Re: How Much of the Enterprise Was Inspired by Roddenberry's Bomber Fl
To me, it seems fairly clear that TOS owes more to Forester's Horatio Hornblower novels than anything else. It's more apparent in the first season than later ones, because they'd learned from experience that a direct correlation wasn't dramatic enough.
Take the battle sequence in "Balance Of Terror." This is clearly analogous to a surface vessel fighting a submarine, but the battle on the Enterprise plays like an sailing ship-of-the-line. Kirk orders Styles (the bridge weapons officer) to fire phasers. Styles orders the phaser gun crew down in the control room to fire. A senior NCO gives the crew another order to fire.
This is basically how naval battles with sailing ships operated. An individual gun was manned by a team of two or three. This team was supervised by a petty officer or midshipman. The PO/midshipman answered to a gunnery officer, and he answered to the Captain. When going into battle, the Captain would order the gunnery officer to make ready to fire the starboard guns, often giving explicit instructions on when and where to target depending on conditions and maneuvers. The gunnery officer would order his POs and midshipmen to get ready and pass along the Captain's explicit orders. The POs and midshipmen would see to their teams.
When firing position was reached, the order to fire might come from the Captain or gunnery officer and then transmitted down the chain of command to the POs/midshipmen. They would then sight down the cannon and order to fire when in optimal position.
This is all fine and dandy if you're making a sea epic. You can show activity all over the decks, the men straining to maneuver and aim the guns, the orders coming down from the Captain until finally the firing starts, the frantic reloading, etc. Damage isn't shown by sparking consoles and camera jiggles, but by holes being blown in the ship, chunks of it falling from the sails and onto the crew ...
It's really quite exciting. I highly recommend 1954's Captain Horatio Hornblower starring Gregory Peck for a good sea epic.
It doesn't work so well on Star Trek because there are simply no moving parts. A sea battle translated to Star Trek looks exactly like "Balance Of Terror:" a bunch of people giving orders, and eventually somebody hits the firing button.
They figured out that it was both rather tedious and after the first time, it actually gets in the way of the action. Hence, Sulu became weapons officer, acquired a gooseneck targeting scanner, and the process reduced to Kirk ordering Sulu to press the firing button.
There's also the intentional parallel of the Enterprise being far from port and the only representation of the Federation nearby. This is directly from history (and Forester's novels) in which a Captain in His Majesty's Navy might be the only representative of the Crown within thousands of miles.
If a Napoleonic Era Captain such as Hornblower wanted advice from the Admiralty while in the Pacific, he'd need to pay a small, fast, private ship enough money to carry a message all the way to England. Then he'd have to wait for a reply. That could take a year or more, so Captains had very broad power to act on the Crown's behalf simply because there was no one else.
This sense of isolation is something later Star Trek series dispensed with, and I think to their detriment. It's more dramatic when the Captain must make life-or-death decisions without input from his superiors. Unfortunately, even when they re-used this concept in Voyager, they simply couldn't bring themselves to keep to it. After a while, the realism of a totally isolated ship was lost, they started contacting Starfleet again, and the threat of superiors intervening became possible.
There's no question that the military experience of everyone involved played a part in the show. The leads in all departments were at least in their mid-40s and had fought in WWII. For them, military parlance was something they remembered and using it was second nature. It stands in contrast to the rest of the franchise, which was produced by people with little or no military experience -- hence the ships and crews of the later franchise have less explicitly military overtones.
Overall, though, I think the biggest influence is still Forester and sailing ships of the Napoleonic era. James Kirk isn't Horatio Hornblower in a character sense, but the Enterprise is a lot like Hornblower's ships -- despite being a starship rather than a sailing ship.
Dakota Smith
