The Excelsior - uncovering the design

[137th Gebirg]

True, the rail-pusher in TWOK does seem to stop at the breach door. In fact, it stops and retracts as the torpedo is being pulled in, seemingly under its own power. Still using conventional ferric metals in the late 23rd century, eh? MAGNETS!!!

in any case, those Connie auto-loaders are WAY too freakin' slow to be tactical in a firefight, moving at the speed of dramatic intent. It's why I really liked the ones they used in ENT so much. They were purposeful, fast, efficient and looked combat-ready and believable. No wonder Malcolm Reed was so proud of them. He was right to be.

 

[blssdwlf]

True, the rail-pusher in TWOK does seem to stop at the breach door. In fact, it stops and retracts as the torpedo is being pulled in, seemingly under its own power. Still using conventional ferric metals in the late 23rd century, eh? MAGNETS!!!

in any case, those Connie auto-loaders are WAY too freakin' slow to be tactical in a firefight, moving at the speed of dramatic intent. It's why I really liked the ones they used in ENT so much. They were purposeful, fast, efficient and looked combat-ready and believable. No wonder Malcolm Reed was so proud of them. He was right to be.

I wonder if the speed of the load on the TWOK Enterprise is adjustable? In TSFS, it seemed to have loaded two torpedoes almost immediately for them.

The NX-01 torpedo bay has 3 loading breeches right? The two original ones for the spatial torpedoes and the middle one on the floor for the photonic torpedoes that are in the 5-round vertical rack?

 

[137th Gebirg]

Eek! I haven't watched ENT since I got the BRD's a decade ago. So, turning the good ol' TrekCore screencap archive (LOVE that place!), here's what we have for the weapons room (S2.26 "The Expanse"), A.K.A. the Armory:

Yes, 100% correct. There are two launching rail/tube units for their "spacial torpedoes" and the new central tube for the photons with the storage magazine immediately rear (obscuring the starboard rail behind it).

This is, by far, one of the most amazingly functional set designs (IMO) that we've seen in a Trek show, before or since.

Kind of makes the gerbil ball launching tubes on DSC seem a little silly, in retrospect.

 

[Spaceship Jo]

in retrospect

Silly... in retrospect?
I love a lot about DSC, but, yeah no, not the gerbil tubes. Maybe if the crew had shrunk down or were the ships of a giant species. Speaking of which, why don't they do that (besides effects cost)?

More on topic: I have to agree that the yellow patches without thruster ports are simply indications of precautions, like on the TOS E, and could be any of a variety things. Yes, some models of the D have had little to no thruster ports visible in those patches, but the rest of the Reliant model very much did, so apples and oranges.

 

[KamenRiderBlade]

I love a lot about DSC, but, yeah no, not the gerbil tubes.

Talk about being an "Experimental Vessel", designing those Gerbil Tubes for one specific craft type seems to be the height of "Over Specialization".

 

[137th Gebirg]

Silly... in retrospect?

I was trying to be nice.

I love a lot about DSC, but, yeah no, not the gerbil tubes.

Me too. But I'll pick the tubes over the turbolift funhouse any day.

 

[David cgc]

I wonder if the speed of the load on the TWOK Enterprise is adjustable? In TSFS, it seemed to have loaded two torpedoes almost immediately for them.

Mr. Scott’s Guide solved that by suggesting the conveyer belt was actually loading primed torpedos into a pair of magazines directly behind each tube, so up to four torpedos could be held ready to fire at once per tube. Depending on the pace of the battle, there could be plenty of time to top off as torpedos were firing, or if eight were launched all at once, it could be a few minutes before you could start shooting them again, at least at the same pace.

 

[yotsuya]

Yes, this is the Star Trek universe where they have anti-gravity and other things that would completely change how such mechanisms operate.

 

[publiusr]

Some think the impulse deck gets wider at the base
https://www.therpf.com/forums/threa...odels-41-excelsior.208844/page-7#post-5360598

Some Excelsior iterations
http://red-shoulders.blogspot.com/2019/01/redesigning-excelsior_29.html

 

[yotsuya]

Some think the impulse deck gets wider at the base
https://www.therpf.com/forums/threa...odels-41-excelsior.208844/page-7#post-5360598

Well, that isn't a theory, it is a fact. The impulse deck is full of complex angles. And that was carried over with the changes to make it Enterprise B. Those added impulse engines have some very complex geomentry. Vertical isn't something you find much of on the Excelsior. Though while the impulse deck does not have straight vertical sides, the neck sort of does. Though that is only in orthographic views from the front or back. The true vertical line ends up encompassing the curve of the neck as well, so the straight vertical is an illustion. Only the grilles at the base of the pylon and on the nacelles are truly in a vertical plain.

 

[137th Gebirg]

Another sad inaccuracy with the ERTL models that never had that angle demonstrated on either the 2000 or the 1701-B.

 

[yotsuya]

Another sad inaccuracy with the ERTL models that never had that angle demonstrated on either the 2000 or the 1701-B.

They retooled their kit for the Ent B. so it had most of the same errors. Even some of the fixes shows that they didn't retool the entire kit like they should. One of my goals is to create a guide for taking any of the three kits and correcting the most major mistakes. I'm not sure that can be one, but there may be a way to add some width to the base and at least give the illusion.

 

[publiusr]

I’m convinced that heels of some shoes might serve as the neck for quick and dirty builds

 

[137th Gebirg]

I built a custom build of a MU 3-engine Excelsior based on some old schematics I did decades ago where I flipped the neck so that the primary hull sat further back. Looked bad-ass. I called it the Asteroth.

 

[yotsuya]

Thanks to Picard, there is yet another CG model of the Excelsior. It never gets any real screen time, but it is the Excelsior herself in the Starfleet Museum (it is in the end credits of every episode).

 

[Peregrinus]

A few things, as I need to get more popcorn for the ongoing debates...

• The Centaur is both large and small. Adam detailed it to be a tiny ship (scaled to the Reliant elements), but has since come to feel it works better scaled to the Excelsior elements. So everybody's right. I personally favor a large Centaur, same way I favor a large Defiant.

• Regardless of coloration, the ball features on the megaphaser mounts I have only ever seen used as movie-era phaser turrets. I agree the yellow markings nearby are lacking the details present elsewhere on the model for me to consider them RCS emplacements, but being proximal to both the lateral turrets and the primary barrels makes me take them as general "there are high-energy weapons systems 'round these parts" markings.

• Tangential to above: I would love to see a remaster where the standard staggered phaser blasts still come from the lateral turrets, but when they fire the main cannons in the nebula battle, I think it would look and sound spectacular to have an effect similar to the Defiant's phaser cannons.

And the main thing I wanted to say, on-topic. Our Lady the Pregnant Guppy. Been going over and over a bunch of reference images of the original build, and the Hood and Repulse redecos. I had forgotten just how much I love the original detailing and have come to dislike more than ever the alterations made for TUC. I don't like the new bridge, I don't like the new deflection crystals, I don't like the new aft box... I saw your at-the-time current progress on the inboard profile views and the internals work better than ever in earlier passes.

One bit jumped out at me, though. The trench. Some of the unofficial drawings sort of take it into consideration, but not, I feel, all that well... This:

...looks to be, eyeballing hull thickness and such, about a good deck-height chunk taken out of the bottom of the saucer -- certainly more than half a deck. But Doug completely forgot it on his MSD:

It's not a new problem. The original Enterprise had this much more substantial cove taken out of the underside of the saucer:

But Matt completely missed it in his cutaway:

And so did Doug, for that matter...

In the Enterprise's case, the outer lower saucer rim deck cannot communicate directly with the coreward portion. It can only be directly accessed from the deck above. I'm pretty sure the portion of that deck on the Excelsior is similarly cut off. Wanted to make sure you took that into consideration.

In other news, you've created about the most accurate Excelsior drawings ever, and I'm wondering if you'd be okay with me using them to start laying out a 1:350 model of the ship to go with my Polar Lights Enterprises and my Cygnus scratch-build.

 

[137th Gebirg]

• The Centaur is both large and small. Adam detailed it to be a tiny ship (scaled to the Reliant elements), but has since come to feel it works better scaled to the Excelsior elements. So everybody's right. I personally favor a large Centaur, same way I favor a large Defiant.

I've noticed a growing interest on Teh Interwebz to consider the Centaur we saw in DS9 to be of the smaller Miranda-scale "Buckner" class (after the original model's creator, Adam Buckner, for those who don't know who that is), and that the "Centaur" class is the larger variant that has become more prevalent later on.

In my own personal head-canon, taking all this into account, the newer Centaur class was named after the Buckner-class USS Centaur, which distinguished itself during the Dominion War, possibly even sacrificing itself so that a mission could be completed that would have been otherwise facing total disaster. The class was so successful and versatile in the after-action reviews of various notable battles, Starfleet COE redesigned it to Excelsior-scale, so that it could perform a broader variety of mission profiles, using newer and more powerful components. The new class would be named in honor of its smaller design predecessor. The fleet we later saw in Prodigy showed mass quantities of these larger Centaurs using Excelsior-scaled parts, lending credence to this theory, with both types now having been shown on-screen by this point (even though the scaled-up Centaur has been around for many years since its appearance in Fabbri's Official Star Trek Fact Files in the early 2000's - and later for the Eaglemoss model in 2015 - it was never fully embraced as canonical until Prodigy showed ships of that size last year).

For those who think that Starfleet wouldn't do such a thing, one only needs to see the two, possibly three, different scales in which the Klingon Bird of Prey has appeared throughout the canonical history of Trek. Empires take inspiration from other empires. There is precedent, and it makes sense from a functional POV.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it!

 

[publiusr]

The Glomars were real life examples. FASA was on to something.

 

[Mytran]

It's not a new problem. The original Enterprise had this much more substantial cove taken out of the underside of the saucer:

But Matt completely missed it in his cutaway:

And so did Doug, for that matter...

I'm not so sure - that yellow structure seems to mimic the undercut fairly well

 

[blssdwlf]

I'm not so sure - that yellow structure seems to mimic the undercut fairly well

Should the bulkheads not go through the undercut? Seems odd that the hull structure doesn't acknowledge the undercut when looking at it. On the other hand, perhaps it is like other illustrations that don't accurately reflect the shape or position of the internal structure and instead is a systems layout.