Hey, I never noticed that before....

Speaking of Spock, at the opening of Spock's Brain when Kara beams onto the bridge the crew members look over at her, but I just noticed that Scotty is the only one who is mildly startled. He actually jumps a little bit. A fine touch added by James Doohan.

 

Doohan put a lot of humanity into his role I would say!
JB

 

Surely Fred Freiberger wouldn't have stooped low again with a possible 4th season episode..... Scotty's Brain?

 

If you go by FJ, it is the cover to a tractor beam generator, IIRC.

I like a probe turret launcher. Being on the very bottom--you have a 360 degree firing arc too.

 

More like 'Scotty's Liver;

 

A Scotty episode from the animated series; "One of My Fingers is Missing."

 

I don't think FJ knew the ventral markings were there. Nobody in fandom saw them until NASM hung the 11-footer from the ceiling in their "Life in the Universe" exhibit. And btw, that NASM exhibit included a wall display of FJ's blueprints, pinned up under a pane of Plexiglas. I saw this in person on a family vacation in 1977.

 

You know, it's frightening to think that Fred Freiberger might have considered it as a script idea.

 

In the remastered "Operation Anniliate" they launch the sunlight satilites out of the yellow circle, but stupidity have it hinge open rather than using an iris.

 

Thanks. Interesting to see this:

I always thought it was the cylinder for the warp core, and that yellow disc is where it could be ejected in an emergency.

 

I'm not positive about this, but...

When McCoy is in the Defiant sick bay during Tholian Web, the camera pulls back and shows a dead blue shirt laying on a medical bed. I swear, this man looks likes the same dude wearing a yellow shirt during Kirk's memorial service in the ship's chapel. He is sitting directly behind the red shirt who freaks out.

 

You can't iris it, it's curved to conform to the hull. Irises have to be flat. You could retract the doors in halves (splitting them in more pieces doesn't work for the same reason), or telescope the entire thing out into a sort of turret as was suggested earlier, (which I like in concept, but the circle is really big compared to a probe, so the only reason for it to be that way it is if you wanted to be able to launch a bunch at once in all directions).

 

NASA never put a iris door on a real spacecraft, that I ever heard of. They always used a hinged door, and they do things for a reason. An iris would be "Cool But Inefficient," something we see tons of in CGI-heavy movies:

http://allthetropes.wikia.com/wiki/Dilating_Door

Check out all the Kryptonian structures in Man of Steel for Cool But Inefficient designs that no one would ever build.

 

Since you mentioned Scotty's reaction in Spock's Brain I thought I would mention Doohan's performance in Star Trek:The Motion Picture. In every scene he shares with Shatner, try and watch Doohan instead. He has all sorts of wonderful glances and looks, especially in the Travel Pod sequence. It's a really lovely performance. It's easy to overlook the secondary characters in these kinds of scenes but Doohan is really wonderful to watch.

 

There was a somewhat funny moment during the ending scene of "The Changeling". Kirk jokingly lamented the loss of his "son", Nomad, the doctor.



The irony of that scene was that Kirk did eventually have a flesh and blood son, David Marcus, who was a doctor (though not a medical physician). And sadly, he lost that son as well.

 

What impressed me most about Doohan was the variety of voices/dialects he performed in TOS : Commodore Enright, the M-5 Computer, Sargon, etc. etc.

 

He did even more 'stunt voicing' for the Star Trek Animated series (cicra 1973-1975).

 

In The Cloud Minders when Kirk, Spock and McCoy are talking to Plasus on the transporter room view screen, the two room panels on either side of the screen are 'floating' off the floor. Normally, a silver separator divides the panels from each other and the floor. The production crew much have been in a rush to get the shots finished.

 

That's not actually correct.

There is a silver divider between the sections, but there's not such a divider between the bottom of wall flat and the floor; just a small gap of about 3/4 of an inch. In this case it's the middle section containing the view screen that wasn't elevated off the floor the the wall flats usually are.

 

You are correct. It's a floor gap versus no floor gap. A bottle of 100 year old Saurian Brandy is on the way to your house.