Wow. LOL.
So, to review, I expressed disgust at the recent penchant for folks to try to rescale (typically embiggen) every ship, often with genius moves like "why not just... pretend {some details are} smaller on the model" to justify it ( a quote from you in this thread, by the way).
Yes, unlike "The windows are definitely on the floor or ceiling, rather than a height where people can see out of them," something that's totally unsupported and yet you've taken so deeply to heart you can't even understand the concept that "identical windows one above the other are probably each about the same height from the floor."
And it seems sensible that "rescalers," a theoretical bloc that you've invented and assigned me to be the representative of, keep making things bigger and rarely make them smaller. Of course no one wants to "fix" the "problem" of interiors fitting inside exteriors with room to spare, and only wants to talk about it when official sizes would have rooms sticking out the sides and heads scraping ceilings.
Way to show that rescalers are reasonable and apt to consider things carefully. At the merest suggestion that the round and oval windows on the widest saucer deck aren't at a height we might assume, you've jumped to mockery with absurdities rather than give up on a potential rescaling argument.
That tells me that your entire bit about other people being fixated on defending the Probert number is actually projection. You are fixated on having an argument against that number.
Because it doesn't fit. I don't have to have this argument about
Voyager. How would it be possible to argue the ship doesn't make sense at the official size without arguing against the official size? You're the one who insists on it, if there wasn't an official figure, if we were just trying to figure out how big it should be from observation of the sets and models and how they were used in the films, then I could still argue for whatever size I wanted, but what would your position be? And yet I'm the one who's obsessed with a number I'm arguing is better left ignored?
For reasonable people, the extant scaling and evidence for it has inertia which a rescaling argument must overcome. It isn't overcome with a single magic bullet ('zomg that door is wrong height so ship is k1l0M3t3rZ!1!') nor is it overcome by ignoring or mocking simple fixes that nullify a rescaler's argument.
"Spock was the first Vulcan in Starfleet" had "inertia" even though "The Immunity Syndrome" had made it obviously wrong from the jump and it was eventually conclusively disproven. Also, "the number is now, has been, and ever shall be the number" isn't exactly disproving the "minion of orthodoxy" thing.
Your argument was that the gangway hatch was between windows, and therefore too tall. I am saying is that it is obviously placed in the center of the saucer rim vertically, so is logically between decks (as has been hypothesized since Shane Johnson, IIRC).
Your now-expanded argument that this makes it 1.5 decks tall is nullified.
Nope, you skipped the important bit.
That door could be taller than a deck, no problem, it's how it fits with everything else that's the issue.
1. The gangway's bottom is parallel with the bottom of the lower rim windows. The gangway's top is parallel with the top of the upper rim windows.
2. It is reasonable to assume that the windows on the saucer rim are all approximately the same height from the deck and ceiling. Wait, did I say "assume"? I meant "conclude." The is no evidence to support your unshakable axiom that one level's windows are on the floor and/or another's are on the ceiling. Not
the concept art,
not the sets, not anything.
3. The gangway is about the same height as the circular docking ports, which also have
a known height.
Therefore, if all of that is true, and no details are altered on the sets, models, or official figures, the deck height of the saucer rim must be a fraction of the height of the circular docking ports.
More to the point, you're a long-time regular on a forum where it has been done to death, with you participating in the threads, and you're feigning ignorance?
Yeah, I'm a long-time regular. That's why I've been convinced that a bigger ship makes more sense rather than just repeating an arbitrarily-derived official number. There have been diagrams, 3D reconstructions, overlays. Much more argument has been put forth for why the official size is wrong than why it's right. I think this might be the first time anyone has taken a hard stand demanding respect for the official figures in a fannish discussion (people defend the official figures when
new official figures come out (and that's probably more complaining about the accompanying redesigns) but, when it's just us kids joshing around, people are usually more relaxed about contradicting the tech manuals and sourcebooks).
Put simply, with me as someone who only sporadically drops in on TrekBBS, you ought to be able to run complete circles around me on this topic, not struggle as you've done so far.
You posted a puke emoji, you didn't ask for my conversion testimony. I'll cite chapter and verse at the end if that's what you need.
You've referenced the ill fit of the Rec Deck, mismatch of docking ports between different models (albeit without demonstrating that the AMT difference is significant on-screen), and your bit about the gangway. Oh, and some random reference to the shuttlebay, presumably regarding Star Trek V where IIRC the bay is too small, not too large.
No, I was talking about the TMP shuttlebay, but let's put a pin in that.
LOL. So they use the AMT model in some faraway shots and now it's the absolute highest canon model, to you, outstripping the enormous and expensive model and even smaller partials?
The partials are worse. You want to break out the ruler and show me
this bad boy is consistent with a 305 meter ship? Or the bridge close-ups showing the saucer is either
a cone or
perfectly flat on top?
The decision in the other universe to embiggen the ship to match all their other bog ships was not based on ST5, but okay. Is your argument of large size for the refit now to be based on the Discoverse? That would tend to be the last redoubt of rescalers, I would think.
Brothers and sisters, I was once like our friend here. I was seduced by the simplicity of dicta. The ship's size is the size of the ship, easily found in the Star Trek Encyclopedia, attested to by the revelation of scaling charts. I scorned people who took the easy way out of making the ship bigger to "make sense." But, my heart nursed doubts. First, it was the world of Babylon 5, where the official figures... changed! Most infamously, the White Star, a small, fast hot-rod of a ship,
jumped from 118 meters long, to 268 meters long to match the bridge set as built (fair enough), to almost 500 meters to accommodate a fighter bay
larger than required to meet the needs of the narrative. It seemed absurd, that this ship whose defining feature was that it was smaller than anything else, and flew like a fighter, was bigger than almost every Starship Enterprise. The people making the decisions were wrong. Just... wrong.
But that couldn't be the case in Star Trek! Babylon 5's visual effects were home-spun, the designers, animators, and modelers (who were often the same person) scrambling under tight deadlines to put together anything that would work. Star Trek was so engineered, so grounded. Every ship had diagrams and blueprints and deck plans, they were even on the sets, ten feet across! They had to know what they were doing, they had to be
scrupulous, right?
But then cracks formed.
I learned about how the Enterprise-D saucer had been one deck thick, then it became two when they built the Ten Forward set, then the second studio model had the design changed to reflect that, but most people didn't care for that, so we've still got two squished decks in the saucer rim that's only thick enough for one.
I saw that Mr. Spock's head would scape the ceiling of every deck on the Excelsior. I'd known about the Defiant, the Bird of Prey, but those weren't just the isolated problem-children of Treknology that I'd been led to believe, the issue seemed pervasive. Then I saw the worse of it. The TMP Enterprise, the coolest-looking, most detailed Star Trek ship...
and the cargo bay designed and painted by Mr. Slide Rule himself would poke out the sides, and needed a ramp (a ramp!) for the travel pod airlock to meet the deck. The worst of it was when
I tried to put rooms behind the windows myself, and both saucer rim decks had to be squished down absurdly, and almost everything else was as cramped as a submarine, nothing like the luxurious spaces seen in the actual movie.
But things always made sense once you made the ship bigger.
Too many compromises. Too little sense. Too much cheating. But what if... what if I just made the ship big enough so the windows made sense? So the innards fit without being visibly distorted, as I'd kept having to do?
Finally it came to me: It's all made up! The ships, the sets, the numbers, they're all imperfect reflections of some platonic ideal out in the Sci-Fi Heaven of Forms, a shared dream we're all trying to grasp. The sets don't match the models. The models don't match each other. None of it matches the deckplans. There were multiple models of the TMP Enterprise, and the scale-establishing features were differently sized on every one. And no one notices! No one cares! I could image, I could
build a model where the windows were a little higher, or a little lower, where the circular airlocks were a tick smaller, where the fantail lined up with the middeck, where the whole ship was a bit longer, and no one would even know unless I told them! We can reconcile everything, make compromises slight enough to go unnoticed, once we let go of the dogma of the official stated ship lengths. The mad visions of Timo have shown the way; we're all just making this shit up! Think outside the box, you might find something that works.
My point in bringing up the ILM AMT model was that this proposed hypothetical, rationalized TMP Enterprise, should I ever build it (it's fairly far down the project list, and so many other people have so many good versions, I like to take on projects where I can really raise the bar) would probably look more like the eight-footer at a casual glance than the screen-used AMT model did, but everything would fit together. It was a justification for knowingly reimagining the design rather than insisting on smashing the square peg into the round hole; I'm confident you can adjust the details of the ship to concord better and still have a smaller apparent difference to the hero miniature than the many "close enough" models actually used in production.
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