Nova class deckplans

[Bill Morris]

The lower shuttlebay is visible on screen as the shuttle leaves the ship; at a similar size to the Type-6 shuttlecraft, the external hatch (though it doesn't appear on the model at all) would only fit into a 180m or larger vessel; the shuttle itself would not fit into single-deck bay, which would put the top of the shuttlebay directly under the bridge and invalidate the MSD anyway.

Well, here's deck 3 of the Defiant at 120 meters overall length, with the Chaffee (Type-10 shuttlepod) scaled to the EAS-recommended length of 6.5 meters sitting in the launch bay, just as it was before the launch we saw in DS9: The Sound of Her Voice.

It wasn't the Chaffee in "Sound of Her Voice," though. It was the larger design, which IIRC is about 9 meters long.

No, no. Caffee, Type 10, not 9 meters long. The figure below shows it at 6.5 meters in length, a perfect fit for a 120-meter Defiant, with a seat set in there at that scale.

According to the Christie's auction catalog, this seat is 41" (1.04 meter) tall.

Christie's catalog listing, 6th item down:
http://startrekpropcollector.com/trekauctions/data/pages/christies/page35.html
These seats were reused many times, including in the NX-shuttlepod.

The Chaffee in the figure below is 700 pixels long, and the seat is 112 pixels tall.

(700/6.5) x 1.04 = 112

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Well, here's deck 3 of the Defiant at 120 meters overall length, with the Chaffee (Type-10 shuttlepod) scaled to the EAS-recommended length of 6.5 meters sitting in the launch bay, just as it was before the launch we saw in DS9: The Sound of Her Voice.

It wasn't the Chaffee in "Sound of Her Voice," though. It was the larger design, which IIRC is about 9 meters long.

No, no. Caffee, Type 10, not 9 meters long. The figure below shows it at 6.5 meters in length, a perfect fit for a 120-meter Defiant, with a seat set in there at that scale.

But the seat doesn't FIT at that scale. Notice the same seat in NX-01 shuttlepod.

Unless you're supposed to pilot that shuttle with your head sticking out of a hatch on the top, it just isn't going to fit at 6.5 meters. You could have the crew sitting on the floor, but that would be a pretty silly design compromise just to justify a fairly dubious MSD.

 

[Bill Morris]

I used the NX-shuttlepod configuration of that seat, which is adjusted unusually high. Here's the same seat at a more normal 40 cm seating position off the floor (the red line), like an office chair for a person 6' tall. Airline passengers seats are set lower than that. I also moved it back a little, but it's all still scaled at 6.5-meters for shuttle length. Still too tight? I could make the floor a few inches lower.

 

[Timo]

Let's consider the overall interior. We see apparent two-plus-two seating, with O'Brien piloting and Sisko and Bashir riding on the back row, the fourth seat probably intended to cater for the damsel in distress (as there doesn't seem to be any space for stretchers or the like).

http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/6x25/hervoice_476.jpg
http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/6x25/hervoice_466.jpg
http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/6x25/hervoice_474.jpg

The Bashir pic seems to suggest that all the chairs swivel, and are mounted inside the Type 6 shuttlecraft prop (the aft ramp is visible behind Bashir's right shoulder) but in a fairly cramped manner that would fit a somewhat smaller interior as well. And the focus is carefully kept off the walls, so even the aft ramp need not exactly match the exterior ramp of Type 10.

Or is it the good old Type 15 shuttlepod prop after all? Below we see how spacious that prop was in "The Search", depicting a Defiant auxiliary with an aft hatch (and therefore apparently not a Type 18). The wall separating the cabin from the cargo trunk was removed to create the effect.

http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/3x02/thesearch2_049.jpg

The details of the respective aft hatches suggest that Type 6 was used for shooting the Chaffee instead of Type 15. However, the comparison above indicates that something the size of Type 15 could have been sufficient for the job, too. We could size our Chaffee interpretation according to that:



This comparison would give a Chaffee length of as little as 5.5 meters if we so wish, with sufficient headroom. Just mind your foreheads when stepping (or crawling) out that aft hatch!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Boris Skrbic]

I'm not using only the MSD. As noted many times, I'm using it as the starting point, because it is a detailed, persistent graphic that ended up onscreen and remained there for several seasons. The goal is to rationalize everything else without making that graphic look like its fictional artist had no clue about the ship.

And in doing so, we seek to make it look as if the ship's DESIGNERS had no idea what they were doing.

Whatever. Go play with your drawings.

Go research how ships were actually designed on Trek. Some designers would specify every last detail even for ships of the week, others would provide only a few sketches and let the modelmaker and the VFX supervisor work out the remainder. No Defiant MSD had been drawn up originally, and by the time it was added for "The Adversary" (at least that is where I first spotted it while rewatching the series in sequence), the 560' size either wasn't as clear as it could've been or it was under dispute. Yes, this is highly unusual for ships of that importance, but it happened here, so now we have to respect the fact that the new layout was canonized onscreen several times over, then fleshed out for the deck plans and the new MSD.

 

[Bill Morris]

I'll play around with this little by little, but this is pretty much how the seating has to be in a 6.5-meter Chaffee, keeping in mind there's a relatively large navagational deflector below the nose and set back a bit. The seats might have to go back even more once I put that in.

Also Doug Drexler designed this thing before finishing his deck plans based on a 120-meter Defiant, and he designed the launch bay for it. So I have to assume his intended size for the Chaffee was 6.5 meters in length, despite the figure of 9.64 in the DS9TM, even if he did tend to draw shuttles too large in MSDs.

 

[Timo]

Seats that are set fairly far back in the hull are nicely consistent with the minimal interior views we got, as there was no hint of a window beyond O'Brien's shoulder.

One wonders why Starfleet bothers with these acutely tilted windows that only offer a view forward and up, here and in the Danube. The TOS shuttle was worse, offering a view up but not forward! Shouldn't a landing craft instead be generously provided with downward-pointing windows?

Apparently, synthetic views solve all problems for our intrepid pilots. Which just raises the question of why install a windshield at all...

At least the Chaffee has twin rationales for the odd windshield that don't apply to most other auxiliaries. It flies from a starship it has to approach from below, dorsal side first. And it flies from a ship designed purely for combat, so tilting the window away from ground fire might be a good idea.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I used the NX-shuttlepod configuration of that seat, which is adjusted unusually high.

LCARS, the chair you linked to is the side-console chair of NX-01's shuttlepod. It doesn't extend up to the back of the head, it stops at the shoulders.

For that chair in your drawing the pilot would have to be headless just to SIT in the thing. Standing would be impossible, even squatting would be painful and awkward.

 

[Bill Morris]

Here's the finished drawing. These are Corbeau GTS II racing seats. The captain's chair on the Defiant is the same, with a custom stand and some consoles attached. They only showed the tops of the seats in DS9: The Sound of Her Voice, but I recognize the seats. By the way, that fancy pilot's seat on the NX shuttlepod is another Corbeau model still on the market. And, yes, the one I pasted over the EAS figure is different, grabbed from my MSD of the NX shuttle for convenience, just to quickly show that seating is possible at that scale.

I agree it's a little tight, but Doug Drexler designed this shuttlecraft and its launch bay before finishing his deck plans based on a 120-meter Defiant, and I believe that by scaling the Chaffee to 6.5 meters in length I'm reflecting the designer's intended size for it. If not, it's the designer's fault, he was too rushed to do things right, or someone changed it after it was out of his hands. But the EAS figure is also 6.5 meters.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Here's the finished drawing. These are Corbeau GTS II racing seats. The captain's chair on the Defiant is the same, with a custom stand and some consoles attached. They only showed the tops of the seats in DS9: The Sound of Her Voice, but I recognize the seats. By the way, that fancy pilot's seat on the NX shuttlepod is another Corbeau model still on the market. And, yes, the one I pasted over the EAS figure is different, grabbed from my MSD of the NX shuttle for convenience, just to quickly show that seating is possible at that scale.

I agree it's a little tight, but Doug Drexler designed this shuttlecraft and its launch bay before finishing his deck plans based on a 120-meter Defiant, and I believe that by scaling the Chaffee to 6.5 meters in length I'm reflecting the designer's intended size for it. If not, it's the designer's fault, he was too rushed to do things right, or someone changed it after it was out of his hands. But the EAS figure is also 6.5 meters.

Which still does not pass the back of Sisko's head. If the shuttlepod has a paper-thin hull, then the ceiling will be about two inches above the pilot's head.

Just randomly curious if anyone seriously believes this shuttle doesn't work a thousand times better at 9.5m... otherwise, this is just an exercise in clown-carism.

 

[Bill Morris]

Sure, it would work better if bigger, but that's not how these things were designed. We had scenes inside a Bajoran subimpulse shuttle that had the seats on the floor like car seats, and Jadzi even complained about that. My cross section of that is in my thread here about schematics.

Also, the no-longer-available Strategic Designs deck plans that led to this thread and the one about the Defiant seem to be scaled the same: to a 120-meter, four-deck Defiant.

But if Sisko wants to lower his seat a little, fine. It's adjustable.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Long as you don't mind flying through space in a glorified cooper mini, then.

 

[Timo]

Our heroes don't mind flying through space in a ship they consider an affront to proper starship design. Probably the shuttles are allowed to be of the same ill-fitting caliber?

A small ship, small auxiliaries... More legroom in the mothership for that 99.9% of time when the auxiliaries are not needed. For all we know, the ship "actually" only has this single shuttlebay, and three pods of varying design (sometimes Type 18, sometimes Type 10) are stacked atop each other there.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Doug Drexler]

Hi all. The Chaffee is 8 meters. A BMW is 5 meters. Plenty of head room in both! I'd send a diagram, but the thread won't let me. Someone send me their E-mail, and I'll pass it on for posting - Doug

dougdrexler@rocketmail.com

 

[dcsmokey]

From Doug Drexler:

 

[beamMe]

That's settled then.

 

[Boris Skrbic]

So far, it settles only the size from Doug's copy of the LightWave model (which we've known about for two years and two months, for those who came in late , and which I also had mentioned earlier in this thread), but we still need to make sure it fits the interior/exterior as filmed. As noted, 6.5m is merely Bernd's estimate from a long time ago; there is no need to take it as gospel.

Thanks for the side view, Doug. It would be nice to see the remaining views as part of a future batch of your blog posts, since they haven't been published anywhere to my knowledge.

 

[Doug Drexler]

Professional lightwave models are the best source for accurate size because they are always built at real world scale.

This is unlike the physical Enterprise D and the physical D shuttlecraft. Their scales are wildly different. This leaves a lot of room for misinterpretation and controversy, and encourages cheating sizes when the physical model elements are comped in post. On the other hand, the Lightwave Defiant model and the Lightwave Chaffee model were built to work together and in the same space. When we shoot CG scenes with various ships on Star Trek and Galactica, we don't cheat the sizes of the models up and down, so indeed, LW models are the best source for accurate sizes.

I'll see about running those views of the Chaffee on my blog next weekend.

 

[Bill Morris]

Welcome, Doug Drexler, to TrekBBS. I hope we'll see a Defiant CGI pictorial on drex files. I've been making do with this one, which is nice but not 100% accurate:

http://lcars24.com/DefWal.jpg

Well, this is the thing for the Chaffee I finished a few days ago, with seating a tad cramped with those Corbeau racing seats. Now I guess it's not finished if Doug Drexler says 8 meters. But in Doug Drexler's images of the Chaffee in the launch bay that it looked to me a tad big for the size of the opening in the same drawing, while it looked fine and showed ample clearance in the scene from DS9, which I used to scale it to a 120-meter Defiant and come up with the same size that Bernd had estimated (6.5 meters in overall length). Admittedly, one can't so accurately compare sizes when looking from an angle, which applies both the the drawing of the Chaffee in the launch bay and the launch scene from DS9.

And here it is at 6.5 meters in my recent Deck 3 drawing:

By the way, I was working on that Chaffee drawing when the 9.0 earthaquake hit and rearranged my house a bit. I finished it a few days later, although "finished" is now in question.

Update: Okay, here's the same figure with the Chaffee fattened up to 8 meters, still in a 120-meter Defiant. I can live with that and redo the seats in the Chaffee schematic.

But the burning question here for Doug Drexler is the size of the Defiant.

 

[Boris Skrbic]

On the other hand, the Lightwave Defiant model and the Lightwave Chaffee model were built to work together and in the same space. When we shoot CG scenes with various ships on Star Trek and Galactica, we don't cheat the sizes of the models up and down, so indeed, LW models are the best source for accurate sizes.

The Chaffee model was likely built to work together with Koji Kuramura's bay interior model. The size relationship would've been suggested by your drawings, which were obviously designed to fit inside your deck plans for a 120-meter-or-so Defiant. Once we leave the interior, however, the Defiant becomes 171 meters long, the size preferred by Gary Hutzel and built into the CG model according to your blog comment I linked above.

This would explain why Brandon MacDougall, who worked on this episode at Foundation Imaging, told me that his Chaffee is actually 12.8 meters long, 4.9 meters wide and 3 meters tall (the width and the height are without nacelles). It was scaled down only 15% in order to fit the shot where it leaves the bay, so it would've been about 11 meters long. The number can be reduced further to about 7.7 meters if we reduce the Defiant back to 120 meters or so, but it is more important to make sure the filmed interior fits the shuttle.

The situation on Galactica was much better, of course, since Richard Hudolin left ship designs up to Gary Hutzel, so there was less room for different interpretations of scale. Lee Stringer also said the smaller models were scaled off the practical sets. Once a number is inside the model, it cannot be misplaced or accidentally revised over the years, which is what happened with some of the ships on Star Trek.

Welcome, Doug Drexler, to TrekBBS. I hope we'll see a Defiant CGI pictorial on drex files. I've been making do with this one, which is nice but not 100% accurate:

http://lcars24.com/DefWal.jpg

Only the physical model could be considered 100% accurate. The first LightWave CG model was built off the ERTL kit, and while the second one (for "The Changing Face of Evil") was built using the actual miniature, it is still derivative. Not that I wouldn't want to see CG views of both models, but we must be aware of their accuracy.

But the burning question here for Doug Drexler is the size of the Defiant.

I already discussed this with Doug (see the link in my previous message). He said that the MSD was scaled to fit four decks, based on instructions from Ira Behr, while Gary Hutzel told me he had originally set the size at 171 meters, in order to make the ship 1.5 times longer than a bird-of-prey. Doug agrees that there is an inconsistency, but the scale of the interior can be stretched a bit without contradicting the established MSD layout.