How big was the hangar deck set miniature?

I was wondering about the hangar deck set in the original series. The studio model of the Galileo was 22 inches long. There's definitely a physical model in the hangar deck set – no matting was involved. Was the hangar really huge enough to fit the 22 inch shuttle, or was there a second, smaller model? If there was, I've yet to find evidence of it.

My other question is about the hangar doors. Pictures of the miniature set from the outside show no doors. Were the doors matted into the shot along with the star field?
Thanks!

 

I think the miniature flight deck interior was about ten feet (3 m) long.

 

The miniature hanger was a forced perspective design. I don't think it was actually 10 feet long though, that information is lacking since the miniature no longer exists.

Here's an article on it:

http://www.startrek.com/article/forgotten-trek-creating-the-original-enterprises-shuttlebay

 

Well, if that is the 22" model in there and the scale of Jefferies plans are accurate, then the set is 5.7 times larger than the shuttle – or exactly 10 feet.

 

I would like to know the reasoning behind making the hangar deck interior so tall.
It stands to reason that there would be a ceiling right above the observation deck top.
That's a lot of unused space on board a space ship where space would be at a premium.

 

If you’ve ever been in an aircraft carrier the ceiling is quite tall. More than twice the height of a jet fighter. Of course, you never know when something huge like an osprey is going to be held there as well. My guess would be the hangar is big to take in larger craft that aren’t native to the enterprise.

 

If memory serves me correctly I think it was about 10' long and about 6' wide. It was pretty big!

 

I swear I saw a photo of the Enterprise in the studio that had the hangar miniature in the background. Can't seem to find it now...

 

We found that photo when researching the Smithsonian restoration. And it's privately owned so can't show it. It was about 10 feet long. Hey Feek - maybe time to build a replica?

 

Perhaps this image is the one you are thinking of; it is pretty cool because it shows both the seldom seen port side of the ship (pre-"Tribbles", apparently) and the back end of the hangar deck model.

 

Why would a high ceiling be "wasted space"? If something is cheap in space, then surely that's space!

That is, the only real expenses involved in including a gigantic room aboard a starship would be the material needed for the walls, and the air/heat/moisture inside. And a shuttlebay probably wouldn't be expensive in the latter terms, as the air, heat and moisture there would mostly be waste products, to be pumped and dumped at leisure, not vital resources as inside crew cabins.

If anything, it would appear expensive to build a starship unnecessarily small. Why is there so much wasted space between the engine pylons of Kirk's ship, say? Or below the saucer? Why isn't all that filled with hull? It wouldn't even be expensive in terms of outer hull material, as building a big cube would actually involve less of it than building a shape that squeezes into a saucer and then constricts into a narrow neck before wrapping into a cigar.

The Romulan Warbird is a good case in point. Compared to a classic Starfleet vessel, the Romulan counterpart makes better use of the available space by introducing some hull above and across the nacelles, a spot where something like the E-D only hauls along useless vacuum.

Timo Saloniemi

 

The real-world problem with bigger spaceships is that it takes more fuel / energy to propel them. That's why the Space Shuttle could never orbit the moon: it couldn't carry enough fuel to lift such a big space truck. Apollo flew that high by using a huge throw-away motor (the S-IVB stage) to provide a big and heavy but disposable engine and fuel tanks for one-time use.

 

But that's only if the "bigger" walls have more mass than the "smaller" ones. And that's not really true of the Trek starships: taking the volume defined by starship maximum length, beam and height and then covering that with an outer sheet of futuro-metal takes about as much metal whether it's a cube of LxBxH dimensions or a complex shape of much smaller volume. (And what is inside that volume doesn't need to weigh much; it would be just thin air in the "higher hangar" scenario.)

It's a matter of packing density, is all. Why spread all that mass across two separate hulls and far-flung nacelles, rather than putting it all in a more compact shape? (And it's not for putting the nacelles at a safe distance, either - they are actually placed right against the primary hull in the classic design!)

Timo Saloniemi

 

Now I see what you're saying.

Also, I think if we ever do build a big spaceship, it will be a bunch of boxy modules bolted together like the ISS, rather than a sweeping, graceful design with organic shapes.

 

This model is discussed in exhaustive detail in the book The Enterprise NCC-1701 and the Model Maker, by N. Datin McDonald and Richard C. Datin Jr, who were the children of Richard Datin, who actually built a majority of the models for Star Trek.

There is a chapter about each of the models he built for the show. Chapter 11 is about the hangar deck. I will here reproduce a section about the dimensions found on page 85/86.

This book is clearly a vanity press project that couldn't bother with an editor, so some of the grammar and punctuation makes things sometimes a bit hard to follow. But you can probably still find it on Amazon and it's great in spite of its editorial shortcomings.

More fun facts about the hangar deck: it was made of pine, plywood and masonite, it took Datin 460 hours to build the thing from 14 September 1966 to 25 October 1966. and also spent 3 hours on October 31 repairing the Galileo model, which he did not build. (The shuttle was actually built in Phoenix, by AMT.) The whole thing was billed for $1800, plus $163 for the decals outsourced to a company called Airmark, plus $175 for labor. in today's dollars, this would be north of 17 grand.

Also, Datin's model shop was in his home's garage in North Hollywood. The hangar deck was the largest model built there and barely fit in there. I wonder if the large size of the model in the small space may have contributed to the fact that the cool special features (removable side wall, working elevator) were not included in the final version.

Datin last saw the model as it was delivered to Linwood Dunn's filming studio, and didn't know for sure what happened to it after, but assumed it was probably broken up and thrown away given its unwieldy size.

--Alex

 

For left-brain word fetishists, there is second edition of the book that I am told by the author reflects a higher degree of editing than the first (though I have made no comparisons). It also contains somewhat better images of the Enterprise blueprints.

 

Do you have a link to where the revised version can be bought? Amazon/Create Space only seems to have one version of the book (published November 2015).

 

Look for the version with this back cover (with reference to the "larger view of bluelines"). The ISBN is 9781518644887 and the copyright is 2016. I think the earlier edition has the same ISBN, so only way to ensure getting the later edition may be to get a pic of the back cover.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51UMHT+tacL.jpg