At the initial explosion frame it's glare.
It's not glare. It's the same momentarily illumination that belies the impact point on the bird of prey. On Enterprise -- a much larger ship -- The illumination there follows the torpedo's path across the hull and is present BEFORE the torpedo detonates; at the moment of impact it brightens only slightly before being swallowed by the fireball of the subsequent explosion.
The illumination there suggests an impact point on the starboard side, VERY close to the bridge. The after effects get close to the impulse engine, to be sure, but the are widespread throughout the entire aft portion of the saucer and do not linger significantly near the impact point.
Until you can explain why the 1st frame doesn't light up the impulse deck
I already did: it isn't CLOSE enough to light up the impulse deck. It lights up the bridge because its impact point is only about ten meters from the dome; from that same point it's almost fifty meters to the impulse engine.
That doesn't tell us anything beyond that they had planned another ship with the Enterprise name.
Which would have been necessary only if the old ship had actually outlived it's usefulness and was DUE for replacement in the first place.
I thought it was just as obvious the extras noncoms were part of the crew assigned to search for these boots and they were standing around out of curiosity.
Except that, earlier, Valeris says the crew is "turning
their own quarters inside-out, but the killers may still be among them."
If these people are searching this room, it's because it IS their own quarters after all.
Janice Rand is the only noncom that we know in TOS that had her own cabin and she was Kirk's assigned yeoman.
Since when do yeoman rate their own quarters they don't have to share with anyone?
Or a simpler explanation is that noncoms normally get bunks.
Previous Enterprises never used them (even Crewman Daniels has his own private cabin on NX-01) nor subsequent Enterprises where even Chief O'Brien seems to have regular-sized quarters big enough to raise a small family. What's do different about Kirk's era?
How do we know they weren't upgraded internally beyond a few panels?
Because for few ships we see in DETAIL, it's obvious that they weren't. Stargazer, for example, has LCARS computers sharing space with 2280s duotronic circuitry and even some of its most basic features -- turbolifts, for example -- are unchanged from its original launch configuration.
For early-model Constellations like Hathaway and Stargazer, that's probably the limits of their capacity to upgrade; the former was on the ragged edge of serviceability in the 24th century while the latter was effectively already in mothballs. More advanced designs like the Excelsiors don't seem to have this problem and can accept LCARS conversion just fine.
The absence of the Constitution class in the 24th century suggests they could not handle LCARS at all. This is probably because the intermediate step before LCARS (multitronics?) introduced on Excelsior were incredibly difficult to integrate into the older Constitution class.
If the panels were converted, what's to stop them from upgrading systems all the way into TNG/DS9?
Speaking from experience? A load-bearing bulkhead in an inconvenient place that cannot be further compromised to accommodate cable trunking and therefore must be bypassed by an elaborate workaround; later designs would have omitted the bulkhead altogether to allow for easier swapping in/out of computer equipment, but on the older design you have to physically reconstruct the entire compartment in order to fit the new component inside. You can't usually get away with that more than two or three times in a ship's lifespan, and from what we can tell, the Constitutions had already done this at least twice already
before the TMP conversion.
According to "Tin Man", all the Hood ever does is go back and forth between starbases
According to "Brothers" the Repulse is on an active mission of exploration. Also, the Hood's Captain DeSoto is a household name in Starfleet; moreover, the Hood -- a late-model Excelsior type -- is described in various episodes as receiving systems upgrades to stay current with the rest of the fleet. So even if Hood is at least 40 years old, it has upgrade potential that the Constellations and Mirandas -- both much newer than the Constitution class -- unquestionably lack.
Both Decker and Scotty state that the Enterprise was redesigned and refitted. Most if not all of the ship was redesigned so you can't really say the ship was not designed for the new technology.
Of course it was designed for new technology (that's what it RECEIVED, isn't it?). What it wasn't designed for is FUTURE technology. Considering the refit only took about three years to complete AND considering how radical that transformation really was, that means all of the systems that were installed on Enterprise (with the possible exception of its warp drives) were fully developed and mature technologies before the ship ever entered space dock. The TMP refit didn't accomplish much, in that case, except to bring the ship up to parity with the rest of the 2270s fleet. Within only ten short years with the release of newer designs and new technologies being developed the ship was AGAIN starting to show its age, and this time further upgrades were no longer feasible.
You had said that a Constitution's saucer would be too small to fit a main reactor and I agree and question wouldn't that be the same for Reliant and/or Constellation.
And the answer -- once again -- is that Constellation's saucer is five decks thick and considerably wider than the Constitutions. The Miranda's saucer extends into that larger aft compartment which is, again, about five decks thick and large enough to accommodate an entire engineering section.
Let's consider the latter case for a moment: it could very well be that the original design for the Miranda (or the ships they wound up replacing) were just saucers with warp nacelles bolted onto them, not unlike the Mayflower type starships of the JJ-Verse. The addition of more powerful reactor types and the recognized need for greater cargo/shuttle storage neccesistated the construction of an "engineering wing" to house all of that equipment. Constellation wouldn't have this problem because it's ALREADY large enough to accommodate all of it in a single hull.
Well I doubt the intermix chamber runs between the tubes simply because the intermix chamber in the engineering hull is further back because of that forward corridor we see in TMP.
Or maybe the TMP Enterprise is simply larger than we've been told. Its "official" length isn't canon, after all, and various posters here have demonstrated conclusively that most of the ship's components (especially the drop-door in engineering) wouldn't actually fit inside of it unless it was at least 340 meters long.
The other thing is that we do see the torpedo bay explode from the port side and it didn't kill Scotty down below or catastrophically effect the intermix chamber or the starboard torpedo bay.
That's mainly because the torpedo bay didn't explode. A phaser beam tore into it and set the compartment on fire, but it didn't damage the torpedoes or detonate anything else.
Those power conduits are still in the hull though. It's not any different than the Enterprise's horizontal shaft going to the nacelle pylons except that there's alot more internal piping on the Reliant.
But the internal piping on Reliant DOESN'T have to go through the engine room or through any part of the ship inhabitted by humans. If you haven't noticed, this also the case for the Enterprise-D, which has its plasma conduits leading AWAY from engineering and through sealed trunks that cut through the hull without sharing the habitable environment of the ship.
Is there any indication that they were designed that way though?
Impossible to know, since we know next to nothing about the Excelsiors. OTOH, the presence of the bulge ITSELF is rather difficult to explain, especially considering the odd skinniness of its secondary hull in that section. If the bulge contains a central reactor to feed the nacelles, the skinny hull makes a lot more sense: the engine room would be BENEATH the bulge, and the entire reactor compartment is simply placed at a standoff distance from the rest of the ship in case of a major radiation leak.
Considering the space aboard Enterprise now devoted to freight in the engineering hull in TMP I'm unable to follow here.
