Here is the draft for Deck 7 before I take a summer break from the project (and hope that in the meantime someone will calculate the approximate dimensions of the arboretum / herbarium many of us assume to be on Deck 8).
Main Deck 7 (130629) – FINAL DRAFT
I wrote earlier that the port side of Deck 7 is the only area where we can know what this area looks like, based on the Season One studio set plan and the footage from “the Naked Time”, revealing the whole length of this corridor in two camera shots (notice that next to the Engineering Control Room there was
no turbo lift door in “The Naked Time” which explains why Kirk and Spock had to come to the ECR from the opposite side of the corridor!).
Various Items
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to provide a better explanation for the odd bulb in the Season One corridor (possibly a compromise they had to accept when building the news sets around the sickbay bedroom first featured in WNM.
Beginning with Season Two they straightened the sickbay bedroom walls and thus were able to eliminate the corridor bulb), other than to use its odd angle to imagine a turbo lift car maintenance station and magazine that provides additional turbo lift cars when necessary at 12 o’clock (other turbo lift cars could be on Deck 6 next to the transporter room to be injected into the turbo shaft network when required).
According to
The Making of Star Trek “all” of the medical laboratories are located on Deck 7 and Kirk mentioned in “Operation Annihilate!” a total number of 14 laboratories of the medical and life sciences department.
The possible locations for these labs are hinted in the blank areas by “lab” and together with the Biochemistry and Radiology Lab I put on Deck 6 we should have those 14 and therefore be able to put Deck 8 to better uses. Regarding what those labs should look like I don’t have good ideas at the moment (“Damn it, I’m a deck plan assembler,
not a doctor!”).
At 9 o’clock we have the turbo lift seen in “The Way to Eden” and hinted in “Is There in Truth No Beauty”. There is no turbo lift straight across / vis-à-vis the exam room door, thus it can’t be the Season Two sickbay set illustrated at the bow (although I believe there had been the main door to the impulse engine room seen
here in “The Doomsday Machine”).
Notice that in “Is There in Truth No Beauty” Spock apparently walked the corridor to arrive at Medical Ward 2 and
McCoy’s redecorated (Season Three) office. Had this been the office in Medical Ward 4, he could have just walked across the room, but he didn’t. I therefore assume that Medical Ward 4 on Deck 7 actually accommodates Dr. M’Benga’s (never seen) own office.
Another thing worth noticing in this episode is that
it’s missing the second bed! You may remember that I had already mentioned that I presume that these sickbay beds can be covered up and thus be transformed into coffins. Writing this comment I realized that there had been one fatality in this episode – Lawrence Marvick!
Apparently his body had been placed into the sickbay bed / coffin, had been lifted up by antigrav units and waited for transportation to the morgue. This would also explain the
strange shadow we see on the exam room wall the moment Kirk leaves Dr. Jones and Spock.
Fracking amazing how clever and subtle the producers and directors suggested such little things, which also is a testimony how much they did care about such details, IMHO (and quite a reward considering all the work I’ve thus far invested into these deck plans. The little details I unexpectedly discover really keep me fascinated and motivated).
For the record I’d like to state, that when I started accommodating the medical wards on the various decks, I really hadn’t planned that we’d see on Deck 7 the medical ward from Season One (port), the one from Season Two (bow) and the one from Season Three (starboard) and thus keep all their various, individual “season details”. This is either a coincidence or the result of a “helping hand”.
I’d also like to add that the sickbay beds facing the inner (computer) core were a last minute addition I almost overlooked (although I had already experimented with the idea in the engineering hull but had forgotten).
In a broader sense the medical wards on this deck all have characteristics of intensive care areas. Somewhat dislocated from the busy decks above this is the perfect deck to treat critical injuries and perform complicated operations. And if a patient dies...the morgue and the ship’s chapel are in close proximity at 6 and 5 o’clock. It’s probably not a morale booster for the crew moving a coffin around on the more busy decks.
As for Kirk’s exit from the chapel in “Balance of Terror” (refer to post # 163) I believe he used a stairway up and popped out of the yellow door on Deck 6 (which still needs to be illustrated / altered on the Deck 6 draft).
While I believe Dr. McCoy took a shortcut though the morgue when he left the chapel in “Balance of Terror” the exit path of Kirk (and Spock and McCoy in “The Tholian Web”) merits an explanation: The room (6 o’clock) is obviously a redress of the briefing room set and as such the exit paths through the side door (there is no main door in the chapel!) would usually recommend a turn to the right to reach the main corridor (shortest access to the nearest turbo lift straight to the upper decks).
Apparently, something blocks that passage and “The Way to Eden” provides the explanation, IMO. Chekov and Irina needed some privacy and went inside the multi-purpose room which seems to be some kind of
waiting area and/or meditation room (considering the mattress on the floor).
With the chapel next door, such a “silent” and/or preparation room would be a practical consideration and explains the onscreen detours via the turbo lift at 6 o’clock or the adjacent stairway. This waiting room also provides some privacy for the chapel as it separates the chapel from the intensive care corridors.
Thus I like the deliberate or coincidental symbolism in “The Way to Eden” scene where Chekov and Irina are facing each other, but are not facing the waiting room exit door together (those two are obviously not getting married although they appear to be a good match, sad).
In case of a funeral the sickbay “coffin” is moved in from the morgue (4 sickbay bed “coffins” on ground floor illustrated), after the ceremony the coffin is lowered 6’ down to Deck 8 from where it is either ejected through the starboard “inspection door” (or alternately the
yellow airlock hatch on Deck 9).
The morgue (4.30 o’clock) is “sandwiched” between two turbo shafts that access to the main horizontal shaft above. The outer one looks a little odd but can’t be on Deck 6 because of the transporter chambers’ bulge.
Essentially these outer elevators at 4 and 12 o’clock serve as medical transport elevators to carry injured landing party personnel, after first aid assistance on Deck 6 in the emergency rooms, to the most suited medical ward on either Deck 5 or 7 (hence the blue “exit only” color seen in “The Naked Time” on Decks 5 and 7).
The deck plan draft also illustrates that the ship should be at least 1,080’ long, because otherwise these elevators would stick out of the hull on Deck 7!
Between 2 and 5 o’clock we see Medical Ward 2 as featured during Season Two and containing Dr. McCoy’s office. The corridor outside was only revealed in “The Deadly Years” and featured the “odd” corridor between the cabin and the briefing room set. To prevent showing a “ship full of corridors” I presume this corridor (3 o’clock) to have a stairway leading up to Deck 6 (similar to the ones on Deck 5 and 6), which I think is the only good excuse for this kind of Season Two “oddity”.
Judging by the red turbo lift vis-à-vis the exam room this was the medical ward we saw in “Journey to Babel”, “The Immunity Syndrome” and “The Ultimate Computer”.
An interesting variation of the third bed, introduced in “Journey to Babel”, occurred in “Return to Tomorrow” where the bed was aligned with the glass cabinet wall, but also featured
further inwards!
Although admittedly on the odd side, I presume this bed to be attached to the door of a medical safe which contains toxic supplies and thus access is only possible under supervision of the head doctor
and by swinging the wall open (you can’t just sneak into sickbay and grab some drugs). Better rationalizations are welcome unless we can dismiss this as a production glitch or oddity not to be taken too seriously.
As for what’s inside the (“briefing”) room opposite the doctor’s office (between 3 and 4 o’clock) I have to assume it’s the extension of the environmental engineering pipes from the
room above on Deck 6 which do make a 90° turn here and connect to the outer, inhospitable rim of the inner Deck 7.
This would probably make the room not usable for purposes other than storage and given its vicinity to the morgue I’d think this would be an appropriate place for cryogenic (medical) supplies.
On the port side we see the Medical Ward 1 from Season One. I left the inner cabin set from Season One to compensate for the loss of the regular cabin set across the corridor, so that the night nurse of this medical ward has a place to stay and – if possible – sleep, too.
My major motivation to equip each medical ward with 5-6 beds results from the concern that an entire landing party might suffer specific injuries of the same kind, thus it’s easier to treat such injuries in one specialized medical ward, rather than to scatter the patients around the medical complex between Decks 5 through 7.
Saucer Engine Room(s)
When I saw the actual Season One studio set plan for the first time, I marveled at the foresighted genius of Matt Jefferies who left enough space between the saucer engine rooms to allow turbo shift passage between the saucer and the engineering hull without the necessity of rationalizing turbo lift detours around these sections.
Yes, I have no evidence for this assumption but looking at the Season One studio set plan (preserved as part of the draft) and the otherwise odd angle of the ECR I dare to say that the design logic is rather obvious, simple, and efficient.
Despite the turbo lift passage possibility (not required for warp engine rooms) there are additional strong hints that the Season One engine room design had always been intended to be a location in the saucer hull:
- “Where No Man Has Gone Before” (WNM) only referenced an “impulse deck” but not a “star-drive deck” or section.
- The Making of Star Trek suggests the engine room to be at the stern of the saucer but made no reference whatsoever to an engine room in the engineering hull (IMHO a concept that was born with Season Two and the ability to convert the Season One impulse engine room set into the new and larger warp drive engine room set)
- In “Court-Martial” Uhura reported Finney’s sabotage of the impulse engines on the “B(erth) Deck” and accordingly Kirk tried to find Finney somewhere in the port side impulse engine room
- As a rule of thumb the large GNDN props do represent an impulse engine room when they are standing cheek-to-cheek, but a warp drive engine room when they face each other vis-à-vis (apparently this rule came into effect when they redressed the impulse engine room as the warp drive engine room in “The Conscience of the King” with many noticeable changes and before the impulse engine room returned to its almost original appearance in “Court-Martial” – “almost” because the Enterprise’s engine room got a little upgrade at Starbase 11 / kept a souvenir from “The Conscience of the King” redress effort…)
- Events in “Space Seed” appear to be happening in the saucer, judging by the speed the characters move between Sickbay, Briefing Room 2 and the engine room. It stands to reason the engine room seen in “Space Seed” was in the saucer, too.
In “The Naked Time” Scotty made a ship wide call addressing other “engine rooms” from the Engineering Control Room, thus there were at least two more.
Interestingly the
Star Trek Sketchbook refers to the Season Two Emergency Manual Monitor as “Secondary Engineering Control Room” which would make the Season One Engineering Control Room the primary one (or just for the corresponding hull of the ship), but first and foremost a master control room and not necessarily the (only) one devoted exclusively to the impulse engines.
Apparently, the first distinction between the impulse engine room and the warp drive engine room occurred at the warp engine room’s first appearance - aboard the starship
Constellation. Scotty and repair crew
descended into the
Constellation’s warp engine room (there’s no space to descend to the upper level of this set in the saucer!) where Scotty went to a wall cabinet, grabbed the trident engineering tool – and
left the room to fix the impulse engines elsewhere.
The
next time we see him use this tool, the soccer ball - we previously saw on top of the warp engine’s dilithium crystal converter assembly casing – is gone! That could suggest he is repairing the (starboard) impulse engines from within the impulse engine room of the
Constellation, and possibly this configuration is similar aboard the
Enterprise.
What’s the dilithium crystal casing doing in the starboard impulse engine room? In addition to my theories presented in
this thread, I believe the (last)
dilithium crystal seen in “Mudd’s Women” is usually integrated in this casing (in contrast the warp drive room uses the crystal paddles) and amplifies the energy output of the “batteries” / fusion reactors (the large GNDN standing around in the engine rooms) into the “main energizers”, mentioned to be on Deck 7 in “The Doomsday Machine”, which I now do believe is the proper term for what we usually refer to as the “cathedral” behind the grated window of each engine room.
I can’t help the feeling that the producers of the Animated Series (TAS) - consultant Gene Roddenberry - had this notion when they made the cels for
their engine room. The position of the GNDN fusion reactors suggests “saucer” and it does have the aforementioned dilithium crystal casing. I assume the pipe we see protruding from it usually goes straight up to power the transporter room on Deck 6 above (and should rather look like the one from “The Enemy Within”).
And the most important thing: The ceiling height is much, much lower than the ceiling height of the ECR, thus it could be possible to have a transporter room above on Deck 6 (as illustrated in the previous draft) which on the other hand is impossible with the TOS studio set of the Engineering Control Room (ECR).
Admittedly, in TAS this engine room often has qualities of the ECR, but obviously it can’t either be the TOS Season Two warp engine room (no upper level, ceiling height, position of GNDN reactors) or the Season One Engineering Control Room (no dilithium crystal floor casing, ceiling height) and thus presents itself to be the perfect candidate for the starboard impulse engine room.
Amount of Medical Wards
In the meantime, I noticed dissent about having that many medical wards (Decks 5 through 7) considering these are only referenced as “Sickbay” and no specifications are provided (and, of course, unlike the transporter rooms, it’s highly unlikely that medical wards are shut down for maintenance…).
However, we do know that there at least 4 medical wards aboard the ship which must have already existed during WNM, judging by the “astro-medicine ward 4” door sign (which had, admittedly, way too many comebacks during the run of the series up from the first until the very last episode!).
For these deck plans and because of my dislike for “reconstruction rationalizations” my reasoning to have that many is the amount of noticeable differences in the Season One set (medical monitor over exam bed
or not)
and the noticeable differences of the “multi-purpose room” interior seen in “Wink of an Eye” versus “The Way to Eden” versus “Turnabout Intruder”
plus the different interior sickbay layout suggested by “Amok Time” and “The Lights of Zetar”.
I also believe the concept of just having
one sickbay and
one operating / examination table for 430 people on a starship which – unlike our aircraft carriers and cruise ships – operates “where no man has gone before” (except colonies and outposts the
Enterprise frequently visits in TOS) to be unrealistic and impractical:
- Captain Pike only had to take care of 203 crew members and I believe Medical Wards 1, 2 and 3 could have been sufficient to take care of the crew and injured crew members (returning from away missions!)
- By the time Kirk had command of the Enterprise the crew complement had been boosted to 430 crew members (more than double) and accordingly the whole Medical Ward 4 complex had been probably added to compensate for the larger crew and its needs on several decks
- In episodes like “Arena” and “The Galileo Seven” we witnessed the return of injured crew members and/or outpost residents that required immediate care. Lt. Kelowitz returned from Taurus II with two injured landing party members and a body (and had been injured himself), and this was just landing party # 2. Therefore, the ship has to have enough facilities to take care of all injured members of one or several landing parties - and just one medical ward wouldn’t do the job (I have a vision of a redshirt crewman moaning that with only one ward and him being the lowest rank he surely is going to die). This is not a sailing vessel of her majesty King George III. with only one sickbay, one surgeon and walls painted in red (to make the patients’ splattered blood “invisible”) from the 18th Century but a Starship of the 23Rd Century whose medical facilities I’d expect to be capable of handling all injured landing party members simultaneously
- The Enterprise provides medical checks and assistance to remote colonies and settlements as we’ve seen or heard in TOS. Just recently I saw an interesting program about a non-military hospital ship in Russia, the Nicolai Pirogow that travels down the rivers once every two years, and acts as a hospital for the outermost and remote regions of Russia. The analogy to the Enterprise couldn’t be a better one, IMHO, and while the Enterprise is not a hospital ship first and foremost, it definitely has to act as one if the need arises and therefore has to have sufficient medical facilities to be prepared for the worst, IMHO.
Of course, since Medical Ward 1 has now “moved” to Deck 7 (previously Deck 5), Deck 5 would now have the Medical Ward 4 seen in “The Naked Time” (and “Space Seed” and others)
with the medical monitor over the examination table.
Bob
).
Would you (or Starfleet for that matter) really ask your crew members to quarrel over "bedroom time" with your roommate like present day college students? They are all grown-ups who have certain standards and expectations as to their living conditions and I´m sure that being able to be alone in their bedroom whenever they want to is among those.
