BK613 said:
SHAW I am so amazed by the quality of your "sketches" and the reasoning behind them. Keep up the good work.
Thanks!
BK613 said:
The bridge, for example, is basically an expanded aircraft cockpit. The helm/navigation console is very similar to the pilot/co-pilot setup and nothing like you would have found on navy ships of the day. The separate stations around the edges are reminiscent of the radio operator/flight engineer/radar operator stations on large military aircraft of the day.
Actually, by the time that
Star Trek was in development, the
arrangement of helm stations on most submarines matched the configuration used in TOS (with the dive officer seated in about the same position as the captain's chair on the TOS bridge). And this arrangement has remained effectively unchanged to this day (with the best control room reference I could find appearing in
this 2001 report,
here). The other bridge stations don't look all that different from the
sonar stations or
fire control stations either.
This is not to say that aircraft cockpit design wasn't a factor, just that it wasn't the only factor.
BK613 said:
Early Enterprise drawings also suggest this background. The "nose cap" over the main dish for example. The fact that he labeled the nacelles "power units" early on suggests that he viewed the engines as the primary source of power on the ship (just like they were on the aircraft he was familiar with.) IOW instead of power flowing up the struts to run the engines, power flowed down the struts from the engines to run the ship. (Some dialog makes a lot more sense when viewed from this perspective.)
So SHAW when you are trying to understand MJ's design choices, I would suggest looking at 40s 50s and 60s aircraft design as well.
I'm quite sure that you are right about much of his early design thoughts, but over the course of early production much of that gave way.
On the energy production/distribution, power for the ship seemed divided into three areas... main engines in engineering, impulse engines and the main energizers. Spock effectively took out the main engines using the phaser banks in
"Paradise Syndrome", which left the Enterprise crippled for several months. That seemed (in that episode) to be the equipment behind the engine room.
Still, there is something to be said about having the power production aspects within the nacelles themselves. Which is why I've wanted to stay as ambiguous as possible on this issue. All arguments have valid points, and there just isn't enough definitive evidence to nail any of this stuff down... which in and of itself is one of the best aspects of the design (which helps keep it timeless).
But you are right, I should spend more time looking at aspects of WWII and Cold War era aircraft... and the thought had crossed my mind while watching
Dr. Strangelove a few weeks ago.
BK613 said:
On a side note, I didn't see the armory on your list of rooms.
Yep... I've got to add that one to the list. I'm currently thinking that the armory would be adjacent to the transporter section (which I'm considering putting on deck 7)... though a secondary arms locker near the hangar deck also seems in order.
Masao said:
Shaw, where did you get this volume for Ohio? Since the submerged displacement is the weight of the volume of water taken up by the sub and a (metric) ton of water has a volume of 1 cubic meter, shouldn't the volume be about 18,750 cubic meters?
That post was a very quick and dirty estimate that I did scratched out on a piece of paper (long since lost). But I'll do my best to reconstruct what I was thinking at the time.
The Ohio class submarine is in effect a long cylinder. By looking at it, I (for the purpose of that estimate) felt that where is was not cylinder like (where it tapers and the added volume of the sail) effectively canceled so that I could treat it as a cylinder of 7.5 meters in radius and 170 meters in length. That is where the 30,054 m^3 came from.
When considering displacement, one usually takes in to consideration that for most ships, a significant amount of the ship remains above water, but with a submerged submarine, this isn't an issue... though one has to take into account that a large amount of water needs to be added to the sub's volume to get it to submerge.
Should the mass of the sub be equal to the mass of the water that would have filled that same volume?
Both airships and submarines are based on the same principles of buoyancy equilibrium control. And that is a function of volume and density to change the apparent mass of the craft.
Again, it was quick and dirty, and was an example of my train of thought on this issue rather than rock solid data. I plan on getting much better numbers before attempting the calculations again, and even then I'll make sure to note that it is a
guestimate rather than a hard figure. After all, there are going to be areas that I have no idea of what type of equipment might have been there while working on these plans.
But I will point out that I do believe that the Enterprise has a certain amount of symmetry in mass distribution along the axis of the impulse engines as illustrated in this image...

So I'll also be dividing up what ever overall mass I get for the ship such that the system of four components work nicely with the arrangement of the impulse engines. Which, in turn, might add weight to
BK613's argument of the nacelles really being the bulk of the main engines.
But all that is a ways away from where I'm at now. I'm still (slowly, obviously) working towards finishing my exterior studies of the 11 foot model.
I've decided to first finish that project on it's own, independent of the interior, to round off my earlier work on the
33 inch model and the
original Jefferies construction plans. I figure those three projects together make for one large nice historical look at the filming models of TOS (though I haven't ruled out adding in an additional study of the 1967 AMT kit as well as it also had screen time in TOS).
With that information documented, I'd feel much better about showing a slightly modified exterior to help make sure that interior and exterior elements line up a little better (for example, the exterior windows of the hangar deck gallery).
I would like to thank everyone for their continued interest and input on this.