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

[Kagan]

WOW! Memories of my childhood perusing the Josef blueprints daily just flashed into my mind.

And your next pic will be?

 

[Captain Robert April]

^ Hopefully squaring away some of those cabins. And figuring out where the bowling alley is on this level.

 

[Kagan]

Captain Robert April said:
^ Hopefully squaring away some of those cabins. And figuring out where the bowling alley is on this level.

How about Corridor 5, Sections 27B-33A?

 

[Captain Robert April]

^Did that one six months ago.

 

[Captain Robert April]

I'm thinking the outer rim compartments will primarily be rec rooms, mess halls, etc.

Question: Would bunking the crew four to a room be able to fit the other four hundred crew on this level comfortably?

 

[ancient]

Try 8 to a room. But personally I wouldn't put everyone on the same level.

 

[Captain Robert April]

The only level left. Officer quarters on decks 4 and 5, permanent engine crew quarters down in the secondary hull, still leaves over three hundred crewmen in need of a bunk, plus enough overage for VIPs and other passengers.

Might be time for an overview of the whole shebang....

 

[USS Jack Riley]

Captain - Have you considered "hot-bunking?" In essence, 2 (or more, depending) crew members are assigned the same bunk. It is still used in the Navy today on smaller vessels (especially subs) and it mioght solve your space issues.

Of course, this being a Starfleet vessel, and their being the possibility that a woman and a man be assigned the same bunk, that could give a whole new meaning to the term hot-bunking!

 

[Captain Robert April]

Something like that might work for the barracks setup down in the secondary hull, but up in the saucer, I'd like to at least come somewhat close to Roddenberry's ideal of every creman having their own cabin.

 

[doctorwho 03]

Looking at some of the Ent-D deckplans I have, it seems Roddenberry pretty much acheived that ideal by the TNG era.

You could try having 2 people sharing a cabin much like the double stateroom in the technical manuel. That would mean the number of rooms needed would be cut in half theoretically.

From the looks of things, it may be hard to avoid any bunking up.

 

[Captain Robert April]

I think it's a foregone conclusion that there are going to be some bunking involved, especially in the lower ranks.

 

[Captain Robert April]

Taking care of some old business.

Mike Okuda speaks:
Sorry for not responding sooner. We've been working 7 days a week for months. I should be working now.

I have a tremendous amount of respect for the ingenuity and the attention to detail of those who have tried to reconcile the ship as seen on screen with the theoretical design. We've all done it to one degree or another. Franz Joseph's notion of rotating the bridge to make the turbolift fit is little short of brilliant. And I'm impressed with the analysis that has gone into reconciling the size and position of the bridge with relation to whether or not one believes that the bridge should be rotated.

Still, no matter how ingenious the analysis, when one looks closely enough, one inevitably runs up against one or more datapoints that simply can't be reconciled. At that point, one usually accepts the inconsistencies because the analysis is otherwise useful or interesting. Where does that point occur? It varies from person to person, depending on their viewpoint.

An example: I like the notion that in the TOS era, each starship's crew wore a different insignia. This appears to have been Bill Theiss's intention. Yet in "Court Martial," we saw a large number of non-Enterprise officers wearing the arrowhead emblem. I choose to regard this particular datapoint as an error that should be ignored. Still, I have a colleague, Mike Sussman, who takes the opposite view. He believes that the arrowhead was the Starfleet standard, and that Decker and Tracy's uniforms were anomalies that should be ignored. The discussion was important because I wanted to do a new insignia for the Defiant crew in "In A Mirror Darkly" (ENT), and Mike thought they should wear Enterprise arrowheads. "The Tholian Web" was clearly filmed to avoid showing the insignias on the dead Defiant crew, but close examination reveals that they were, indeed wearing Enterprise insignias. Who was right? It really depends on which datapoints you feel should be ignored. In this case, Mike still disagrees with me, but he was willing to concede the point, and I got to make the new badges.

I did speak with Jefferies at some length about such matters. Matt was a pilot, and it was inconceivable to him that the bridge would face any direction but forward. Sure, "inertial dampers" and other technical reasons make it arguably unnecessary for the bridge to face forward, but Matt wanted it that way.

The 947' length of the Enterprise has been very widely published. I'm not surprised to learn that it is inconsistent with the ship when closely analyzed. After all, the model was originally conceived to be a smaller spacecraft. It was only after the second pilot that the model was retrofitted to represent a bigger vehicle. I don't doubt that a more "accurate" figure could be derived. Still, changing the 947 number at this date would invalidate a whole bunch of stuff that's already in print, and could seriously confuse anyone who needs an "official" length for the ship. I'm not saying that I would never support a revision of such things, but I would need to be convinced that the value of the new information exceeds the confusion that it would sow. In this particular case, I don't personally think that a revised ship length is worth the confusion, although I think it's an ingenious (and informative) intellectual exercise to see the implications of such a revision.

Clearly, your mileage may vary.

 

[ancient]

It's nice to hear from Mike Okuda, as always.

I like to just make the ship as big as it needs to be to fit the insides, and consider its length to be a minor and unimportant detail. as a result, My diagrams usually end up a bit larger than 947 feet.

But then again, MJs & FJs ENT diagrams are both showing a ship quite a bit out of proportion with the model, so if you want to get technical, fitting the actual model onto its scale might yield quite a different length.

Anyways, Looking fwd to updates.

 

[Ziz]

Captain Robert April said:
Taking care of some old business.

Mike Okuda speaks:
Matt was a pilot, and it was inconceivable to him that the bridge would face any direction but forward. Sure, "inertial dampers" and other technical reasons make it arguably unnecessary for the bridge to face forward, but Matt wanted it that way.

:thumbsup:

 

[Captain Robert April]

Of course, you know that won't end the argument....

 

[doctorwho 03]

And it's a good thing too. If it did, we'd all have nothing to argue about.

 

[ancient]

I know I have a hankerin' for another pointless discussion on the subject, complete with little diagrams and visual aids. (pulls out my diagrams)

 

[Captain Robert April]

Well, I just posted my latest dissertation on the subject over on Hobbytalk.com. Howzabout I post it here, just to remain consistent?

But first, my email to Mr. Okuda that started this latest tidbit...

Subject: Channelling Matt Jefferies
Date: 6/4/2007 11:48:37 A.M. Mountain Standard Time

If you ever wander over to HobbyTalk.com, in the Science Fiction Modeling section, you might've noticed a rather extensive thread regarding the question of just how big the original Enterprise was, as can be established by objectively verifiable means, and not just taking the 947' figure as sacrosanct.

Of course, any topic regarding the Enterprise requires my input, so it was off to the races.

Anyhoo, my offering was this: Given that it was generally assumed by those actually involved in the production that the bridge faced forward, and not offset some 30 degrees as shown in certain after-the-fact blueprints, and that the only time we're actually shown that the bridge is all the way up in the dome is in "The Cage" (along with the assumption that the entire works was lowered inside the superstructure prior to "The Corbomite Maneuver"), then one only has to determine how big the dome has to be to accomodate the bridge in a forward facing orientation, then adjust the rest of the ship accordingly to determine the "actual" size of the ship.

Have I mentioned that the "offset bridge" debate is one of the most contentious amongst the technically minded fans?

In any case, one oft-cited point is how closely the turbolift on the bridge set matches up with the model detail, if you just ignore the illogic of facing a ship's bridge anywhere but directly forward, and simply swivel it thirty-something degrees to port.

The point of this email: In your conversations with Matt Jefferies, was it ever mentioned which direction they all felt the bridge faced? Rick Sternbach passed on a comment from Bob Justman that they all figured it faced forward and didn't really worry about how the turbolift fit into the thing, but that's not getting a lot of mileage with this group. You'd think I announced that Jesus was a crossdresser the way they respond to the notion that the Enterprise design wasn't worked out with the same degree of precision as an Apollo command module.

I eagerly await your thoughts,

Bob

After complying with requests to post my initial email on HobbyTalk, to put Okuda's response in context, I got a few semi-snarky responses on how I worded my initial missive, and how, apparently, I'm the only one who's upset about this matter (translation: I'm not going along with the fanon doctrine of an offset bridge).

Which prompted the following...

Posted Elsewhere by Yours Truly:
With regard to the wording of my initial email, the key factor is that I already know that Mike Okuda and I come at these matters from pretty much the same viewpoint, i.e., what was the viewpoint from those in charge at the time (sort of a Strict Constructionist Trekkie p.o.v.) and I already knew he felt the same way I do regarding the bridge, that it faces forward, geometry be damned. I just wanted to know if the subject ever came up while talking to Matt Jefferies and what his stance was.

As for my characterization of others' views on this, look at the reaction I'm getting for daring to adhere to the view of the guy who designed the bloody thing in the first place. Especially from certain individuals who like to cite "creator's intent" until the cows come home until it comes to the bridge. Then suddenly all authority is punted over to Franz Joseph, who didn't come up with his solution until roughly ten years after the fact. It's that little block of orthodoxy that has been giving me migraines since the time I started on my deck plan project.

Personal opinion on what MJ would've done if he'd been comissioned to do full-on blueprints: Forward facing bridge, with some slight tweaking in the size/shape of the bridge dome, lowered slightly into the superstructure, and a slight enlargement of the overall size of the ship. His design, he could do pretty much whatever he wanted, and I wouldn't argue much. And this has been, more or less, my guiding principle in doing my blueprints, "how would Jefferies do this?", with a few extra restrictions, like avoiding any major changes to the size and shape of the outer hull like the plague.

And that's the name of that tune.

 

[aridas sofia]

Oh my God. This is so f#*@ing funny I have to break my self-imposed ban on posting in this forum to respond:

And this has been, more or less, my guiding principle in doing my blueprints, "how would Jefferies do this?"

Really? Since when? Since you decided his length of 947 feet was negotiable, or that the bridge needn't be centered in the dome, or that there were back to back engineering rooms, or that you could ignore that TMoST cross section that Jefferies drew, and instead the template for your work would be the demonized Franz Joseph's plans?!

At least your posts are dependably disingenuous. I really think this "born again" Jefferies adherence is in deference to the people that have tried, tried and tried again to show you that the guy you have claimed didn't have time to wipe his nose actually did do a reputable -- indeed exemplary job -- of meshing the interior and exterior of that ship. And that this fact might -- might -- have something to do with the fact that we are still here 40 years later discussing it.

Welcome to the club. A day late and a dollar short, but welcome nevertheless.

 

[Shaw]

Captain Robert April said:
After complying with requests to post my initial email on HobbyTalk, to put Okuda's response in context, I got a few semi-snarky responses on how I worded my initial missive, and how, apparently, I'm the only one who's upset about this matter (translation: I'm not going along with the fanon doctrine of an offset bridge).

Hmmmm....

How did you reach that translation? I'm not sure that even Babel Fish would yield anything that off base.

See, in English, what was said was that the only time people get upset with you is when you insult them for not falling inline with your Trek world view.

I, personally, don't care if you believe that the way the set was laid out on the sound stage is the only way it could be and that the Enterprise is only 60' long... but when you attack others for not joining in with your views, that is were most of the problems with you pop up.

Agree, disagree, it shouldn't matter... but stop taking the fact that people aren't following your beliefs on this topic as personal affronts against you.



And heck, Trek is actually Roddenberry's... he wanted the Enterprise upside-down. So just because it was filmed one way, maybe we should all follow that "creator's intent" and start imagining it as upside-down.

It would sure solve the bridge issue.