I'm building the entire Starship Enterprise interior at 1:25 scale

It’s quite apparent Mr. Trek’s proportions are way, way off. The size/proportions of his bridge dome and Deck B/C superstructure is out of whack with relation to the saucer overall. He is no longer making the TOS Enterprise, but his own dream version.

 

I think his problem is not so much that he is doing his own version as it is that whatever version he is doing, he is pursuing nearsighted. He is focusing on each small space, then cobbling them together and ending up with distortions. He would have to be fitting his spaces into some kind of outside envelope to make sense on both the macro and micro levels.

 

Probably not the thread for this, but I always appreciated how you are one of the few blueprint artists that remembered the TOS crew collected live specimens.

 

In truth though, we all end up making our dream version of the TOS E, based on whatever compromises that are necessary to make things work (and what we hold as valid sources).
Rotated bridge or no, upscaled size or no, screen-accurate hangar or no, primary hull engineering or no, this transporter back wall or that one...well, you get the idea.
I'm not going to fault the guy for working things out in a way that makes sense to him, because anyone that takes on the TOS E does the same.

 

Isn't that the point to inspire the imagination?

 

I think the example of Star Wars showed the value and danger of doing both - crafting something that has mass popularity while giving it such depth and realism that it incites fanaticism in a devoted base. The people responsible for making Star Trek - somebody or many somebodies - seem always to do one without the other. Either incite the fascination that prompts a guy to build a 40-foot Enterprise sixty years after it first appeared - but gets canceled after three years - or tell those people to pound sand while the studio goes its own way and changes everything trying to create mass popularity, and wonders why there is disenchantment.

There would seem to be some benefit, particularly in this viral age, to do both, so one feeds the other. Tell the stories you want to tell, but do fan service in creating the settings. Picard tried and one can certainly debate how well it did, but SNW is a very different matter.

 

I don't know.

I felt like TMP was a change for "mass entertainment," especially with Star Wars, led to a complete redesign of the only design of the Enterprise. And that created an interest of mine and looking over different elements of a new ship design. I didn't care for it in the films, but I loved reading books on it.

So, I welcome the changes, because it inspires in different ways, even if I disagree. Because then people go and make their own, which is interesting in of itself. I don't think the studio needs to encourage fan service at all.

 

The TMP Enterprise draws heavily from the Phase II Enterprise redesign by Matt Jefferies himself. It wasn't created in a vacuum or solely in response to Star Wars. In fact aesthetically it seems to be a deliberate repudiation of Star Wars's "lived in" aesthetic and much more in line with the clean futurism of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Edited to fix things.

 

Not the redesign itself but the focus on making a model to appear on the big screen like Star Wars did.

 

I don't understand your point. Should the Enterprise have not appeared in The Motion Picture?

 

TMP was fortunate to have Douglass Trumball. Able, Abel was not.

Given Trumball's experience, if anything, a comparison to 2001 is warranted.

 

Of course it should appear.

 

A fair point—and one that I agree with—but not the point I was making.

 

The only 100% correct version of the Enterprise is the one that exists in my head.

 

The point wasn't that those who remake the Enterprise will do so in line with their values and imagination? O_o

 

No, the point was that with all the intentional and unintentional contradictions/discrepancies (due to it being a television show), there is no one version of the Enterprise that can be created that encompasses them all. So fans who try have to choose which takes precedent over which.
It's like the Galileo only writ large. To remind everyone, the G's interior filming set, with its headroom, will not fit in the full size 22' exterior mock-up*. Which do you hold as 'the real one'?


*(And I'm pretty sure that @Warped9 has shown it won't fit in a 24' version either. His, IIRC, clocked in at 28')

 

Oddly, if I subtract the nacelles and aft landing strut I get a main hull between 24 and 25 feet, which kinda gels with Kirk’s throwaway line about a 24ft. shuttlecraft.

 

The one on screen at the moment.

 

That really doesn't work if you're trying to build a model that incorporates both the interior and exterior.

 

Hmm, I thought you had a bigger discrepancy than that. Maybe it was someone else...