Deck Plans V: The Not-So-Final Go Around

[Warped9]

SupermanReturns said:
What exactly is wrong with the Franz Joseph plans?

It depends on your perspective. There's nothing wrong with FJ's plans per se, but they diverge in many respects from what we saw onscreen. That said FJ's plans still served to show us how things were generally oriented within the Constitution-class ships. And they served as an inspiration for a great many fans, myself included.

 

[Captain Robert April]

Here's a more visual way of demonstrating the discrepancies:

The colored portions are derived from Alan Sinclair's drawings, considered the most accurate publicly available plans of the eleven foot filming miniature, with the FJ drawings overlaid.

Any other questions?

 

[Ziz]

Captain Robert April said:
Any resemblence between the FJ plans and what was shown on screen is purely coincidental.

aridas sofia said:
^ That statement is both untrue and unfair, as has been amply documented on this BBS.

He took no more liberties with onscreen material than you have -- given his methodology of making exterior conform to interior.

So, if neither set of plans is considered fully correct, then neither can be considered fully incorrect. IOW,...

"Any resemblence between the CRA plans and what was shown on screen is purely coincidental."

Works both ways.

Someone will always be there to nit-pick one while defending the other, so what difference does it make in the long run? Just sit back and enjoy the one you want and don't worry about the other version. No one's forcing anyone to take one over the other.

 

[Captain Robert April]

aridas sofia said:
^ That statement is both untrue and unfair, as has been amply documented on this BBS.

Horse hockey. And you damn well know it.

He took no more liberties with onscreen material than you have -- given his methodology of making exterior conform to interior. And he had Matt Jefferies to comment on his work.

Which seems to have gone no further than the already completed plans being shown to Jefferies, his saying something like "Looks good to me" and that being the end of it (not that I blame Jefferies; he was working at the time on "Little House on the Prairie" and was probably lucky if he could spare more than a few minutes to go over FJ's plans).

Until FJ, nobody in any real position of authority had worked up any kind of detailed understanding of how the Enterprise worked, not Roddenberry, not Jefferies, nobody! so it's not like anybody was in a real position to counter anything he put down at the time, especially not in the apparently short amount of time that either Roddenberry or Jefferies saw the plans. They went back and forth on just what the nacelles did from one episode to the other, there are at least two different versions of where the antimatter is stored and what it does, and Main Engineering itself moves all over the inside of the ship. And, as FaltorPan's interview with FJ shows, he had more contact with college professors who probably couldn't tell a turbolift from a tribble than with anyone connected with Star Trek.

IMO, you would be better off letting your work speak for itself and not going back to bashing others. After all, you have no control over what he did or anyone's perceptions of it -- only over the work you produce.

I wasn't "bashing" anyone. I was simply answering a question. I"ve lost count of all the times I've lauded FJ for what he was able to accomplish at the time with the absence of reference materials at the time, but accuracy is not determined by how long something has been on the shelf!

And don't you have your own projects to keep you busy?

 

[Ptrope]

Guys, guys, guys!! Drop it! Again! Clearly you can't play nice on this subject, so just do the smart thing and refrain from this discussion for the umpteenth time - you're never going to agree, so move on. There is no justification whatsoever for going back over this every damn time the thread is restarted.

- Ptrope

 

[Captain Robert April]

Like I said, I was answering a question.

 

[Vance]

My penis is bigger than both ya'lls, stacked end-to-end.. so I win.

I mean, seriously guys. FJ was inaccurate, certainly, but inaccurate to WHAT? Three different models which all had dramatic variances? Sets that were made with little thought to the exterior of the ship? Designs with changing production values and notes within the writer's bible which wrought havoc on consistancy?

Give me a break.

April, you want to do your own thing? Cool. But your hate-on for FJ is obsessive, and it makes me, personally, not too interested in your project - as you go out of your way to NOT do something FJ did, it negatively impacts your own work.

Certainly, though, at the end of the day, you have things which don't mesh up with what's out there, like your rediculous bridge arrangement. Fine, that's what you want to do, then okay, but PLEASE get off your high horse when telling the rest of us that "my work is how it REALLY is, and FJ sucked, and so does anyone who liked him!"

 

[Ptrope]

Don't care - move on ... "answering questions" is usually where your threads take a turn for the worse, because they're always the same questions, and you always seem to feel the need to justify your position. Well, you don't - it's your art, and by now, it should be crystal clear to everyone - aridas - that there is little resemblance between your work and that of FJ, so when it comes up, just ignore it and move on. Don't encourage the argument, no matter how much you might enjoy making your point again - it's been made enough, so move on. I won't have this continuous bitching and whining like a bunch of kids on a playground, doing the, "He started it" routine!

 

[Captain Robert April]

Last time, promise...

Vance said:
My penis is bigger than both ya'lls, stacked end-to-end.. so I win.

Well, whatever you won, I hope you're happy with it.

seriously guys. FJ was inaccurate, certainly, but inaccurate to WHAT? Three different models which all had dramatic variances? Sets that were made with little thought to the exterior of the ship? Designs with changing production values and notes within the writer's bible which wrought havoc on consistancy?

You do realize you're actually making a large majority of my points with that statement, don't you?

Give me a break.

April, you want to do your own thing? Cool. But your hate-on for FJ is obsessive, and it makes me, personally, not too interested in your project - as you go out of your way to NOT do something FJ did, it negatively impacts your own work.

Certainly, though, at the end of the day, you have things which don't mesh up with what's out there, like your rediculous bridge arrangement. Fine, that's what you want to do, then okay, but PLEASE get off your high horse when telling the rest of us that "my work is how it REALLY is, and FJ sucked, and so does anyone who liked him!"

Times like these, I can really relate to Rush Limbaugh. Getting criticized for statements I never made and would never make by someone who apparently hasn't been following these threads very carefully, if at all.

For the umpteenth time, I do not hate FJ, not even a little.

What I don't have warm fuzzy feelings for is having FJ's version rammed down my throat and being called a heretic for daring to say he was off by a mile in certain respects.

 

[Ptrope]

Time to take the weekend off, folks ...

 

[Ptrope]

Okay, people should have had enough time to settle down, so we're opening this back up.

Folks, like every project here in the TrekArt forum, this is the work and the concept of the person who started the thread, in this case, Captain Robert April. It's posted here for the appreciation and discussion of the members and visitors of the TrekBBS; it is not here for people to take to task for not adhering to Franz Joseph's rightly-famous plans for the TOS Constitution class, which by now everyone should know are not canon, and in many cases, are inconsistent with the scenes and sets shown in the series. These are nothing more and nothing less than another perspective, created with a lot of work and a lot of research, and a lot of imagination, and ultimately, they are one man's vision, to which he is as entitled as anyone else. So if you want to discuss this project, discuss this project - please don't turn it into yet another argument about whose interpretation is "more valid," because, ultimately, they all are equally valid, until someone actually builds this starship. :thumbsup:

Thanks for your support, folks, and your cooperation.

- Ptrope

 

[Captain Robert April]

^ What he said.

 

[Captain Robert April]

Time for an actual update.

Today, campers, we have an attempt to scale the stage sets we all know to the interior of the ship...

Besides providing a little more grounding for filling in Deck 6, it'll also help in arranging the transporter rooms on Deck 7.

This might also have some ramifications for the bridge and Engineering.

 

[ancient]

Following the sets engineering is either

-close to the center of the saucer
-behind a curved corridor in the engine hull.

I did both on mine, though I think taking some liberties with the curviture of the corridor is ok, since it is difficult to judge exactly from OS images.

 

[Captain Robert April]

For now, I'm ignoring the corridor outside of Engineering. My main concern in that regard is to position the engine room in a logical position in relation to the M/ARC and orientiating it according to the location of the dilithium crystal thingamajig (which is why it's aft of the warp core; the crystals have to be between the matter/antimatter reaction and the warp nacelles for the system to work).

Besides, in both the first season version and second season onward, the corridor comes to an abrupt end just past the entrance to Engineering. Doesn't make a lot of sense in the saucer, but it's at least workable for the secondary hull, with a minimum of chickanery.

My main conern with that cut-and-paste number, though, is just to get the sets in the same scale as the ship drawings, to make it easier to transpose, say, the bridge into the proper place (that should prove interesting all by itself, considering all the crying and what all that went into that chapter).

 

[Ziz]

Not to throw a monkeywrench into your latest plan of attack, but how do you know the curved corridor of the set is representative of an actual corridor in the saucer?

What I mean is, maybe the set was built with an "extreme" curve to hide the fact that it is what it is and nothing more?

Work the other way - resize the set drawings based on some linear dimension - door size, hallway width, size of a particular room, something like that - and see where that puts you.

 

[Captain Robert April]

I'm not going by the size of the corridor in sizing the pic (since I suspect that FJ resized the corridors in his plans), I'm going by the size of the rooms, which is a bit more consistent.

Besides, you'll notice that laying the sets over the FJ deck plan has the corridor lining up with a turboshaft.

It's just an exercise in scaling one pic to another, nothing more.

 

[Timo]

As I'm a fundamentally lazy person, I'm going to ask rather than measure:

What is the scaling used in the comparison you posted? The crew quarters in the "set" element appear markedly smaller than the crew quarters in the "FJ" element. The corridor in "set" is narrower than in "FJ". And so forth.

Did you perhaps scale "set" correctly, that is, taking the real dimensions of the set and matching them with the known "real" dimensions of the overall saucer?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ziz]

I don't mean lining up the set plans with the FJ drawings...I know you're throwing those out. I mean the curve of the corridor itself might not necessarily be "correct", just "representative". Set design vs. ship desigh...that kind of thing.

If you're going by room size and such, great...that's the way it should be done. I just figured that after you've come this far, you don't want to rush the last part of it...especially a part that could end up being very repetetive - filling out a whole deck with essentially nothing but crew quarters.

 

[Captain Robert April]

Timo said:
As I'm a fundamentally lazy person, I'm going to ask rather than measure:

What is the scaling used in the comparison you posted? The crew quarters in the "set" element appear markedly smaller than the crew quarters in the "FJ" element. The corridor in "set" is narrower than in "FJ". And so forth.

Did you perhaps scale "set" correctly, that is, taking the real dimensions of the set and matching them with the known "real" dimensions of the overall saucer?

Timo Saloniemi

Just eyeballed it.

As such, I'm perfectly open to correction on this matter.