Are there any good quality pics of the big Enterprise-D cutaway from TNG's first season out there? I remember reading once (on the internet, so it must be 100% true) that the Enterprise-D's deck layout needed a little finessing to make deck 10 fit with the location of Ten Forward, and was curious if the cutaway perhaps originally reflected the observation walkway/corridor envisioned for the location, before the too-big-to-fit Ten Forward was squeezed in for season two.
This one, with appropriate shoulders, shows the deck floor going right through the notch at the saucer rim: https://i.stack.imgur.com/lqq0w.jpg Alas, it's not as if it ever got any better. The art remained untweaked, Ten Forward remained on Deck 11, the mouse and the Porsche stayed put. Only the later Sternback blueprints corrected this to any degree, and even there the window row count remains iffy. Timo Saloniemi
Fascinating, thank you! I just compared that with the Sternbach Enterprise-D blueprint cutaway and yes,they're really quite different.
Okay, what? You guys must be engineers or architects to EVEN figure that picture out Okay, I'm looking at it in a cell phone but still How can 10 Firward be on deck 11? That's just Wrong! I have the blue prints, these big fold out ones. There are like 14 or 25 maybe of them. They show like 2 of three decks on each one, but some of the smaller decks have more on each page. (BUT, I'm not a nerd) Anyway, on those, 10 forward is on deck ten!!! So your "deck 11" information, I'm sorry to tell you, seems to be in error. One thing that bothered me though was that in one of the episodes it shows Picard's room number as being on a different deck than my Blueprints. ( I figure that the episode is simply in error)
Thing is, Ten-Forward was designed and added to the show for season two. This really old concept art is what Enterprise-D designer Andrew Probert envisioned for those tiny top and bottom saucer rim windows: But, it seems this idea was already jettisoned (or simply never seen) by whomever came up with the large cutaway diagram at the back of engineering. Mike Okuda came up with this concept in '88, for the lower saucer-rim windows. It's way too big to fit there going by the above, but whatever. Movie magic. The official TNG blueprint set was made many years later, by Rick Sternbach, attempting to reconcile everything, and including stuff like Stellar Cartography which was added in the movie Generations.
Kinda like the Rec Deck not actually fitting in the space available on the Refit Enterprise, even though the windows are appropriate.
I've still got one of these posters that came with the first Ent-D kit from AMT, as well as the Pocket Books Sternbach blueprints.
Okay, the top picture is really cool and it would have been awsome if they had gone it that way, also if they had EVER shown quarters with the windows in the floor, that would have been fun too. As for the second drawing, I pictured 10 forward as being the deck below where the ' ' man in the window' is and the deck below 10 Forward, in the picture as being deck 11 or 9 whichever way the deck numbers go. But I also thought lower than deck 10, the Windows would be in the floor. I never noticed that there were two levels of 'straight' up And down Windows. (Ok, my phone won't let me type the word "Widows" Without making it a brand name sometimes?)
Not that they didn't cut corners for a lot of sets as to how they would fit in the ship, itself (hangar decks, anyone?), but I'm glad they abandoned this idea because when you look at the edge of the saucer, it's just too big for this to make sense, at least, to my memory, especially when you compare these windows with those of the crew quarters.
I was watching an episode last night. The one where the doctor is drinking Riker's brain through a straw. Anyway the windows in 10 forward Looked like they bent towards the floor in some shots but from a different angle they looked level with the floor as there was a sort of light across the bottoms that looked like an edge on the bottom of the windows. If I hadn't been on here earlier, I wouldn't have noticed the Windows as much.