My TOS Shuttlecraft...

[ancient]

Very nice work, Warped9.

btw, Just to add a little something to the numbers discussion, we do see the Copernicus labelled as '2' on-screen. Though it was on the Enterprise-A and not the TOS-E. We see it in ST5:TFF, you can see it in the hangar, and when they land on the god-planet. Take as you will though.

 

[Warped9]

I believe in TFF we saw the Copernicus as 3. No matter. It just seems more symetrical as 1, 3, 5 and 7. and I give TOS more weight than TWoK-TUC.

 

[ancient]

I figured. Was there any explanation given (on or off the books) as to what ever happened to the even-numbers? Or are the evens used for the work-bees or something?

By the way, I'm glad you put warp nacelles on the shuttle, I don't know how the 'no warp for tos-shuttles' got started but it was insanely stupid, imo.

 

[Warped9]

There's confusion on this issue. In TMoST it says the E has six shuttlecraft (which seems like a lot given the space available). But "the Omega Glory" seems to establish that a heavy cruiser has a complement of four shuttlecraft (which seems more reasonable). At the time of TOS we didn't know of workbees or maintenance pods or the like and yet it did seem odd that if the ship had only four to six shuttlecraft that one of them would be numbered 7.

The offscreen explanation is likely that it was easy to lift a 7 from the "1701" decals. The onscreen explanation remains illusive and thus pretty much left up to the individual unless someone can arrange a seance to contact MJ.

If the Columbus had been established onscreen as 1701/2 then I would have had no choice but to go with that. But we nevr saw the registry of any other shuttle other than the Galileo and so we're left to work from that.

My references in order of priority has been onscreen TOS materiel as the highest priority, TAS and movie onscreen materiel as secondary and then "official" or fan generated print materiel lastly.

 

[Klaus]

ancient said:
By the way, I'm glad you put warp nacelles on the shuttle, I don't know how the 'no warp for tos-shuttles' got started but it was insanely stupid, imo.

The first time I remember coming across it was in Blish's Spock Must Die!, where ur-Spock rigged a shuttle's engines to be warp-capable by drawing energy directly from "Hilbert space" [the dimension they used to make an interstellar transporter] - it is responsible for the best line in the book, when Scotty called it "putting a ten-ampere tap on God" and said it made him uncomfortable... but that's obviously not canon, and wouldn't the "Menagerie" scene of Kirk and imaginary Mendez chasing the E in a shuttle argue pretty forcefully in favor of warp lol?

 

[johnhazard]

Warped9 said:
Try this.

I LOVE this. I've always bought into the idea that the TOS shuttles had no warp drive- I believe Roddenberry was insistent about it, and for me as well as many others, ignoring that would be like Catholics ignoring an edict from the Pope.

Folks always bring up "The Menagerie" as proof the shuttles had to have warp drive, while others say it was a Starbase shuttle, it was different than the ones the Starships carried.

I think it makes sense that the nacelles on most shuttles looked like warp nacelles, when they really performed a similar function- negating gravity around the shuttle, so it's tiny thrusters could lift it off a planet.

I prefer to believe most or all shuttles couldn't go to warp- it just makes the tech of TOS seem less advanced than TNG. It gives a sense of history. "The Menagerie" was just a mistake to be ignored- if someone ever does a "special edition", Kirk and Mendez should be in something like this scout shuttle.


I've also always thought it was crazy to land a shuttle on it's engines, the most precious and potentially dangerous part of the ship. Better they be up on struts, like on your scout. The only reason to put them down below is, like I said, they're there to come between the shuttle and the gravity of the planet below.

Can't wait to see more of this one.

 

[Irishman]

The problem is that we don't get to pick and choose which clearly depicted onscreen facts we ignore. Is all Roddenberry's backstage banter equally as weighted in your mind?

 

[Warped9]

I've never heard of anyone officially connected to TOS or the rest of Trek and explicitly arguing that shuttlecraft have no warpdrive. And even if someone did the evidence right there onscreen supports that they do.

However an interesting point has been raised and I will try to address it that I believe the shuttlecraft's antigrav generators (for lift-off) are located within the space warp nacelles.

 

[Warped9]

Hurrah! Last night I was experimenting with Automator (part of my OS X Tiger on my eMac) and successfully and effortlessly created a PDF document out of my drawings (or what I have so far). Now when I'm finished the set I know I'll be able to share it out easily.

 

[B.J.]

Ah, but the $100,000 question is, did it convert the drawings to an actual vector format, or did it just embed a raster bitmap? A lot of programs that convert to PDF only do well with text and not vectors.

B.J.

 

[Irishman]

Warped9,

Here's an idea that occurred to me, while reading your last post. What if the shuttlecraft's antigravs are in the nacelle pylon and wing? We have seen how small antigravs can be aboard the Enterprise. There's no reason to conclude that the pylon functions exactly like its larger cousins on the E herself (especially given that the shuttlecraft doesn't have m/a reactor). Or, similarly, its antigravs could simply be a slab 3 or 4 inches thick covering the entire ventral flat surface of the craft.

 

[Q2UnME]

^It depends on what he's using as his source drawing program. I suspect it's something on a Mac, so I'm not going to comment further because I'm not a Mac guy. I use AutoCAD 2004 for my drawings and drafting needs. I also use Adobe Acrobat (real version, not just the reader). Acrobat installs a neat little tool into AutoCAD that allows for "plotting" drawings from the "DWG" into PDF. It actually does a good job, but one has to consider the PDF nothing more than a 2D drawing. All the layers and line vector information is gone and it's really nothing more than a 2D picture. For my needs, it works well and allows me to share CAD drawings with folks who do not have the program or skill set for CAD but can handle Acrobat.

My two cents.

Q2UnME

 

[Warped9]

The drawings I've worked on in Illustrator and Photoshop are layered drawings, but I then make a flattened finished copy in JPEG when finished. That 2D JPEG image is what I convert into a PDF file and then the collection of images into a PDF document. Automator allows me to save evrything that's required for a printer to make copies of the images.

Now there is one small catch here: The images are 11x17 in size and as far as I know most personal home printers cannot print that size. If someone wants the fullsize hardcopy then they'll have to copy the PDF document onto a CD or flash drive and take it to their local copy/print shop to print out the 11x17 sheets. I did it this way so that the drawings would be in actual 1/24 scale for the convenience of would-be modelers. They can take measurements right from the drawings rather than trying to scale up from something smaller. The larger sheets are also nicer to look at and harken bark to the large sheets of FJ's Booklet Of General Plans.

I could make a separate PDF document with sheets that are 8.5x11, but then the image doesn't fill the page, and while it still looks nice (I've printed samples to see for myself) it doesn't make the same impression as the 11x17 versions.

And now here is something else to consider. I've decided to charge little for these plans, little more than the cost of materiels (blank CDs and shipping) and so the real expense would be for anyone taking their electronic copy to a copy/printing shop for printing. Even so I daresay the cost of printing out twenty-five 11x17 sheets will still be less than if you were paying for something like this from Pocket Books say. Put another way I recall paying something like about $12-$15 CAN for my original FJ plans back in the mid '70s. Those things would cost easily three or four times or more than that today. I know the last Pocket Books Trek reference books were easily in the $40-$60 CAN or so range over the past few years.

Beyond a few contributor's copies I still want to keep the expense of these things as low as possible. Fortunately contemporary home computer technology helps to do that. I know first hand how disappointing it is for devoted fans to feel they're being left out of the loop when they see desireable Trek merchandise at crazy prices. When I was doing fanzines for the Toronto Trek convention my friends and I set a target of $5 while others were routinely charging $15-$20 or more for their zines. We essentially covered our costs and each walked away with about $20 in our pockets for the weekend, about enough to cover our drinks and snacks over the weekend. So in the end it was a draw.

In a way I'm losing money because my time is not being charged for because this is still essentially a hobby and I'm not greedy, certainly not at the expense of fellow fans.

 

[Warped9]

Something new while I'm working on the interior detrails.

 

[Captain Robert April]

Minor nit: I think that should be "materials", not "materiels".

 

[Warped9]

^^ Good point.

 

[Warped9]

Regrettably what you can't really see here except as a vertical line just ahead of the atmospheric recycling tanks is the craft's basic food and beverage processor. This will be more visible in the forthcoming deck plan as well as the second aft cutaway view. It's my notion that this and the waste management system were primarily what was jettisoned to lighten the Galileo's load in "The Galileo Seven."

 

[Klaus]

very nice... and one more nit -- in the previous one it should say "displaced", not "displayed"...

 

[Warped9]

Klaus said:
very nice... and one more nit -- in the previous one it should say "displaced", not "displayed"...

If you're refering to what I think you are then read the sentence again. You may not have clearly understood what I was saying: Starfleet's new faster starships were displaying the inadequacy of the then current auxiliary (read: shuttlecraft) craft. Unless, of course, you're refering to something else.

 

[Klaus]

Ahh, I wasn't reading it that way, cool! Maybe "displayed the inadequacy of auxiliary craft then in service"?