Day of the Dove". There, Klingons are said to hold Engineering by holding "Deck 6 and starboard Deck 7" while the heroes hold decks above that.

Which suggests to me that the writer of this ep. was using TMOST as the referance source for writers it was intended to be, and was, unlike everyone else it seems, trying to maintain consistancy with that source, since the specificity of this and other dialogue closely matches info from the book?

...Which is curious by itself, since it sort of implies that Deck 7 is above Deck 6 and thus contested by the heroes.

Meh. YMMV, it could just as easily be interpreted the other way around, which of course, I do.

I do find it amusing that the most direct and specific evidence for the whereabouts of the engine room come from the same contradictory episode, "Day of the Dove" and it can be used to support both locations with equal enthusiasm!

 

[TIN_MAN]

Anyone seen my blueprints lately?

Allow me to paraphrese Dr. McCoy
"Just don't stand there jawin, You and Shaw get crackin!"

 

[Mytran]

OTOH, Deck 12 seems to be where Kirk has his quarters in "Mudd's Women"

It's also the location of Yeoman Rand's quarters in Charlie X and Enemy Within. In the latter we see significantly more of the corridor, and it is curved.

...Which is curious by itself, since it sort of implies that Deck 7 is above Deck 6 and thus contested by the heroes. The writers in that episode might have been thinking that Deck 1 is at the very bottom... Meaning Decks 6 and 7 would actually be in the secondary hull, just like the VFX of the episode suggests.

Is there any evidence in TOS that deck 1 is at the top of the ship?

 

[Captain Robert April]

Anyone seen my blueprints lately?

Allow me to paraphrese Dr. McCoy
"Just don't stand there jawin, You and Shaw get crackin!"

Just as soon as Shaw sticks the nacelles on that cross section, I can get goin' on a new set.

 

[Captain Robert April]

No. But let me tell you this: even if they somehow reconcile every single piece of TOS weirdness and randomly named deck numbers into a cohesive whole, and make it mesh with all the later technical assumptions in other Treks flawlessly, I'll probably still prefer FJ's. Sorry.
I guess I've got a little of that "misguided loyalty" Christopher was talking about earlier

Place links for absorbtion!

Here's what I was working on until Shaw started on his survey of the 11 footer, prompting me to put my efforts on hold until the more accurate information was complied.

For those tuning in late, I reconciled the differences between the first season engine room with the later version by putting the first season room forward of the tube assembly (designated as the Main Plasma Manifold), and the later room aft. That way, all that has to be done is move that wall at the back of the assembly to the forward end and change the designation of main engineering from the forward room to the aft one.

Now Shaw puts the works further aft than I did, but I think my setup can still work. Just need to rework the plasma conduits to the nacelles a bit.