Enterprise Evolution from TOS to TMP

[yotsuya]

I could use some help getting this going again. I stalled trying to improve the details of the TMP pylons. I know that the Kimble drawings are wrong in many ways when it comes to the surface details all over as well as the pylons and nacelles which were not truly final when he drew the plans. Has anyone worked closely with making the 1/350 model more accurate in these areas or worked on other drawings. Jackill made a second pass at the refit and a closeup of just the pylon to secondary area from top, profile, and aft views would be helpful. Or if you know where I can buy a digital copy (my days of collecting paper blueprints are done) of that excellent. I'm going to go with what the photos show, but sometimes seeing what someone else thinks it should be is helpful.

 

[Spaceship Jo]

I've heard both folks that swear by Big Jim Slade's plans and also folks that see them as all wrong. To my untrained eye, they seem right... and their methodology is near unbeatable. Jackill's are great, but by no means as well processed (for one: the views don't match each other, as Slade demonstrated in another forum long long ago).

I'm no expert on the TMP model though, so grain of salt and all that.

 

[yotsuya]

Big Jim was on the right track initially and he has a great level of detail in his drawings, but he has quite a few things wrong. Very wrong. One of his major revisions to was flatten the sides of the back end of the warp nacelles which took that area of his drawings from relatively accurate to completely wrong. From what I'm looking at, Jackill's revised drawings (the first refit drawings were not very accurate) pretty much match the details I'm uncovering, but the only copy I have been able to find is too low res to be of much use. That version has completely different nacelles and pylons from the norm and they are very close to what I am seeing in the photos.

My working theory is that when Taylor came in, he took Jefferies Phase II design and redesigned the pylons and nacelles. Kimble's plans bear this out as the saucer, neck, and secondary hull match within tiny variances to Jefferies Phase II drawings. So I'm taking Kimble's drawings as gospel for those areas. But not for anything that was changed after that. I think his drawings are the late goal of the design (later than Taylor's drawings), but are not representative of how the final pieces were build and assembled. I'm using his nacelle drawings and a jumping off point and correcting them to the photos, including their position. In the photos of the model they sit lower with the pylon joining higher. That fixes a number of issues. Jackill's revised drawings have that same relative position.

One of the details I'm trying to figure out is if they pylons get thicker toward the top or not. I'm currently leaning toward yes.

 

[publiusr]

That might be a matter of perspective, but it does seem a tad thicker. Bezos needed to run it through a laser scanner---like this:
https://get.creaform3d.com/lp-gosca...MI66exwL-_7wIVqgT5AB1UjQNaEAEYASAAEgJuk_D_BwE

 

[yotsuya]

Unlike the TOS Enterprise, the refit is pretty easy to fill in thanks to Kimble's cutaway. But when I turn to the Phase II design, that isn't so easy. There aren't any plans for the sets, just drawings. I'd like to include the plans for the few rooms that were dreamed up, but the cross section is going to be closer the the TOS design.

 

[Maurice]

Unlike the TOS Enterprise, the refit is pretty easy to fill in thanks to Kimble's cutaway. But when I turn to the Phase II design, that isn't so easy. There aren't any plans for the sets, just drawings. I'd like to include the plans for the few rooms that were dreamed up, but the cross section is going to be closer the the TOS design.

As most of the Star Trek II (TV) sets were the basis of the TMP sets you can do a fairly good reconstruction of many of them by starting with the TMP set plans and ripping out the stuff that was added. McCoy's office and lab, for instance, ended up very close to the original TV design just with different furniture and the partitions moved around. And there are photos of Kirk’s quarters iundet construction.

 

[yotsuya]

While I have not yet nailed down every point of the TMP Refit, I am still working on the interior. Though not quite as hard as the TOS design, the Phase II and TMP Refit interior are not a piece of cake. Kimble drew most of it, but not nearly enough.

And so far this is what I have:

 

[publiusr]

Now, one drawing Matt did had something of a spine running along the top/back of the secondary hull...pointing the way towards Excelsior with the nacelles no longer attaching to the secondary hull proper.

After this current work, I hope you do some original art along these lines—moving the refit towards Excelsior in terms of unbuilt projects.

Though it is a lovely use of the Klingon bridge...I would almost swear that torpedo room would have to be in the saucer of a dreadnought to be that wide. There was a still from a site a decade or two back that seemed to imply more torpedo bays

 

[Mres_was_framed!]

That's a very interesting cutaway of the Phase II version. What have you got at the back of the saucer where one engine room may have been in TOS? The yellow structure looks interesting but I don't recognize it. I recognize the other as being like the Phase II-style engine room seen in some screen tests in the disks' Special Features. I had forgotten about our discussion of having the Jeffries tube connect two engine rooms. I really like that.

Where did you get the diagram of the sets as they appeared in TMP? I think I have only seen ones from other movies.

 

[yotsuya]

That's a very interesting cutaway of the Phase II version. What have you got at the back of the saucer where one engine room may have been in TOS? The yellow structure looks interesting but I don't recognize it. I recognize the other as being like the Phase II-style engine room seen in some screen tests in the disks' Special Features. I had forgotten about our discussion of having the Jeffries tube connect two engine rooms. I really like that.

I was working on the TMP and TOS cross sections at the same time. I decided that the pipes structure on the TOS set was the main energizer (the thing that with or thorugh the dilithium converts the warp plasma into energy for the ship to use for other things). I put the main energizer in main engineering in the secondary hull and created a smaller one for the back of the saucer. I just copied that idea over to the Phase II and TMP. And those aren't Jefferies tubes, those are warp plasma conduits. They are replaced by the shafts in the TMP design. They serve the same purpose but not quite the same function.

Where did you get the diagram of the sets as they appeared in TMP? I think I have only seen ones from other movies.

The sets were built for Phase II. They didn't change much until TNG when into production and took them over. Most of them still didn't change much through the end of Voyager. But I'm bad about keeping track of where I find these things. I have all sorts of set plans from the various productions. I have spent time on TOS to draw out all the different versions. Season 1 engineering was redressed as 3 other sets. I'm going to try to do the same for the movies. I need TMP-TSFS and then TVH-TUC for 1701-A. So I will have two different warp cores.

 

[Spaceship Jo]

Do you upload higher res images of your project elsewhere? Or perhaps here when you are done?

I get the general overview of what you are doing, but I can't really make out any of the details. Comparison overlays would help, but aren't necessary if the images were higher resolution.

(Is it possible this is a non-question? Is this somehow about my settings or somesuch? I can definitely see much higher res pictures over in some other threads, so I don't think so, but I could be totally wrong.)

 

[yotsuya]

Do you upload higher res images of your project elsewhere? Or perhaps here when you are done?

I get the general overview of what you are doing, but I can't really make out any of the details. Comparison overlays would help, but aren't necessary if the images were higher resolution.

(Is it possible this is a non-question? Is this somehow about my settings or somesuch? I can definitely see much higher res pictures over in some other threads, so I don't think so, but I could be totally wrong.)

Until I finish the projects and post the final results, I prefer to keep what I share lower quality. There really aren't a lot of details to make out at this time. I want to add more, such as corridor and cabin cross sections. Just what to put where?

 

[yotsuya]

For as important as it is, there are very few references to the Refit Constitution Class. We do get to see a few others on screen, but the model was never redressed (kind of like TOS).

USS Ahwahnee (NCC-2048)
USS Eagle (NCC-956) I correct this to 1956, a similar error to some other registry issues in TNG and DS9
USS Emden (NCC-1856)
USS Endeavour (NCC-1895)
USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)*
USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-A)*
USS Korolev (NCC-2014)
USS Olympia (NCC-21576)*
USS Yorktown (NCC-1717)*

It is unknown how many of the older ships survived and were refit. So this list should be considered partial.

 

[F. King Daniel]

I like to think the Olympia was a Constitution kitbash of sorts, since we never see her in one piece, just wreckage on a planet.

 

[yotsuya]

I like to think the Olympia was a Constitution kitbash of sorts, since we never see her in one piece, just wreckage on a planet.

Due to the timing I could see Starfleet pulling one of the Old Constitution Class out, refitting it, and sending it on the specified mission. The Excelsior and Miranda classes are better suited to the conflicts that were cropping up at the time so a long range deep exploration mission would be just the thing for a spare Constitution Class ship. I think it was renamed and renumbered. The registry I got from someone who was doing a model. There doesn't appear to be any registry associated with that ship in any series related source.

 

[publiusr]

How are the refit drawings coming along?

 

[yotsuya]

How are the refit drawings coming along?

Horrible. I can't seem to get the pylons right.

 

[yotsuya]

Ah, at last some progress.

I was looking for something else (the red alert scene where the decks are highlighted on screen in a graphic, which I found) and I noticed that while the views of the model I really needed don't exist as photos, they do exist as composite shots in Star Trek II. My one question about the pylon thickness was answered, as was another about how the pylon fits to the nacelle. And I think I can find the answers to how the pylon meets the secondary hull. I'll have to go though the films again to find the shots I need, but so far it looks like Star Trek II and IV have what I need for the bottom of the pylon. And the surface detailing on the pylon (both the original aztecing and the "enhanced" detailing added for Star Trek II) should give a good idea about how to draw the grilles on accurately. Now I just have to do that work again to see if it works.

 

[publiusr]

Good…I enjoy seeing your work.

Reliant might be the hardest to draw. I like the Wright-Corder design of the Avenger class blueprint even if it isn’t accurate

 

[yotsuya]

My attention has been pulled to the Stargazer. An interesting investigation. There are three models that appear on screen. The first was the Picard's office model. Kitbashed from the TMP 1701 refit and several Anime related kits. There was reluctance to use the 8' 1701 model in TNG. So instead, the model that was in Picard's office got a full 4 foot shooting miniature built by Greg Jein. He matched the office model and made the necessary parts except where one particular kit could be found in the appropriately larger scale. The larger model was relabeled twice, only once during production, and is still owned by CBS/Paramount. For the remastered version, the aft shot from Peak Performance was missing so a CG model was made to reproduce that shot. I has some inaccuracies from the actual studio model. Like all the other TMP era ships, it is white, even though it appears darker on screen. And no good orthographic drawings exist and I don't think enough photos exist to get it exactly right, though I might have to try, since it is a movie era ship. Too many greebles for my liking. I so prefer Jefferies clean look. So much easier to draw.