That's fair. I always liked to think the ore arrived at the upper or lower pylon, made its way down (or up) until the product was packaged and stored in the cargo bays in the docking ring for export.
I've read a few tons of messages over the years about scales and sizes and such, and all I can really say about the DS9 station is that the 1451.82m (~4763') diameter was to me an acceptable compromise between the arbitrary 5280 feet used by the VFX folks and the original ~3600' that I started with for the miniature blueprints. Even over the course of the 3-4 seasons that I was on the show, there was really no time to flesh out everything with precise measurements, and the DS9TM was basically an attempt to simply get things sorta kinda believable and entertaining in the time we had on the manuscript. If folks have questions about where things are located or how things worked in-universe, I don't have a whole lot of answers after ~30 years, but I certainly invite the faithful to play in the sandbox and come up with smart solutions. - Rick
Rick has spoken. "Sorta kinda believable and entertaining" Don't overthink. And yes, I do scale models. Feel free to play in the sandbox.
I got the new DS9 handbook the other day, and I have to admit I chuckled at some things. The section on the Defiant, which seems partly based on the descriptions in the DS9 Technical Manual, still doesn't have a consistent description of the ship's armaments. The text and the diagram labelings don't really match up. The nose of the Defiant is still described as being a warhead, with as many as five possible torpedo launchers if one goes by the diagram labeling. A few of the labels are clearly errors, as the starboard view has a part of the forward wing labeled as an impulse engine.
^Sounds like you don't have a very high overall impression of the book? DS9 being my favorite Trek series, I had my eyes on it.
No, I find it okay. I'm just amused that the section on the Defiant still has some of the same confusion, and I've seen a few other things that are unintentionally funny. But I do wish some of the labeling errors on the illustrations had been avoided, since it wouldn't have been difficult to do. I personally rather like the nose warhead idea, but I understand it's something that was never referenced in the show. IIRC, the original DS9 TM was the first reference to it.
Isn't the Defiant's nose where the mess hall was? I somehow remember that when the faulty torpedo crashed through the wall with Quark and Zephram Cochralien.
I am not surprised, because Starfleet Intelligence disinformation counter-measures. Defiant was a wartime project.
Yup. Since the mess hall and sickbay are the same set, we need two locations, and the round cheeks of the main hull, inboard of the triangular torpedo thingamabobs, appear appropriate. As for the bow, giant warheads never worked against the Borg. The only thing that ever did was boarding. And the Defiant needs a boarding system at the bow, in order to interface with DS9. The MSD shows an airlock tube of sorts there - but the exterior has no central opening for it. It does have two parallel panels, though... So perhaps Starfleet decided to convert the initial detaching-warhead bow into a breaching pod, with two side-by-side docking tubules that slide out from underneath hinged panels to deviously inject human-sized "nanoprobes" into Borg Cubes? Timo Saloniemi
Yep, parallel boarding tubes. And DS9 itself likely had one of its docking ring ports customized to fit that set-up.
The never-completed Defiant cutaway painting [source] goes with that interpretation (or one offset airlock, it's hard to tell).
...FWIW, the floor has a branching line pattern, one branch going to the visible starboard docking tube, one symmetrically going to the spot where the port one would be. Or then to a head or a broom closet or whatever. The impulse engines of the bow pod are definitely there, just as in the floor-by-floor plan that ended up in the TM, and in other views as well. It would have been nice to draw some sort of a piloting station there to more blatantly suggest independent flight capacity. Timo Saloniemi
I always like to take a look at the model and see if it lends itself to anything. The Defiant model has a panel on the nose that would be perfect for a hatch covering an airlock. It lines up with the deck layout.
It’s clear from Doug Drexler’s starboard elevation interior and deck plans that the Defiant has two side-by-side airlocks on Deck 3, just above the deflector. Unless there is a contradiction with the interior corridors as shown in a scene, I don’t see a better reference than these DS9TM schematics, which were also reused for consoles in Seasons 6 and 7. This wouldn’t stop a future production from altering the layout, of course, but we do have an exact interpretation.
Revisiting the p.15 scale drawing of the Enterprise-D, Defiant 74656 and DS9 together, I can certainly believe that each pylon "rises" or "falls" 126 decks in each "direction". I wonder what the view from inside Ops would have been of the upper pylons.