I applied the same Occam's razor to the number of nearly identical rooms within the TOS Enterprise.
I'm not sure why. The stardate theory was sound as such, and didn't contradict anything on screen. It didn't tie the hands of the writers of future episodes, either. Why should one apply a razor to a complex work of art, unless one has an
a priori reason for Calvinistically fanatic iconoclasm?
As for the situation in "The Omega Glory," the montage which showed an empty engine room while Kirk and Company occupied an engine room also showed rooms that were all empty of crew uniforms -- an unlikely situation, given the story, so it's possible that the empty engine room was a goof-up.
That evokes two immediate responses in my perverted mind:
a) There can't be such a thing as a "goof" in the Trek universe. What we see is all equally real. If it doesn't make sense, then our intellect isn't up to the challenge!
b) Surely when people started desiccating to white powder left and right, the majority would rush to sickbay? Most compartments would thus be entry, while the sickbay would be jam-packed (as we saw) and the corridors outside would be even more so (but we didn't peek into those).
Had there been more soundstage space and money, a far more effective depiction of a maze would be... a maze -- of winding passageways, Jefferies tubes, and the like. There isn't much maze-like about multiple large, open rooms.
Yet what we did get was a maze as well: an open space (of which we always really saw just one corner, that is, two intersecting walls) bordering on some heavy equipment behind a grille on one side, and expanding to a floor littered with multi-storey pieces of heavy machinery, behind or even atop which the villain of the week could hide.
The set wasn't built "wild" enough to allow the photographers to actively create the illusion of a larger space, for example by moving major walls between shots in a single episode. But the ambiguities in filming certainly allowed for it - and the writing demanded it.
It might be that the big transformer things that lay oriented whichever way in different eps were in fact movable, perhaps gliding on air cushions or those nifty antigravs when needed. But the changing walls, the appearance of the entry alcove, the emergence of the floor cylinders... At some point, one would wish to draw a limit on what the shipboard repairmen could achieve. (Certainly the addition of the second level would be a bit much!)
Why would such rooms be nearly identical in size and configuration?
I don't see why they wouldn't be. After all, the function of them all would be identical. Taking a peek in the machine room of a modern seagoing vessel, there would be multiple gigantic diesels, with associated control equipment at both ends of each engine, and then a central control room elsewhere.
It's not as if Scotty really would be "headquartered" at any of his different-looking engine rooms. He repairs and adjusts machinery here and there, checks readouts on that beige switchboard that mysteriously changes location from episode to episode, and accesses specific systems via Jeffries tubes, but the overall nerve center seems to be his bridge station.
The engineering rooms of Saladin's, Ptolemy's, Miranda's, all the saucer-only ships has to be (IMO) located near the impulse engines, per TMoST and FJ.
The
Miranda saucer isn't really related to the
Constitution one in that respect. And the single-nacellers should have a very different configuration in every respect, to accommodate the described systems. Probably only the rough exteriors are modular and interchangeable, while machinery inside can be positioned in many ways (say, with two torpedo tubes atop the saucer on
Saladin, but up to six at the bottom of the saucer in the
Constitution we see and hear described on screen).
Timo Saloniemi