Re: Never seen TOS scenes, but would've been nice.
^^ Yes, I noticed that. This was just an exercise in trying to get a lay of the land so to speak. My real question is: who am I to believe has the best schematics of the Hangar Deck? Reasonable chematics of the
E herself are now available from at least three sources--Alan Sinclair being one, cannot at the moment recall the other fellows name (starts with a "C" I believe) and of course from
CRA. How far can one now trust what FJ did as we've seen he diverged quite a bit from what we actually saw in many things. His shuttlecraft really bears only superficial resemblance to what we've seen onscreen as well as in comparison to the excellent renderings done by Phil Broad and
FourMadMen.
A lot is made of Matt Jeffries' original intentions, but the best intentions can be compromised when they butt up against the realities of tv production. And then sometimes the realities necessitate better solutions and/or rationalizations.
The original filming miniature was to have been at 1/48 scale until GR decided they wanted a bigger ship and crew. But the idea that the filming miniature represents a very awkward and unwieldy 1/84 some scale doesn't work very well. Far better and more logical that the scale was simply doubled to 1/96 and then you have a very reasonable and spacious ship of 1080' l.o.a. And the beauty is that that figure cannot be contested anywhere onscreen since the ship's size was never stated at any time. But it does beg the question: where did MJ come up with that 947' figure? We know that drawings of the ship at around that time (as seen in
TMoST0 were not accurate or consistent with the filming miniature (to be kind). We've also discovered that the early Phase II drawings are not very consistent with the TOS
E. As was said elsewhere before, it is almost as if MJ couldn't redraw his own ship and just decided to fudge it(!).
Anyway, the gist of it is to first decide how big the ship "really" is--947' or 1080'--and then discern how much available space there is for the Flight Deck, Maintenance Bay and whatever sized shuttlecraft.
Note,
CRA, that a larger ship facilitates many things such as allowing more credibly for some of the sized interiors we saw onscreen, a more credibly sized shuttlecraft, and of course a forward facing bridge.
Here's a copy of comparison I did. The smaller represents the ship at 947'. The larger image shows it 14% larger at 1080'. You can easily see the appreciable increase in size and available space overall.
Also I'm not really doing thm in any particular order, but I will get around to everything I have in mind.
