Trapped down where?

[T'Girl]

Day of the Dove.

UHURA: Captain, reports coming in from the lower decks. Emergency bulkheads have closed. Almost four hundred crewmen are trapped down there, sir
KIRK: Scotty, how many men do we have?
SCOTT: Three hundred and ninety two trapped below decks. The doors and bulkheads won't budge. We'll have to cut through.
SPOCK: The Klingons control deck six and starboard deck seven, while we control all sections above.

In the Day of the Dove the Enterprise rescues 38 Klingons from their damaged cruisers. A powerful alien seals the majority of the Enterprise's crew out of the way and compels the then equal number of Starfleet and Klingons to do battle so that the alien could feed off of their emotions.

But where exactly are the majority of the crew when the emergency bulkheads close?

After Kirk returned to the ship he cancelled red alert, but maintained general quarter, it's possible that after the Enterprise destroyed the Klingon ship and left the system that Kirk release the crew from general quarters. Some time later the Enterprise changed course and the bulkheads closed. Were the majority of the crew somehow in the lower cargo holds?

Outside the sealed bulkheads there is the bridge, impulse engineering, sickbay, armory, a crew lounge (where the Klingons were held) and various stretches of corridor linking these locations. Some lengths of turbo-lift were outside the sealed sections as well.

What I think happened was when the ship was on red alert the entire crew were at their alert duty stations. When the red alert and then (perhaps hours later) general quarters were canceled, all but the regular duty officers and crew dispersed to their off duty locations, mess rooms, lounges, gyms, many simply to their living quarters. This is where they were when the doors closed. They weren't all down in the engineering hull, they were on decks five, six and seven but could no longer access the core areas. The big recreation areas on (Franz Joseph) deck eight were isolated from the rest of the ship. I thing the entirety of the dorsal and secondary hull were isolated as well.

Uhura said the crew was trapped "down there." but from the perspective of the bridge, everything is "down there."

Where am I wrong?

 

[blssdwlf]

Sound thinking. Although there is that diagram that seems to suggest there was access to the engineering hull's engine room via the neck. Even though the Klingons controlled deck 6 and part of 7, it seemed clear that they didn't control all points as Chekov, Sulu and Scotty were able to freely move between the engine room and bridge. Probably the other 300+ trapped crewmen were either in their quarters, still at their stations or stuck in some rec room somewhere as you suggested.

 

[Captain Rob]

They were all off-duty hanging out at the pool or the bowling alley.

 

[Forbin]

It may have been equally valid to say, from the perspective of the majority of the crew, that twenty-some people were "trapped on the upper decks."

 

[Captain Robert April]

From the point of view of someone on the bridge, everyone is "down there."

Let's also not sugar coat this, we're talking about a sloppy bit of writing, with very little regard to how the ship was laid out.

 

[TIN_MAN]

I dunno, the dialogue seems way too specific to me to be too easely dismissed? I've always suspected that the scriptwriter was using "The making of Star Trek" as the referece it was intended to be, and was under the impression that Engineering was in the impulse deck on levels six and seven? It seems to me, if there was any "sloppiness" involved, it was in the fact that there was no coordination between production dept.s, the director had his ideas, the special effects guys had their (seperate) ideas, and Jefferies (with his optical insert diagram) had still other ideas, and nobody agreed on where the "interiors" were or which way they were facing etc. etc. and it's fair to say they could'nt care less. So there's plenty of "blame" to go around, it was just the nature of the bizz. YMMV of course.

 

[Captain Robert April]

Especially in the third season, where everyone was starting to look for a graceful exit, Roddenberry included.

 

[Timo]

The evil entity of the episode seems to have made sure that all those people who were "trapped" would be in no position to operate the ship or control its key subfunctions. That would seem to call for something with more finesse than merely closing a lot of doors at a random moment with the crew randomly dispersed. At any arbitrary timepoint, there'd be people operating important systems such as engines - but after the trapping maneuver, somehow there were few or no people operating warp engines.

Yet this should not be beyond the capabilities of the space monster of the week. It was known to manipulate people's minds; it should be no problem for it to lure people into useless rooms, dead end corridors, various closets and whatnot before slamming shut the doors. More significantly, the entity might well be able to turn the "trapped" people into initiative-starved slackers for the duration of its cruel games, imprisoning them not so much with bulkheads but with suggestions of inactivity or misguided activity.

Where am I wrong?

In trusting FJ on the placement of rec facilities.

In TOS, there seemed to be important rec stuff on decks 3-5. That's where the TMP ship might well have had its biggest rec facilities, too, but that's a bit beside the point. Having rec rooms on deck 8 is probably a bad idea considering how many of those things there seemed to be higher up...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[chardman]

I dunno, the dialogue seems way too specific to me to be too easely dismissed? I've always suspected that the scriptwriter was using "The making of Star Trek" as the referece it was intended to be, and was under the impression that Engineering was in the impulse deck on levels six and seven?

I'm gonna agree with this. Until it was later retconned, most of us accepted that engineering was in the saucer, if only because it was directly off a huge curved coridore that wouldn't have made sense anywhere but in the saucer.

 

[kkozoriz1]

Why can't there be a curved corridor in the engineering hull? There could be a large cylindrical tank of hydrogen slush right across from main Engineering.

 

[Mytran]

All incarnations of Trek have engine room that is accessed from a curved corridor.

(I'm excluding Enterprise)

 

[blssdwlf]

With the exception of "The Ultimate Computer", the curved corridor leading to the engine room in "The Naked Time" and "Mirror,Mirror" could fit in the engineering hull. I don't have a problem with the curved corridor since you could imagine it a little straightened out in the middle and curved at the ends with a wide-angle lens playing tricks with the corridor lines

 

[Mytran]

Warp field energy distortions can also play tricks on the eyes

 

[Captain Robert April]

Why can't there be a curved corridor in the engineering hull? There could be a large cylindrical tank of hydrogen slush right across from main Engineering.

I am so stealing that....

 

[kkozoriz1]

Why can't there be a curved corridor in the engineering hull? There could be a large cylindrical tank of hydrogen slush right across from main Engineering.

I am so stealing that....

You don't have to steal it, it's free.
Just make sure I see it when you're done.

 

[Forbin]

Why can't there be a curved corridor in the engineering hull? There could be a large cylindrical tank of hydrogen slush right across from main Engineering.

I am so stealing that....

I was gonna alert to the post if you missed it.

 

[Captain Robert April]

Of course, it might not work with my scheme of two engine rooms, but it's worth a shot...

 

[Timo]

One might also consider the navigational deflector (or whatever that dish is) to feature lots of internal machinery or structure behind the dish part, perhaps arranged in a set of nested paraboloids; the forward end of the secondary hull features a suggestive nested structure of concentric cylinder surfaces, after all.

Transverse corridors in the forward part of the secondary hull might curve around the deflector (?) machinery, then.

Alternately, if the TOS ship has internal workings and structures at least roughly similar to the TMP one (as Drexler's "Captain's Chair" CD-ROM cutout, later canonically seen in ENT "In a Mirror, Darkly", sort of suggests), then the forward end of the secondary hull might feature an important juncture of vertical and horizontal antimatter-containing pipes - perhaps heavily shielded by something cylindrar or spherical.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[blssdwlf]

I think a good part of the engineering hull would have "curved" halls for various machinery and it could go all the way to the middle and rear of the hull. The hallway that connected to the hangar bay was also curved.

 

[Timo]

And we need not be talking about circles or partial circles here. The VOY set had that shallow S curve for the all-important hiding-the-far-end visual effect; any use of the simple C curve of the TOS set could be interpreted as being part of a shallow S configuration, or something even more serpentine than that. Straight corridors might not offer advantages in a hull that has curved walls and probably doesn't consist so much of habitable spaces (which might best be rectangular) but of bulky pieces of machinery that the corridors have to snake past.

Timo Saloniemi