Now that I am viddying these fine examples of art down there at the fan art section, where they speculate (and back those speculations with awesome cgi) where everything is inside the Enterprise, and also the Shane Johnson book I avidly read back then,.... ... the airlocks placement dont make a bit of sense. Why would anyone choose to board the ship in the middle of the cargo deck where there is nothing besides a corridor from the side of the hangar bay to somewhere else (ok, there is a turbolift, but so far from the more useful places). Or the side of the fraking torpedo room? what is in there except crampiness? An there is tho one at the back of the bridge. The most busy place in the ship where visitors have, in principle, nothing to do.
Well on the model there's a docking hatch to the port side of the saucer rim. Looks like a large door that people could walk through. Dignitaries would probably enter through there if they didn't want to come in through the cramped and hostile-looking transporter room. Most people coming onto the ship would be crewmembers, anyway.
That one is fine as I see. The others would be just people crowding waiting fot the lift. Now I remember there are more ports in the sauce, Spock and Kirk used one for their little visit to Vger's memory.
Yeah but they are more like hatches... not the kind of thing you use for regular egress. I still say the other ports are for crewmembers so their being cramped is irrelevant.
Direct access to those sections? As for why Kirk used them? Who knows, it's Kirk he does stuff differently. I've always assumed that if we ever saw the Enterprise properly docked for a resupply you've connecting tubes to those ports with small personal cargo (luggage) for the crew moving throw the secondary hull dock, weapons handlers loading empty p-torp cases through the launcher dock, and the saucer docks being used for people coming and going to the dock/station.
We may as well ask where *else* to put the airlocks? If not at the torp bays and cargo bays, then where? First thing that jumps to my mind is around the rim of the primary hull, although there are already the gangways located there. So where should the airlocks be? Given what we know about TMP Enterprise, I don't know where else would be better or at least as good.
In TMP you see the gangway between the dock and the Saucer airlock. You see the shuttlepods delivering supplies through the hanger and into the cargo deck. I think the hatch locations make sense. I thought a better portrayal of the Enterprise in dock was in Into Darkness we finally see the ship connected to dock umbilicals, etc. JJ Trek seems to use the shuttles a lot more to carry personnel and supplies than we saw in the first 6 movies. -Chris
Because the studio gave him a bloated budget to create all that eye candy. After all, the Transporter was added as a cheap way of getting people to and from the ship on a TV budget.
An obvious rationale for the placement we see is accessibility from the outside. There's already access at the rear of the secondary hull, and there can be none at the front; the empty middles of the sides make the best sense for docking ports in this hull. There are probably various hatches at the bottom, even though their outlines aren't easily spotted in the early movies - the E-A features color-coding suggestive of such things. But docking ports won't work there, because having one flush with the bottom would require gravity adjustment facilities that consume space unduly. Really, what you need for a docking port is a vertical wall unobstructed by things like warp engines or deflector dishes. None of that is available on the saucer, so the bridge aft extension makes good sense there, adding the verticality in the middle of the unobstructiveness. Some is available on the sides of the neck, and the torp deck is the thickest part of the neck so it can best accommodate things beyond the docking ports. Anywhere else you run into problems and have to do silly things like the saucer ventral docking ports / airlocks with their double hatches; you can only dock teeny weeny pods there. Timo Saloniemi
Shuttles are good for outsided items too big/delicate for certain transporters. I don't like the dock on the torpedo tube... In addition to the main gangway, remember, there are two ports on the underside of the saucer that are covered by twin doors that are flush with the lower saucer exterior. A spacesuited Kirk emerged from one of these in ST :TMP to rescue spock I would have made those weapon ports to slide open for Kelvin/Phase cannon style extra armaments.
You couldn't dock the Vulcan shuttle in those, though. And even the saucertop port places severe limitations on what can dock and what cannot. In contrast, you could basically dock another starship to the extremely accessible secondary hull ports... Alas, we haven't seen a shuttle capable of handling cargo that would be too large for a "regular" transporter... Even the giant prop used in STXI only had teeny weeny personnel doors to the sides and the rear, and a floor hatch no larger than the average transporter platform (plus you'd need to hover to get any cargo in or out that way). Timo Saloniemi
The Enterprise D connected to Starbases with the Dorsal/Neck Pylon Airlock, considering the different shapes of vessels it is a logical spot. On the Refit there are not very many vertical surfaces to use. The lower Saucer Airlocks might work for Travelpods, anything larger would have to use the A-Deck or sides... I like having different ways to enter the ship- one nice feature introduced in TMP. Being forced to either beam over or use the Hangar Deck always seemed limited.
I don't think there's a problem with the airlock placements, they kind of account for the whole ship. People who are crewmembers in the engineering section enter through the one in the engineering section, those in the neck enter through the neck, and those in the saucer section enter through there. I reckon the main entrance for officials will be the bridge one, I'm sure there'll be a little welcome lounge, and it's only one floor below to the Officers lounge.
Dunno - as a method of entry, it's awfully clumsy. The largest spacecraft we saw docking with those ports couldn't have carried more than a couple of dozen people at the very most, and probably had space for less than a dozen, so it's not a valid means of commuting to work. A single proper walkway (such as the one suggested as being on the saucer rim, even if we never quite saw it in action) would have way more capacity than all these docking ports put together, were the ship to dock with a pier. For commuting when not moored, the transporters ought to be more convenient. For receiving the occasional visitor in the depths of space, these ports are fine and well, but only for craft that don't fit inside the shuttle landing bay. And it's difficult to imagine a deep space encounter situation calling for more than one docking port... Or for access into each and every section of the ship. On the other hand, if a docking port doesn't require anything more than sacrificing a few square meters of outer hull, there's little point in not having one. It's not as if the outer hull has better uses! There are precious few portholes or visible weaponry or instrumentation to compete for the acreage... And the possibility of invisible sensors is sort of decreased by the use of very visible greeblies for hull sensors in basically every other Star Trek spacecraft. Timo Saloniemi
We need to also remember, the saucer can be a life boat if the Star Drive must be jettisoned. And likewise, the Secondary hull serves as life boat if the saucer is uninhabitable. So there is another reason for having the airlocks there. And They're at the widest area of the secondary hull. But, I don't know if they were ever meant to be docked with anything but a service pod or shuttle. The gangway doors on the saucer, are much larger and I think allow entry to F and G decks. They're also rectangular so a shuttle or pod could not dock there.
We don't really know that the secondary hull would do any good in emergency separation. Sure, some TOS references suggest there's plenty of life support capacity down there, possibly including Kirk's cabin in the early episodes. But the cavernous cargo hold in TMP might have done away with much of that. And neither TOS nor TMP gave the secondary hull impulse capabilities, any more than the saucer got warp capabilities. Doesn't mean there wouldn't be a need for docking ports in both halves in a separation emergency. In a real hurry, it would be way too clumsy to unpark any shuttles from the hangar and use them for shuttling between the hulls, but a slower-paced emergency might benefit from this. And perhaps the ports can handle the unseen but signage-verified lifepods, so that a partially loaded pod can be docked after launch and stuffed with more refugees? Having the docking port right next to the lifepod stations (just like Probert's matte interior suggests) would be helpful there. We don't know if a docking port can mate with another docking port. It doesn't look like a symmetrical system at all, but we might be mistaken, and the saucer might dock with the secondary hull after separation. Alas, the saucer has no ports capable of reaching any of the secondary hull ports, but still... Timo Saloniemi
Thers's plenty of hatches on the top of the saucer, and many airlocks on the bottom, as we see in TMP. I'm sure there's many access ports for refueling on the engineering section. What about the one entering the cargo area after Kirk steps on board in TMP ?