Donny's Refit Enterprise Interiors (Version 2.0)

[Christopher]

Anyway, we still don't know how the power systems and propulsion systems work...actually, I'm even more confused after the TOS movies.

The general rule in both TOS and TNG-era, in broad strokes, was that a matter-antimatter reaction powered the ship and the dilithium crystals channeled the energy from that reaction to the ship's engines in some way. The "lithium crystals" in "Mudd's Women" were part of circuits that burned out when power demands were too high, and then "The Naked Time" established M/AM as the main power source. I used to think "The Alternative Factor" was an exception, since it treated M/AM reactions as something that would destroy the whole universe and appeared to show dilithium as the source of the ship's power, but now I understand that the station Lazarus stole the crystals from was scripted as some sort of charging station, as if the crystals were storage batteries for ship's power, so it's not as inconsistent as I thought (aside from the M/AM thing).

The TNG revision is that the dilithium serves as a magnetic bottle of sorts for concentrating the M/AM particles to maximize the efficiency of the reaction (since otherwise they're so small that a lot of them would just miss each other and not react) and then channeling the resultant high-energy plasma to the transfer conduits. That model has been used consistently ever since. But in the movies, it was never clear what role dilithium played. TMP had console graphics reporting on dilithium power levels, but there was no explanation of where the dilithium was in the intermix assembly. Although in Voyager, which was supposed to use the same kind of "swirl chamber" model as TMP (as Rick Sternbach explained it to me once), the dilithium was a vapor-deposited layer on the inside of the intermix cylinder.

Of course, TWOK's "reactor room" throws a monkeywrench into all that. It just doesn't fit, either physically or conceptually.

 

[Jedman67]

And in the shot before that last one you mention, you can see the reflection of the rods retracting in the glass wall that Scott and McCoy are banging on.

And yes, it's definitely Spock moving the levers that retracts the rods. That's a weird sort of interpretation of what was in the script, which was written as though the engine was a nuclear fission reactor and talked about Spock struggling to pull out the control rods that were damping the reaction so that the reactor would come back on line. But those rods were supposed to be inside the "radiation container" and were the thing he was exposing himself to a lethal dose in order to withdraw. This not only moves them outside the container and changes them to a preliminary step, but has Spock making them go in rather than out. Which further confuses the issue of just how the hell any of this is supposed to work.

Perhaps if he had just kicked it that would have fixed the problem?

 

[ashleytinger]

Perhaps if he had just kicked it that would have fixed the problem?

Emergency Repair Procedure Number 1

 

[Lamplighter]

First, I'm usually just a lurker, but @Donny's work is amazing and is honestly what I spend most of my time checking back on around here. But I thought maybe someone would be interested in my take on the power system convo?

So, the way I interpret the TWOK power setup is that we have the intermix chamber that leads down to where the actual M/ARC is, at the bottom of the ship. The chamber takes the power up to the impulse deflection crystal (and EPS taps?) and the nacelles.

We know that there's an "energizer." It's "bypassed." That might be the crystal pedestal. It "energizes" the crystals somehow, which generates some type of energy that is necessary for the M/AM flow to create warp speed. The energy flows down the pedestal and continues down through the ship and feeds into the aforementioned M/ARC. Spock went and and undid whatever the bypass was.

Of course, I forgot about the rods and how the hell they would fit into this is beyond me. Maybe they actually produce some type of force field that keeps stray radiation from leaking out of the pedestal? Spock turned them off and they then retracted into the wall?

This also leads into TNG somewhat. That's a more advanced warp core because Starfleet figured out how to embed the crystal right into the M/ARC, eliminating the need for a dangerous, leaky energizer.

There might be all kinds of things that this explanation contradicts, but it works in my head.

 

[Mytran]

As far as I can tell, (di)lithium crystals in TOS were part of the system that converted the raw power of the main engines (AKA reactors) into form usable by the primary ship systems, specifically things like phasers, inertial dampeners, structural integrity fields and deflectors. That last one was specifically cited in Mudd's Women when they forcibly extended the deflectors around Harry's spaceship, which is what caused the lithium crystal circuits to break. If the crystals were merely part of the propulsion system, this would not be an issue.

Other examples in TOS often involve situations where going to warp is declared "impossible" by the characters unless replacement dilithium crystals can be found. However, why would you want to go to FTL speeds without deflectors and SIFs in place? You'd be reduced to a smear of jam amid a pile of rubble!

 

[Donny]

First, I'm usually just a lurker, but @Donny's work is amazing and is honestly what I spend most of my time checking back on around here. But I thought maybe someone would be interested in my take on the power system convo?

So, the way I interpret the TWOK power setup is that we have the intermix chamber that leads down to where the actual M/ARC is, at the bottom of the ship. The chamber takes the power up to the impulse deflection crystal (and EPS taps?) and the nacelles.

We know that there's an "energizer." It's "bypassed." That might be the crystal pedestal. It "energizes" the crystals somehow, which generates some type of energy that is necessary for the M/AM flow to create warp speed. The energy flows down the pedestal and continues down through the ship and feeds into the aforementioned M/ARC. Spock went and and undid whatever the bypass was.

Of course, I forgot about the rods and how the hell they would fit into this is beyond me. Maybe they actually produce some type of force field that keeps stray radiation from leaking out of the pedestal? Spock turned them off and they then retracted into the wall?

This also leads into TNG somewhat. That's a more advanced warp core because Starfleet figured out how to embed the crystal right into the M/ARC, eliminating the need for a dangerous, leaky energizer.

There might be all kinds of things that this explanation contradicts, but it works in my head.

Thats some good thinking! I like the idea of the dilithium reactor shaft going all the way down and meeting the antimatter storage and causing a necessary reaction there, as I was struggling with a way to imagine it connected to the power systems in a believable way. Thanks for your input!

 

[Christopher]

I've thought of the idea that the chamber is on top of some kind of side shaft going down to the reactor at the base, but it doesn't make much sense for the crystals to actually be in the column Spock exposes, since it's really out of the way. I've thought maybe it's some kind of manual control connecting to something down in the core, but then, why would it have an open conduit for radiation?

The problem is, it was written to be a core element of the warp engine, but because they only had the budget to modify the existing set rather than starting from scratch, it ended up as this peripheral thing.

 

[Maurice]

What are the images on the octagonal screens in that room? Crystals?

 

[Donny]

What are the images on the octagonal screens in that room? Crystals?

That’s what I imagined them to be, and is what I depicted in my render. We never get a clear shot of what’s on these screens in either TMP (K’tinga bridge) or TWOK (Reactor Room), so I went with what I always thought would be on the screens in the reactor room: microscope images of crystalline structure.

 

[Christopher]

My best guess is that the column in the reactor room is analogous to that thingy in the TOS engineeering set that held the dilithium crystals. Doug Drexler's Constitution-class cutaway graphic seen in ENT: "In a Mirror, Darkly" (which I consider more or less canonical because it was onscreen) puts the warp core directly underneath main engineering, so I tend to assume that the TOS dilithium frame was the top of some kind of dumbwaiter/mini-lift that raised the crystals up from the core a couple of decks below so that the engineers could swap them out or do maintenance on them. Maybe the column in the TWOK set is the top of a similar crystal-maintenance lift. Maybe the crystals are normally only adjusted/swapped out when the engines are inactive so there isn't a radiation hazard, but in the case of TWOK the maintenance had to be done while the engines were hot, so the radiation leaked out through the lift shaft. Maybe the original design didn't allow that kind of hot-running maintenance, so later designers incorporated an access lift encased in a radiation room so that it could be done safely. (Note that Scotty was trying to get into a radiation suit so that he could go into the reactor room and do the same thing Spock did, but he passed out before he could manage. Presumably if he'd succeeded, or if Spock had had time to put on a radiation suit, they could've done the repair and survived with only a limited radiation dose.)

That still raises some questions, though. In this design, there are multiple lower decks of the engineering section closer to the base, so why not just have the access room down there? And why is it so far off-axis?

I can't help wishing they'd scripted the scene to take better advantage of the existing set, rather than trying to modify the set to accommodate what was scripted. They could've used the existing intermix shaft itself as the centerpiece of the action, maybe built an "access panel" piece onto the front of the main column, on the opposite side of it from the horizontal shaft. They could've built a transparent blast door/airlock sort of thing into the set's existing entry alcove, and the radiation leak could've required evacuating the whole engine room. Then the essentials of the scene could've played out as scripted, with Spock going in alone, Scott and McCoy banging on the clear door, etc., but the technical aspects would've made enormously more sense. It would've been less expensive too, because they wouldn't have needed to build that whole new room, just add an access panel and another blast door to the existing set.

 

[Mytran]

Doug Drexler's Constitution-class cutaway graphic seen in ENT: "In a Mirror, Darkly" (which I consider more or less canonical because it was onscreen)

Does that "more or less" canonicity include the number of decks and the scale? Because if so the TOS-E is around 1,320 feet long!

 

[Christopher]

Does that "more or less" canonicity include the number of decks and the scale? Because if so the TOS-E is around 1,320 feet long!

The number of decks seems to conform to the usual, 11 decks in the saucer and 24 or so overall. You do seem to be approximately right about the scale, though. Well, Trek seems to be very inconsistent about starship size, not to mention everything else numerical like stardates, ship registries, distances and travel times, etc., so I tend not to worry too much about those. Canon is best understood as a matter of broad strokes rather than precise details, because it's made by many creators and that's bound to lead to differences in interpretation. What matters to me here is not how many meters long something is, but what makes sense as a logical configuration for the ship's engines, taking all the various evidence from canon into account. The idea that the TOS engine room sat above a horizontal warp core similar to the vertical ones seen in later films and shows makes sense, because that design seems pretty standard and so it keeps TOS from being the odd one out. And it explains that dilithium crystal frame in the engine room if you assume it's the kind of access mini-lift that I described and the crystals descend from there into the core proper.

In my novel Department of Temporal Investigations: Forgotten History, I featured a tour of the engineering complex in one scene, based partly on the Drexler cutaway and partly on what TAS showed of engineering beyond the main control room. My description implied that the engine chamber we saw in "One of Our Planets Is Missing" (presumed in the episode to be inside one of the nacelles, which doesn't track with modern Trek tech assumptions) was actually a walkway above that horizontal core from the Drexler cutaway, one deck below main engineering. It seemed the most logical compromise among the different versions we've seen.

 

[Lamplighter]

Thats some good thinking! I like the idea of the dilithium reactor shaft going all the way down and meeting the antimatter storage and causing a necessary reaction there, as I was struggling with a way to imagine it connected to the power systems in a believable way. Thanks for your input!

Thanks! Love your work.

My best guess is that the column in the reactor room is analogous to that thingy in the TOS engineeering set that held the dilithium crystals. Doug Drexler's Constitution-class cutaway graphic seen in ENT: "In a Mirror, Darkly" (which I consider more or less canonical because it was onscreen) puts the warp core directly underneath main engineering, so I tend to assume that the TOS dilithium frame was the top of some kind of dumbwaiter/mini-lift that raised the crystals up from the core a couple of decks below so that the engineers could swap them out or do maintenance on them. Maybe the column in the TWOK set is the top of a similar crystal-maintenance lift. Maybe the crystals are normally only adjusted/swapped out when the engines are inactive so there isn't a radiation hazard, but in the case of TWOK the maintenance had to be done while the engines were hot, so the radiation leaked out through the lift shaft. Maybe the original design didn't allow that kind of hot-running maintenance, so later designers incorporated an access lift encased in a radiation room so that it could be done safely. (Note that Scotty was trying to get into a radiation suit so that he could go into the reactor room and do the same thing Spock did, but he passed out before he could manage. Presumably if he'd succeeded, or if Spock had had time to put on a radiation suit, they could've done the repair and survived with only a limited radiation dose.)

That still raises some questions, though. In this design, there are multiple lower decks of the engineering section closer to the base, so why not just have the access room down there? And why is it so far off-axis?

I can't help wishing they'd scripted the scene to take better advantage of the existing set, rather than trying to modify the set to accommodate what was scripted. They could've used the existing intermix shaft itself as the centerpiece of the action, maybe built an "access panel" piece onto the front of the main column, on the opposite side of it from the horizontal shaft. They could've built a transparent blast door/airlock sort of thing into the set's existing entry alcove, and the radiation leak could've required evacuating the whole engine room. Then the essentials of the scene could've played out as scripted, with Spock going in alone, Scott and McCoy banging on the clear door, etc., but the technical aspects would've made enormously more sense. It would've been less expensive too, because they wouldn't have needed to build that whole new room, just add an access panel and another blast door to the existing set.

Yeah, there's really no way around the weird design of the whole thing. It could be that whatever machinery the crystal energy feeds into is several decks tall, and that room is sitting on top of it. Then the dumbwaiter doesn't have far to travel. If you HAD to make that explanation work.

 

[Christopher]

It could be that whatever machinery the crystal energy feeds into is several decks tall, and that room is sitting on top of it. Then the dumbwaiter doesn't have far to travel. If you HAD to make that explanation work.

But then why is it off to one side of the actual reactor core? We know from TMP that there's a clear line of sight for several decks down around the vertical intermix shaft. So the M/ARC would have to be way down at the bottom there, not off to the port side.

Sure, maybe there's some kind of auxiliary machinery for channeling warp power to ship's systems. It does seem strange that the engine as depicted in TMP and the Kimble cutaway poster and the like doesn't seem to have any sort of power connections to anything other than the warp and impulse engines, leaving it unclear how the rest of the ship is powered. And TOS did portray the (di)lithium circuits as channeling engine power to the rest of the ship. But -- in this specific case, the repair Spock needed to sacrifice his life to perform was necessary to get the warp engines up and running, so it had to be something directly connected to the warp drive rather than auxiliary systems, and that's what the central vertical and horizontal shafts are for.

 

[Mytran]

The number of decks seems to conform to the usual, 11 decks in the saucer and 24 or so overall. You do seem to be approximately right about the scale, though.

Take those 11 deck divisions in the Drexler cutaway and map them onto an official 947' sized Enterprise and you end up with 7'10" each: And that's before you allow for some thickness of the deck floors themselves! The argument could be made that the TOS-E didn't really have 10' tall ceilings (like the sets) but 7' ceilings seem a little on the low side.
Matt Jefferies' own cutaway had 8 decks in the saucer for a reason...

In my novel Department of Temporal Investigations: Forgotten History, I featured a tour of the engineering complex in one scene, based partly on the Drexler cutaway and partly on what TAS showed of engineering beyond the main control room. My description implied that the engine chamber we saw in "One of Our Planets Is Missing" (presumed in the episode to be inside one of the nacelles, which doesn't track with modern Trek tech assumptions) was actually a walkway above that horizontal core from the Drexler cutaway, one deck below main engineering. It seemed the most logical compromise among the different versions we've seen.

I remember that scene well!
I agree that what they call the "antimatter nacelle" in OOOPIM is better of interpreted as some sort of antimatter generation facility. Locating it in the midst of the secondary hull actually mirrors the shape of that part of the ship to a certain extent, so it makes sense to place it there. A premium antimatter replenishment system is also precisely the kind of machinery I'd expect to find on a deep space vessel.

In this specific case, the repair Spock needed to sacrifice his life to perform was necessary to get the warp engines up and running, so it had to be something directly connected to the warp drive rather than auxiliary systems, and that's what the central vertical and horizontal shafts are for.

As I listed above, functioning nacelles would be pointless if you didn't have the associated systems in place which protect the ship and crew at FTL speeds. Therefore, there's really no reason why Spock's death chamber (assuming it transforms power for those systems) couldn't be connected directly to to the main reactor a few decks below, requiring no connection at all to the vertical warp conduit itself.

 

[Christopher]

As I listed above, functioning nacelles would be pointless if you didn't have the associated systems in place which protect the ship and crew at FTL speeds. Therefore, there's really no reason why Spock's death chamber (assuming it transforms power for those systems) couldn't be connected directly to to the main reactor a few decks below, requiring no connection at all to the vertical warp conduit itself.

Doesn't work, because the dialogue said it was the "mains" (presumably the main engines) that were offline, rather than some necessary auxiliary system. Scotty had to take them offline because of excess radiation, and it was Spock's repair that allowed their reactivation.

 

[Norsehound]

A thought; with the Refit adding so many weird cross-connecting systems (Phasers linked through the main engines now, for instance), this may be some kind of ad-hoc retrofit that's a separate system needing its own Dilithium crystal bank in order to support the main engines. The mains couldn't come online without this separate subsystem being bypassed, because too many connections from the mains went into this auxiliary area (A sort of power transformer or regulator?).

Maybe the reason the Constitutions were phased out was because of so many retrofits like this not working out.

 

[Henoch]

I still feel that the TAS catwalk scene is inside one of the nacelles, or as designated in the TAS episode, the antimatter nacelle. I estimate that the "set" shown is 40 feet in diameter, and if you add another 10 feet around it for the connected machinery that use the feed from the plasma tubes, you get about 60 feet in diameter. The nacelle is about 60 feet in diameter on a 947 foot ship, so it matches. Gouging out a 60 foot diameter tube room about 160 feet or more long in the secondary hull seems implausible on the 947 foot ship or even in Drexler's huge ship. And what systems are the eight sets of plasma tubes connected to? My guess are the warp field generators (a.k.a. warp coils). It goes along with the Catwalk episode in ENT and the nacelle scene from TNG; a nacelle trilogy, so to speak. YMMV.

 

[Christopher]

^Well, as I said, I was trying to find a reasonable compromise among the different versions shown in various productions, rather than dwelling on the exact details of any one version. Art is always a matter of interpretation; have a dozen artists render the same subject and they will depict it a dozen different ways.

 

[aridas sofia]

I shake my head at the thought that on a ship with that kind of technology - FTL propulsion, gravity manipulation, matter/energy teleportation, etc - that there was not, as a matter of course, a robot to go in that room to do what Spock did.