Modernized TOS Enterprise
- Thread starter JJohnson
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I remember that, but I also remember it taking time that a person could count in seconds for the engines to rev up, turn the ship, and then for them to fire. Arguably, the relative snail's pace of it all was an artifact of it being a TV show, but I don't believe that it changes my point: merely having FTL speed does not imply instantly or even quickly being able to attain FTL speed. The fact that there are multiple phaser banks could be taken in-universe as proof that such an arrangement is superior, for whatever reason, to relying on the reorientation of a single bank and the whole ship via FTL. Another limiting factor could be power consumption, at a time when the ship may be under fire herself.From Elaan of Troyius...Sulu: Warp power to the shields, Captain?
Kirk: Negative. His sensors will pick up our power increase. The more helpless he thinks we are, the closer he'll come. As he passes, I want to cut in warp drive. We'll pivot at warp two and bring all tubes to bear.
I never had the impression that the Enterprise was capable of reorienting itself at warp speed, i.e. literally pivoting faster than light. Imagine what that would look like. The ship could be screaming along at warp 5 in one direction, instantly flip 180 degrees and zip back in the opposite direction. We've never seen any indication of that kind of maneuvering on-screen.
The dialogue from Elaan of Troyius could easily be interpreted to mean the ship simply engaged warp 2 and then pivoted while at warp speed.
Arguably, this could be a somewhat unusual or difficult maneuver, at least in the TOS era. More than once, when Kirk ordered a simple course change, the warp engines could be heard re-accelerating almost as if they had to drop out of warp to reorient the ship or at least re-engage along the new trajectory. Obviously pivoting at warp is possible but it may be more of a high-strain combat maneuver for anything more than minor course corrections.
The dialogue from Elaan of Troyius could easily be interpreted to mean the ship simply engaged warp 2 and then pivoted while at warp speed.
Arguably, this could be a somewhat unusual or difficult maneuver, at least in the TOS era. More than once, when Kirk ordered a simple course change, the warp engines could be heard re-accelerating almost as if they had to drop out of warp to reorient the ship or at least re-engage along the new trajectory. Obviously pivoting at warp is possible but it may be more of a high-strain combat maneuver for anything more than minor course corrections.
Rotating isn't the same as moving the ship from one place to another. Pivoting at the speed of light or faster means you could (from the perspective of someone out side watching) appear to be firing in all possible directions at once.
And we're talking TOS here... Jefferies had one phaser bank on the Enterprise, and later on when he upgraded her for Phase II he left it at one phaser bank (just making it easier for the effects people to spot).
The real effect of the move from the original Enterprise design to the TMP Enterprise is equivalent to moving from CVN-65 (with 6 weapons placements) to CV-6 (with 94 weapons placements)... a giant step backwards.
As for power, the phasers don't need to be connected to the ship... you could put them in a shuttlecraft and the Enterprise could still power them. And that is based on technology from the first pilot. And all this is too advanced for 20th/21st century minds to grasp.
Like I said, the audience needs to be modernized, not the Enterprise.
We're all still trying to catch up with the implications of 23rd century possibilities. But that is part of the human condition which Star Trek also looked at. In Return To Tomorrow we had this exchange...
As I said before, any attempt to modernize the TOS Enterprise is equivalent to Steampunking it.
If you described the USS Ford to people 150 years ago and then asked them to make a representation of it, imagine what you'd get from their modern perspective. Tell them that a few pounds of a metal can power a ship the size of a city to speeds nearly as fast as a train, and you'd get a reaction similar to Scotty's above.
And we're talking TOS here... Jefferies had one phaser bank on the Enterprise, and later on when he upgraded her for Phase II he left it at one phaser bank (just making it easier for the effects people to spot).
The real effect of the move from the original Enterprise design to the TMP Enterprise is equivalent to moving from CVN-65 (with 6 weapons placements) to CV-6 (with 94 weapons placements)... a giant step backwards.
As for power, the phasers don't need to be connected to the ship... you could put them in a shuttlecraft and the Enterprise could still power them. And that is based on technology from the first pilot. And all this is too advanced for 20th/21st century minds to grasp.
Like I said, the audience needs to be modernized, not the Enterprise.
We're all still trying to catch up with the implications of 23rd century possibilities. But that is part of the human condition which Star Trek also looked at. In Return To Tomorrow we had this exchange...
Kirk: Bones, they'll show us medical advances, miracles you never dreamed possible. Scotty, engineering advances. Vessels this size with engines the size of walnuts.
Scott: Ach! You're joking.
Spock: No, he's not.
If anyone can't grasp this stuff, you're in good company because Scotty had the same problem when confronted with things that seemed outside what he thought was possible.Scott: Ach! You're joking.
Spock: No, he's not.
As I said before, any attempt to modernize the TOS Enterprise is equivalent to Steampunking it.
If you described the USS Ford to people 150 years ago and then asked them to make a representation of it, imagine what you'd get from their modern perspective. Tell them that a few pounds of a metal can power a ship the size of a city to speeds nearly as fast as a train, and you'd get a reaction similar to Scotty's above.
I'd like you to prove that mathematically, stating your assumptions.
The ship having a main deflector that faces in only one direction could be taken as evidence against it being able to do that.
That's always how I interpreted it.
You can't do this math?
Let say the Enterprise pivoting about it's mid point exists in a spherical volume of a radius of half it's length (approximately 950 meters, so the sphere has a radius of about 475 meters). Lets also say that a phaser beam has a diameter of about 1 meter. At the speed of light (299,792,458 meters per second) it would take the Enterprise approximately 0.01 seconds to cover the sphere's surface area (of approximately 2,835,287 square meters).
And I think it goes without saying, but at warp 2 it would be much less time than that.
Isn't calling the dish the "main deflector" a bit of a retcon? The original annotated Jefferies' drawing calls it a "main sensor".
Well how could it be better?
Deg and Vektor are very talented artists and clearly have immense respect for Matt Jeffries. When you look at their ships and then Ryan Church's version, whom do you think has more respect for Jeffries?
Even Probert (a very talented artist) made a lot of changes to Jeffries' Phase 2 design. While maintaining Jeffries' basic shape, he added some wonderful detailing.
In fact of all the Enterprise re-imaginings I have seen I think Deg and Vektor have been the most faithful to Matt's design.
I agree that Matt's design is absolutely timeless in shape and in structure. It still looks futuristic to me, but I also agree with the Deg and Vektor that a slight modernization of the skin of Jeffries design perhaps it would have made it completely unnecessary to go the route of Church's 1950's Hot Rod Enterprise, which is in my opinion, completely unbalanced, and much like his phaser design, too flashy and Flash Gordon-esque.
I suppose the argument from the Abrams camp was that the TOS Enteprise would look too hokey on the big screen.
Here is a wonderful example (by another artist) of how the original ship would look with modern cinematic techniques.
Or this beautiful rendering by Daniel Broadway on how much better the classic E would have looked on the big screen...
The wonderful thing about all of this is that Jeffries' work inspires people, and then their work inspires others.
For example, the rear warp nacelles from Deg's design inspired model maker Jeffrey Gaskin...
VIDEO HERE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7fU9v-g5qA
And also inspired artists Rick Carthew and Ricky Wallace...
Artists are meant to inspire and BE inspired.
I have seen several interviews of Matt Jeffries and it was very obvious to me, as I'm sure it was to all of you, that he was a genuine, and humble man.
If he could see the work of these artists and how he inspired and continues to inspire them to this day, I am certain he would be thrilled.
Let say the Enterprise pivoting about it's mid point exists in a spherical volume of a radius of half it's length (approximately 950 meters, so the sphere has a radius of about 475 meters). Lets also say that a phaser beam has a diameter of about 1 meter. At the speed of light (299,792,458 meters per second) it would take the Enterprise approximately 0.01 seconds to cover the sphere's surface area (of approximately 2,835,287 square meters).
And I think it goes without saying, but at warp 2 it would be much less time than that.
You're assuming that the Enterprise has the ability to pivot on its axis at the speed of light or greater, which it has never been seen to do on-screen. On the contrary, starships have always been seen to maneuver and reorient themselves quite ponderously. There's no evidence I've ever seen that warp engines are capable of affecting the ship's orientation at all, let alone fast enough to traverse an entire spherical envelope in a tenth of a second.
In Elaan of Troyius, it seemed pretty obvious to me that they basically engaged warp 2 and pulled a U-turn to bring the forward-firing photon torpedo tubes to bear on the target that had just shot past them. They did not simply spin the ship on its axis at warp speed.
EDIT - Furthermore, pivoting a ship at FTL rotational speed presents all kinds of messy problems. The leading edge of the saucer and aft tips of the nacelles might be moving at light speed or faster but the ship's center of gravity would be effectively stationary. Can you imagine the centrifugal force of something like that? Close orbiting a black hole would pale by comparison. Sure, they've got inertial dampers and structural integrity fields and whatnot, but there are limits to everything.
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Perhaps, but my comments don't depend on that anyway. I wasn't suggesting that the Enterprise could fly at warp sideways or any other angle besides forward and backwards. That doesn't mean it can't turn at warp speed, but I can easily believe that doing so produces a strain on all sorts of things depending on the tightness of the turn and what warp factor they're traveling at.The maneuver Kirk ordered in Elaan of Troyius might have been so explicit for that very reason.
"We'll pivot at Warp 2." Pivot--not change course or turn.Let say the Enterprise pivoting about it's mid point exists in a spherical volume of a radius of half it's length (approximately 950 meters, so the sphere has a radius of about 475 meters). Lets also say that a phaser beam has a diameter of about 1 meter. At the speed of light (299,792,458 meters per second) it would take the Enterprise approximately 0.01 seconds to cover the sphere's surface area (of approximately 2,835,287 square meters).
And I think it goes without saying, but at warp 2 it would be much less time than that.
You're assuming that the Enterprise has the ability to pivot on its axis at the speed of light or greater, which it has never been seen to do on-screen. On the contrary, starships have always been seen to maneuver and reorient themselves quite ponderously. There's no evidence I've ever seen that warp engines are capable of affecting the ship's orientation at all, let alone fast enough to traverse an entire spherical envelope in a tenth of a second.
In Elaan of Troyius, it seemed pretty obvious to me that they basically engaged warp 2 and pulled a U-turn to bring the forward-firing photon torpedo tubes to bear on the target that had just shot past them. They did not simply spin the ship on its axis at warp speed.
And this is a perfect example of why most people can't fathom the actual implications of 23rd century technology.Let say the Enterprise pivoting about it's mid point exists in a spherical volume of a radius of half it's length (approximately 950 meters, so the sphere has a radius of about 475 meters). Lets also say that a phaser beam has a diameter of about 1 meter. At the speed of light (299,792,458 meters per second) it would take the Enterprise approximately 0.01 seconds to cover the sphere's surface area (of approximately 2,835,287 square meters).
And I think it goes without saying, but at warp 2 it would be much less time than that.
You're assuming that the Enterprise has the ability to pivot on its axis at the speed of light or greater, which it has never been seen to do on-screen. On the contrary, starships have always been seen to maneuver and reorient themselves quite ponderously. There's no evidence I've ever seen that warp engines are capable of affecting the ship's orientation at all, let alone fast enough to traverse an entire spherical envelope in a tenth of a second.
In Elaan of Troyius, it seemed pretty obvious to me that they basically engaged warp 2 and pulled a U-turn to bring the forward-firing photon torpedo tubes to bear on the target that had just shot past them. They did not simply spin the ship on its axis at warp speed.
EDIT - Furthermore, pivoting a ship at FTL rotational speed presents all kinds of messy problems. The leading edge of the saucer and aft tips of the nacelles might be moving at light speed or faster but the ship's center of gravity would be effectively stationary. Can you imagine the centrifugal force of something like that? Close orbiting a black hole would pale by comparison. Sure, they've got inertial dampers and structural integrity fields and whatnot, but there are limits to everything.
Look guys, I'm not going to hold your hands through this stuff. If you can't get it (and I don't believe you need anywhere close to my background to understand this) or don't want to get it, it isn't my problem (I don't need others to agree with my views). I'm just pointing out that the more people attempt to modernize something from hundreds of years in the future, the less futuristic it becomes.
Vektor, I love your version of the Enterprise... it is one of the most esthetically pleasing renditions I've seen. But many of your choices show that you are firmly rooted in the 21st century.
Forget the phasers, you added reaction control thrusters to the design. Why? Because it needed them? Maybe a 21st century vessel would, but not a 23rd century one. The next obvious question is how does it maneuver?... and the answer is (and always should have been) we don't know because we aren't from the 23rd century.
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Alright, so by "firing in all possible directions at once," you're exaggerating. You don't mean literally all directions at the same instant in time. The fact is, with two working phaser banks, the ship can fire in two directions literally at the same time, which is what the TOS Enterprise usually did with its pair of blue beams.You can't do this math?
Let say the Enterprise pivoting about it's mid point exists in a spherical volume of a radius of half it's length (approximately 950 meters, so the sphere has a radius of about 475 meters). Lets also say that a phaser beam has a diameter of about 1 meter. At the speed of light (299,792,458 meters per second) it would take the Enterprise approximately 0.01 seconds to cover the sphere's surface area (of approximately 2,835,287 square meters).
And I think it goes without saying, but at warp 2 it would be much less time than that.
In .01 seconds, a target moving at the speed of light will move almost three million meters, which is about three million times the diameter of your phaser beam. Will your E reorient fast enough to defeat two targets coming in at warp before one scores a hit against it? I'm not liking its chances. In war, more is almost always better. With two banks firing simultaneously, the sphere can be covered in approximately half the time, which is a measurable advantage.
But there is another problem, that I said originally: what is the average angular speed of the Enterprise while it's traversing the surface area of the sphere? If it takes time measured in more than a few percentages of a second to go from sublight to superluminal, then, when starting up from rest, it would take much longer to completely traverse the spherical surface of the example, obviously. In this situation, two banks could provide an even greater advantage.
My math is just fine, by the way.
It may be a retcon, I'll agree.
From what I know of TOS more or less on its own terms, IIRC, The Making of Star Trek speaks of navigational deflectors (at the moment, I don't have access to the book to look up what it says exactly). I don't recall it being nailed down where they were. They would pretty much have to be on the engineering hull, though, or else the warp drive would be useless with the saucer jettisoned.
In "The Paradise Syndrome," the Enterprise uses a deflector beam against the asteroid. In the original version, IIRC, the beam emanates from some unknown point on the ship as shown here. In TOS-R, it appears that they made the beam originate from what in TNG would have been the main deflector dish, as shown here.
More is not always better, but redundancy and 720 degree coverage is generally warrented regardless of how fast ones ship can turn, pivot, or roll.
Even when the US Navy started removing guns from their ships, there noticed that it was a mistake to remove them all, and then reintroduced a small number of cannon to their warships. Enough to cover most arcs with at at least one gun. Most only have one gun, but others have two. A far cry from the 15 main guns a light cruiser might have in 1940, plus secondary weapons and anti-aircraft guns. Today warships have one or two main guns, a small number of close defense gatling based cannons, and recently close in anti-personal machine guns to deal with small boats, swimmers, and the like. Newer ships are to be fitted with lasers as some point which can be dialed up and down in power for various effects. The larger ships are to be fitted with railguns if needed. But again, probably only one or two per ship.
Even when the US Navy started removing guns from their ships, there noticed that it was a mistake to remove them all, and then reintroduced a small number of cannon to their warships. Enough to cover most arcs with at at least one gun. Most only have one gun, but others have two. A far cry from the 15 main guns a light cruiser might have in 1940, plus secondary weapons and anti-aircraft guns. Today warships have one or two main guns, a small number of close defense gatling based cannons, and recently close in anti-personal machine guns to deal with small boats, swimmers, and the like. Newer ships are to be fitted with lasers as some point which can be dialed up and down in power for various effects. The larger ships are to be fitted with railguns if needed. But again, probably only one or two per ship.
OMG! 
I showed you all possible directions can be hit within 0.01 seconds, which matches what I said earlier...
"Pivoting at the speed of light or faster means you could (from the perspective of someone out side watching) appear to be firing in all possible directions at once.
To do this the Enterprise (starting at the top of the sphere) spins covering the sphere until it reaches the bottom... approximately 1492 rotations in about 0.01 seconds. If this was done on film, it would take a single frame ( if the camera saw it at all and be blurry).No, not considering this...
Fix this and we can continue. Because this looks like you don't care enough to think this through before replying. I won't respond further until all the mistakes in your post are addressed and corrected.
It's nice to see you're so well credentialed, Shaw, but this particular debate isn't really about math, it's about basic assumptions. I don't entirely disagree with your point about attempts to modernize the design actually taking it in the opposite direction, but literal 23rd century plausibility has never been the be-all, end-all objective, not even when Matt Jefferies first designed the Enterprise. If I had set out to create the most speculative, forward-thinking version of the Enterprise I could possibly think of without regard to entertainment value or contemporary relevance, I assure you it would have almost no connection at all with anything we’ve ever seen in Star Trek other than the name. But Star Trek isn’t just a vision of the future, it’s also an entertainment vehicle and it has to appeal to a certain range of contemporary expectations.
From TMP onward, the design was “modernized” in various ways, i.e. the addition of obvious phaser banks in multiple locations. The TOS Enterprise had NONE that were obvious, not even the ones from which the phaser beams were visibly emitted. We could conclude that the TOS Enterprise had only one phaser bank because we only ever saw one firing, or we could assume there were other phaser banks, also invisible, that were simply never caught firing “on camera.” We could also speculate that the TOS Enterprise had NO phaser banks as such but rather collimated phaser energy at a point just above the surface of the hull and emitted it in a controlled direction. And yet, for some reason, only a few years later they were using the multiple discreet phaser banks as seen on the TMP refit, and a century later the linear phaser arrays first seen on the Enterprise D.
Now, how do we rationalize this? We can take it at face value and assume that something about the technology or its operational conditions changed between the two designs. You yourself mentioned the flat screen vs. CRT style monitors and the fact the latter may have replaced the former due to ship-board maintenance or manufacturing limitations. Perhaps something similar happened with the invisible phaser banks. Or maybe the original versions couldn’t handle the extra power from channeling them through the main engines and they had to do something completely different. The same sort of explanation could be applied to the maneuvering thrusters.
The only other alternative for resolving these discrepancies is to assume that either TOS or everything that came after it is open to some degree of reinterpretation. Some people go to the extreme of simply dismissing one or the other entirely, which is fine. To each their own. For my own part, as much as I love TOS, I do find it very dated by today’s standards, let alone a 23rd century perspective, which none of us is truly capable of envisioning any more than someone from three hundred years AGO could accurately envision our time. In particular, I don’t think the mere lack of familiar or recognizable technologies automatically implies something more advanced.
For my TOS Enterprise update, I chose to come at it from the point of view that my changes and additions were always there, just not readily visible on 1960s television screens. That’s why I didn’t radically alter the basic lines and proportions as so many other people have done, most notably JJ Abrams and his team. For the most part, mine was intended to be the “high-definition” version of the original. To be honest, though, I was never really concerned with even that level of rationalization. I just wanted to take the original and improve on a few things, according to my own sensibilities of course, without being slavishly devoted to either the TOS or post-TOS aesthetic.
Your mileage may vary.
Again, I don’t agree that the mere lack of familiar or recognizable technologies automatically implies something more advanced. We honestly can’t know whether 23rd century spacecraft will require some form of reaction control thrusters or not, and the fact that the TOS Enterprise didn’t have anything obviously like them does not unilaterally invalidate the possibility that they were there. A good example would be the Abrams nu-Trek Enterprise which doesn’t have any obvious RCS thrusters either but is in fact studded with small, unobtrusive ones tucked in between the hull panels all over the ship. Ironically, one of the reasons the most recent renderings of my updated Enterprise have gaping holes where the TMP-style RCS thrusters used to be is because I decided to abandon them and go with similar, unobtrusive versions. I just haven’t gotten around to doing it yet.
IF the Enterprise were capable of maneuvering in this fashion, you would be correct, but such capability has NEVER been demonstrated in TOS or any subsequent Trek series or movie. On the contrary, Trek ships have always been shown to make wide, sweeping turns or relatively ponderous pivots.
If the line of dialogue in Elaan of Troyius is your only substantiation for this then it's pretty weak. Kirk’s exact words were, “As he passes, I want to cut in warp drive. We'll pivot at warp two and bring all tubes to bear.” Only an extremely narrow grammatical interpretation would conclude this to mean the ship was actually rotating on its axis at FTL speed. A far more plausible interpretation is that the ship simply accelerated to warp two and made a U-turn to face its target, a type of maneuver seen many times in Trek history at least as far back as TNG’s Encounter at Farpoint. By strict word definition, Kirk might have more accurately said “turn” rather than “pivot” but the two are so closely synonymous as to be easily transposed.
The ability to do what you describe would radically alter the character of pretty much every space battle we’ve ever seen in Star Trek, including TOS. Therefore, as far as I’m concerned, it does not exist, and multiple phaser banks covering multiple firing arcs are well justified, whether or not they are obviously visible on the ship’s hull.
One of the limitations of TOS and all subsequent films and series is one of f/x. To properly show the ship at warp would mean we couldn't see it at all. Hell, it wouldn't even have to be at warp for that to be the case. The limitations of TOS in showing the ship firing phasers from different points on the hull were due directly to time and money--they simply couldn't afford more time to make further different sequences of the ship firing phasers so we were stuck with a few stock shots. Knowing that shouldn't automatically invalidate what the anecdotal evidence within the series seems to be saying.
We know there were bathrooms aboard ship simply because there had to be even though we never saw them. We know the shuttlecraft have to be warp capable because the onscreen evidence argues for it and events shown onscreen don't make sense if the shuttlecraft aren't warp capable.
We know there were bathrooms aboard ship simply because there had to be even though we never saw them. We know the shuttlecraft have to be warp capable because the onscreen evidence argues for it and events shown onscreen don't make sense if the shuttlecraft aren't warp capable.
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