Not entirely sure the pylon "bump" holding the warp drive together would necessarily have full decks like that. I always envisioned it as the main engineering section containing the primary intermix assembly that could be easily separated from the secondary hull and jettisoned in the event of an emergency.
It could even be a full, "solid" ovoid, symmetric wrt the vertical-walled "waist" or "equator" that just barely peeks above the hull surface. An armored vessel for whichever purpose, and probably jettisonable, but significantly also featuring armor between the internal doodad and the interior of the ship proper. Timo Saloniemi
I have not fully detailed what is inside the ship. Those decks are placeholders. However, Praetor and I are on the same page about the typical warp core and shaft. If you check out some of the earlier pages in this topic you can see some of his work. I'm basing mine on being similar to the TMP and TNG Enterprise warp cores, so a vertical shaft up to the deflection crystal and a horizontal shaft back to the hump with a small vertical shaft before it splits and goes to each nacelle. What I posted was to show the deflector dish compared to the TMP Refit design. The cross section does that most effectively since it is recessed.
If the larger of the two refits reflects the deflector dishes being the same size, it seems very close to the was they appear onscreen together in the movies to me. If the smaller of the two refits reflects the deflectors dishes being the same size, it makes the Excelsior close enough to the size of the Galaxy to match, fairly well in my opinion, early effects shots from TNG.
Yes, they were not consistent in how they represented the size of the ships. Remember how large the Bozeman was compared to the Ent D? I don't take the effects scales into account, only the details on the ship. The windows on the secondary hull of the Excelsior are a bit close, but if they lead into the cargo area it is easy to make thinner decks along the outside of the cargo area (so not true decks). At 467, the windows just above the edge of the saucer make good clearstory style windows. at 542, those windows would be the deck above the edge. In both cases they make good locations for VIP quarters. But at 542, the windows on the secondary hull line up to 8 foot decks. That is what Probert designed for the interior of the refit saucer so that is what I've used for both the refit and the Excelsior except where the windows indicate taller decks such as in the secondary hull. For either size I use a sunken bridge. There is no way to align the ST:VI or Generations changes to the bridge or the front area of the hanger to any deck arrangment. The little lounge in the newer bridge module requires either a gigantic Excelsior class (larger than the Galaxy class) or that the lounge is on a 0 deck that is above the bridge. The new area in front of the hanger also can't align to any decks so those must be something besides windows. And since Jefferies gave us a sunken bridge for the TOS Series version of the ship, I think we can apply it to other ships (the Galaxy has a lowered bridge by design). His plans would call for taller decks, but for the TMP era, it is Probert's designs that should govern the deck spacing and he has 9 feet between decks. There is plenty of room, even in the saucer, for rooms with higher ceilings if you put them in the right place.
Could your reclarify for me which one is scaled so that the deflector dish size is the same for both the Excelsior and refit? Here are some of my thoughts after reading this thread, although I skipped some of the history chapters, etc. I wish the original poster were here to respond to some of these thoughts, as his/her ideas were really interesting. Great that you tried to address the variations used in the show. I like the idea that the Centaur and Mediterranean are the same class, just variations. We should consider that canon. I imagine NCC numbers working such that the next ship of the same class/type/whatever after 2099 could be 20100, instead of 2100, meaning that Excelsior numbers could cover a lot of years, and that there is no need to account for the jump from 3000's to 10000's in the registries that has very little filling it in. I suggest that the reason for low and high registries serving together and that TNG and DS9 show ships of various eras all at the same time is simple: If a ships is lost, Starfleet replaces it with one of a newer design era, and otherwise just keeps upping the amount of ships in the fleet with newer designs as they come out. An Excelsior class USS Yorktown could be replaced with an Ambassador class USS Yorktown, but if the Excelsior class USS Yorktown survived, it would just still be in service as long as it could be kept in operational condition. The Ambassador serves as an example to me me of what an uprated Excelsior could look like, filling in more of the unused space that many have mentioned could be there. I think the USS Dallas depicted the warp core as being in the bulge at the base of the wings. To match with the warp core ending at the Impulse Deflection Crystals, it would make more sense for it to run vertically through the center of the ship, maybe even give the vented neck a purpose of generating a field of some kind. On Trekyards, Probert explains that the vented nacelles (which glow blue on the Galaxy) were carried over from the Excelsior even though he did not feel he had knowledge about what the vents would be able to do. The Pen-nacelles have this blue venting, too, it is just painted on. How about a dual-core design, with two cores side-by-side, one TMP-style swirl chamber and on TNG-style reactor? The TNG-style one would be added later. One for each Impulse Deflection Crystal How about two swirl chambers in the center of the ship, and then a TNG-style core in the bulge? I read a comment about the power transfer conduits and how they would split. It seems to me that there would be a single conduit out of the core that would split at the bulge. This is sort of like how the power transfer conduits head in different directions at the end of the swirl chamber at the back of the engine room in TMP. In TNG the split happens right at the vertical part of the core, an advancement in that the horizontal part of the system is not needed, and perhaps the reason that other terms that were used early on got changed to "warp core." By the way, what is the second tall structure running behind the warp core in the TNG engine room? Would the Excelsior have one? EDIT: I note in the linked images posted a couple pages back that the fan designed engine room has tow of these extra structures running up the back of the warp core and that they have some TMP-style connection detailing. Depending on what they do, Could these be the two structures running up to the two impulse deflection crystals?
Yes, I'm not sure why Praetor has been quiet, and I can't address most of your post because it seems you would like him to answer your questions. However, a couple of things you brought up relate to things I have been considering. I look at the NCC numbers as doled out by Starfleet for ships they would like to build. Between the initial assignment and the final launch of the ship, things can change. Take the Constitution Class for instance. We have several different clumps of numbers that have become canon. The 1700 series, the 1600 series, 1071 and 1371. If the Constitution is 1700 and that is the main series up through 1764, then where do the other numbers come from. The same with the Excelsior class. Excelsior is 2000, there are several around 2500 (2541, 2544) and then the numbers get higher. To account for this what I see happening is that Starfleet has contract numbers they have assigned to a specific purpose or even class. Some get cancelled, some get postponed. Cancelled ones are skipped. Postponed numbers may get built for the originally intended purpose or they might get built as something else. The Excelsior seems to be an experiment that they were not sure was going to pan out. So they didn't plan on more around it. When it worked they were at a higher number. So the next batch was in the 2500 range (including the Hood and Repulse, if you go by the number they painted on the model for the Hood). But the Excelsior was a great workhorse and they kept making them. So they would use a few NCC numbers for each batch and then the next batch would be a new group of numbers and the numbers would keep climbing. I see the Star Trek VI and Generations versions of the Excelsior Class as having two roles so they would make one or the other with the 1701B version being produced in far smaller numbers. But that accounts for all the bizarre numbering. Grissom being in the 600's, Reliant being in the 1800's, The Scouts and Dreadnaughts in the TMP dialog being in the 500's, 600's, and 2100's. And periodically contracts would have to be renegotiated due to changing times and so the new contract would jump to higher numbers. It is far different from how Jefferies imagined it (1701 being the first ship of the 17th design), but then the various productions didn't worry about sticking to any exact numbering system.
Hard to think those two shots are from the same ship. When I first saw Excelsior in ST III, the saucer seemed miles wide. And yet, when it chased the Enterprise outside spacedock--it somehow seemed less impressive when I saw how the saucer was a bit smaller. So help me--but I thought for awhile they had used differensaucers--in the same way the Golden Gate Bridge model had forced perspective built into it for the BoP to fly under. Excelsior's saucer is probably the hardest thing for fans to draw. I have seen so many versions.... This is such a great page https://sites.google.com/view/excelsior-thegreatexperiment/renderings I actually like the FASA mini because it seems to capture the feel I first had when I saw Excelsior. I can't get the link to work.
I'm fine with anyone responding to my thoughts given in my last post, the reason I mentioned wondering about the original poster's thoughts is that I really find the idea of a 622 meter Excelsior fascinating. In some ways it alleviates scale concerns/debates about earlier ships by suggesting that even if the earlier ones were larger than we understood them to be, the ships after the Excelsior would be staying the same official size. With regards to your thoughts on registries, they are logical. I favor the idea that actual Starfleet Starships with USS names and NCC numbers should still be a bit rare and special, even in the TNG era, and this could rarity could be explained by the fact that SS named vessels with NAR and other registries are in use. So using a system the way I described means that, for example, there could be a lot fewer than 36000 ships built between NCC-4000 and NCC-40000. Combine that with the construction delays and other numbering concerns you bring up, add in the fact that some ships do get destyored or retired without there numbers being re-used, and even in a system with ships numbered as high as things like 70637, starships could still be somewhate rare and special for the purposes of storytelling.
I would also say that each shuttle should technically have its own number, but gets reassigned a different number depending on where it s based. As we've seen, those that are assigned to a ship carry the ship's registry with the shuttle number appended.
I love it when people reference my page. That drawing next to the photo of the FASA model is one I did back in the 80's. Mostly that site is just a collection of the photos I've acquired over the years. Google sites shrank most of them down from the original. There are so many different drawings of the Excelsior and so many are just plain wrong (and I have the photos to prove it). So many places have the width of the saucer wrong. Even Christies and the current owner have the width too small. Most of the errors go back to a few source that others have gone by. The AMT kit made several mistakes that Jackill copied. The biggest problem is that no one has had access to the original model. And until recently, the photos available were not the right angles or not detailed enough. But thanks to all the photos at the Christie's auction and a bunch that Bill George posted, there are enough to see just about every inch of it in good detail. The link is wrong. It should be http://engineering.thetafleet.net/manuals.html
Now, I seem to remember some really good looking blueprints hit the web some years ago--I first saw them over at modelermagic.com I think it was the Enterprise-B studio model drawings/blueprints--though nothing comes up now. An interesting take https://daftworks.co.uk/gilso/Single Ship/FEDERATION/FED PAGE 2 ROLL OVER/USS ENTERPRISE-B BLUEPRINT.jpg https://daftworks.co.uk/gilso/Single Ship/FEDERATION/FED PAGE 1 ROLL OVER/EXCELSIOR BLUEPRINT.jpg http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/scans/excelsior1.htm Another offering http://www.modelermagic.com/?p=93332 From earlier in this thread: https://imgur.com/a/V98w5 That makes Excelsior huge--with that tiny bridge. A very nice idea: https://www.deviantart.com/bernard-guignard/art/Excelsior-Concept-3view-684477866 Do both versions, please.
Nice drawings don't necessarily make for accurate drawings. I would point out the flaws, but .... Bill George posted those from his personal collection. They are kind of mixed up but a great many of them are from just before the model was converted to the Enterprise B Or a very sunken bridge. I feel that ring just below the bridge is not an indicator of the deck. I've focused my attention solely on the original 7 foot studio model and its three variations. Greg Jein's model was made from photos, he did not have access to the original model.
Something you might wish to add to your Great Experiment page--The Lunar Models Excelsior: https://www.resinilluminati.com/showthread.php?s=49e7b4a9da7f14d571ce363aab13325c&t=15409&page=8 http://scifimodelaction.com/sfmaforum/index.php?topic=3185.0
Unfortunately I have never found any good details of the model kit built as it came. It has some things that are right and some that are way off (and that page has some things that the builder thought were making it more accurate that aren't that accurate). So I probably will skip it because it is rare enough that it didn't impact the quest for accurate Excelsior plans/models.
Some nice models were made of Excelsior study models by an artist named Paul Cairncross (pauly 1972) https://s149.photobucket.com/user/pauly1972_photos/library/Yorkshire class USS Denver NCC-54927?page=0 https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/uss...-named-uss-xavier.255706/page-2#post-10229971 Rats--password protected now. He has done good work over the years--and you may want to contact him Here https://s149.photobucket.com/user/pauly1972_photos/library?page=1 http://www.starshipmodeler.net/talk/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=124298&start=270 Interesting (O/T) https://roguereviewer.wordpress.com/category/star-trek/planet-of-the-titans/
Yup, I have all those. Bill George posted them originally. All the ones outside and in pieces are during Generations.
I think it is time for me to finish my Excelsior drawings. Since no other accurate drawings exist, I am including some alternate views and some enlargements of certain details. I'll probably submit the set to the Cygnus blueprint database so everyone can get the full size imaged from there. I think I will do it in 4 sets. The Mk I NX-1000, the Mk II NCC-2000, and the Mk III NCC-1701-b with set 4 being the details, which are shared, with some small variations for the Mk III.