I'm building the entire Starship Enterprise interior at 1:25 scale
- Thread starter Mike Nevitt
- Start date
Wow! I actually have not seen this before. I totally understand now the proportion variances. Really interesting stuff! Thank you for sharing.I'm very sure. I'm looking at it.You saw the engine room on Deck 7, and there is also the Warp Drive Engineering Section on Deck 16.
You have a point if you want the set on Desilu Stage 9 to be in the secondary hull. FJ put that room in the saucer. Not everybody likes that, but to me it really fits.
I would love to know just HOW fj developed his blueprints? In that era he couldn’t have photocopied, scanned or enlarged. Did he do it by hand, hence the variances? Were they drawn on a draftsman’s table with pen and ink?
It was done by hand at his drafting table, but with professional instruments— not freehand. It was his trade and he had the tools.
FJ talks about his methods in these two interviews:
1976: http://www.trekplace.com/fj-fjwilliamsint01.html
1982: http://www.trekplace.com/fj-fjnewittint01.html
He had The Making of Star Trek in hand, which he obviously devoured, plus his daughter was a huge fan with about 800 of those 35mm film clips from Lincoln Enterprises, Majel Barrett's mail order business.
He used his wartime technical skills to reverse engineer the photos of props and sets into plans. He used the MJ ship drawings only as a jumping off point, because he found that the views didn't line up with each other, and with their stated dimensions, perfectly.
I think part of the problem may have been distortion of the drawings as published in TMOST. Another source of distortion would come in if he photographed the MJ pages so he could project transparencies onto a screen (as with the Lincoln Enterprises frames). In any case, he had to create his own version of the ship to make it all line up.
As an aside it's interesting how Sternbach did the Enterprise-D blueprints too... Sternbach wanted to use Adobe Illustrator on Apple Macintosh Quadra 800 computers, but mid-90s computers were nowhere near powerful enough to handle entire decks of the Enterprise-D as single files (they had 33MHz Motorola 68040 CPUs and a maximum of 136MB of RAM). So the computers were used to draw repetitious individual elements (rooms, hardware, equipment, etc) which could be individually printed as transfer decals. The general deck structure (hull and corridors and general spaces) were drawn in pencil and then inked over on mylar plastic with technical pens, and then the decals for the rooms etc were printed and added to the mylar masters. Each deck was only done as a half to save time, then photostatted when complete and reduced in size by two thirds, and then photographically mirrored for the final image. So it was a surprisingly manual process that needed four artists to complete (Sternbach himself, Todd Guenther, and Jeanne Rogers, and Dan Gauthier – possibly explaining one or two infamous omissions).
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Not to go too far afield, but do we know if he had access to / used the AMT model kit? It has always seemed to me that some of the differences in shape between the 11 foot and the AMT are shared by FJ.
Oh, those windows on 7x? Those are the privacy rooms. Used for meditation, chess, and the occasional tryst. You gotta take one of those tri ladders to get to them though.
I will add however, my one, somewhat controversial caveat. I like to think something like the big rec room from TMP was in the original Enterprise- at least since its TAS refit. This rec room would take account of the undercut and follow Probert’s original concept pretty closely… except for the inclusion of Burke chairs, of course. And the different window arrangement.
This would serve as both the original ship’s rec room AND botanical garden.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/04/51/ec/0451ece0e3cb1edff8856f579405e7ba.jpg
This would serve as both the original ship’s rec room AND botanical garden.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/04/51/ec/0451ece0e3cb1edff8856f579405e7ba.jpg
I’d also include a small swimming pool as part of the recreational facilities on the rim at the primary hull -- it's good exercise and also very useful for physical therapy. We also see a gymnasium and theatre in TOS, but those can be the same room repurposed (just like in primary school), which sort of works out since I think they were both S1 Engineering Room set redresses anyway.
That be it...spare, Spartan and smooth.This Metaluna?
What's the "curved bridge design"? This one?
The AMT nacelles crowd the saucer a bit more than in the FJ booklet...the latter having the elegant secondary hull the AMT lacked.
David Merriman's scratchbuild Enterprise as featured at Culttvman has a secondary hull most like the FJ, but it too is a bit off with the nacelles a tad too low...as Shaw relates.
Put a production 11 foot saucer stop the (Achernar/Franklin Mint) secondary hull---and you get the closest to MJ's smaller sketches in TMOST-- more fluid.
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Oops, forgot to mention this in my last post...
I always thought he had some knowledge of the AMT models, as with the exception of the Dreadnought, the other ships in the Technical Manual can be built relatively easily from the AMT kit.
The Strategic Design deck plans for the TOS-configuration Constitution give it a rec deck like the TMP refit, and a corresponding swimming pool on the opposite side of the impulse engines.
I’ve never bought into the swimming pool, or bowling alley for that matter. TAS shows that the original ship had a holodeck. There is no reason that cannot be the swimming pool (or ocean, creek, or sea), or bowling alley (or any other sports venue). Then, a feature that can be used for the training of crew (as well as recreation), can justify its inclusion. That, and the fact we actually saw it in an episode.
Wow! It’s crazy how labor intensive it was even at this point. It really makes you appreciate FJ s work more…. As well as how computing power has progressed so folks can do their own interpretations single-handedly with some amazing results!
Yeah, its an interesting project, but his stated rejection of TAS--the most faithful continuation of all things TOS (including the 1701) leads me to lose interest in his project, and I'm not too fond of silly concepts such as a shuttle housed beneath the bridge.
Put it this way, FJ's 1975 blueprint of the bridge seems to take more inspiration from AMT's model kit than the 11-foot miniature--
I don't think the TOS Enterprise had a holodeck. I consider that an addition that occurred between TOS and TAS. As for the bowling alley, in Conscience of the King we see a temporary stage erected in the gymnasium. I could imagine the bowling alley is temporary as well and only set up at certain times.
Maybe. Who knows? The difficulty of the different "eras" of Star Trek mean that there are now things that we make weirdly "retro" to make it the "less futuristic future". Whereas in 1965, 1966, and 1973 they were trying to make it all as futuristic as they possibly could.
We're now at a point in our Star Trek where we're positing a scenario that someone in the 2270's but NOT before the 2260's came up with a virtual simulation system. That just strikes me as oddly specific. OTOH I would have liked something weirder with transporter tech than what ENT came up with.
I think by 2270-whatever holodecks are going to seem pretty quaint. While Warp Drive may still look like science fiction.
The holodeck or holographic rec room was conceived during TOS only they never got around to showing it. And they could have given how they handled illusions. I don’t see why it couldn’t have already been there and it finally appeared in TAS (even if it was a dumb episode).
If they had a holo-room in TOS, then they would have had as many holo accidents as they had transporter accidents...no, there was no holo-room in TOS.
As for a swimming pool, they could have used futuristic swimming spas (above) that has less volume of water to keep from sloshing all over the ship (below):
As for a swimming pool, they could have used futuristic swimming spas (above) that has less volume of water to keep from sloshing all over the ship (below):
A holodeck per se was in TAS - they called it a rec room - which might have literally meant RE-CREATION, or perhaps Recreate Environmental Conditions - so it is a very, very small step to imagine the same thing being in that same ship in TOS. And a holodeck - or Rec Room - almost a century before TNG would not necessarily operate on the same principles. It might not use transporter technology and instead rely on, you know, holograms and imitating sounds, weather, lighting, etc. In other words, not nearly as interactive. If you want it to do actual interactivity (ie the bowling alley or pool), it might be very resource intensive and take hours for the deck to build and disassemble. Thus, pool night only one Thursday a month, and bowling night every other Wednesday.
https://www.cygnus-x1.net/links/lcars/epics/TAS-S2/S2E3/TAS-S2E3-51.jpg
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The rec room also played with artificial gravity, when it put them in a big hole that they climbed out of.
