The Excelsior - uncovering the design

[Henoch]

Turbolifts!!!! The best design for the Excelsior would have shafts on either side through most of the secondary hull, neck, and impulse deck.

Great to see you moving the design forward. On large naval vessels, the port side ladders, gangways, stairs, etc. are usually used for travel in one direction (i.e. down only), while the starboard side is for the opposite direction (i.e. up only). I see the turbolift system to be similar in use, so, shafts on either side makes total sense as long as you got the space.

 

[yotsuya]

Great to see you moving the design forward. On large naval vessels, the port side ladders, gangways, stairs, etc. are usually used for travel in one direction (i.e. down only), while the starboard side is for the opposite direction (i.e. up only). I see the turbolift system to be similar in use, so, shafts on either side makes total sense as long as you got the space.

The Constitution Class turbolifts have a bottle neck in the neck. There is only room for one shaft in the neck. But the Excelsior has that nice wide neck so there is room for multiple turbolifts. The Ambassador and Galaxy classes are narrower again but the deck plans for the Galaxy show 2 tubes.

 

[Mres_was_framed!]

The Constitution Class turbolifts have a bottle neck in the neck. There is only room for one shaft in the neck. But the Excelsior has that nice wide neck so there is room for multiple turbolifts. The Ambassador and Galaxy classes are narrower again but the deck plans for the Galaxy show 2 tubes.

Is this true for the Constitution-class even if the two turbolifts are font and back instead of port and starboard? (I expect the intermix shaft, or whatever you want to call it, is in the way for the refit either way, but what about the original?) Honestly, I don't think there NEEDS to be two turbolifts between the two sections, but it is a thought-provoking suggestion.

 

[blssdwlf]

Is this true for the Constitution-class even if the two turbolifts are font and back instead of port and starboard? (I expect the intermix shaft, or whatever you want to call it, is in the way for the refit either way, but what about the original?) Honestly, I don't think there NEEDS to be two turbolifts between the two sections, but it is a thought-provoking suggestion.

Physically there is room for two turbolifts shafts going down the neck but you'd angle the shafts. The intermix shaft in both cases would need to be angled with the neck going down instead of running vertical.

 

[Deks]

I don't see the issue in having two turboshafts going through the neck. The Ent-D may have a thinner neck on the front, but it thickens up at the end.
And the 1701 (TOS and Refit) necks have room to house two turbo shafts as well (maybe not side by side, but certainly at the front and back of the neck).

Plus, even if there's only 1 turbolift line, there are several turbolifts, and because they are maglev, they're supposed to be quite fast for going around the ship (its the live action that has a problem with long turbolift rides that span the entire dialogue).
I remember on TOS, there was long winded conversation between Spock and a woman (I think) in a turbolift and they needed to get to deck 2... took them well over a minute to get there from the bridge.


Or in VOY, I remember when in the first season, the Doctor had a problem while in the holodeck and holo Janeway said with the turbolifts down, it would take her 30 mins to get to the mess hall.. which is on deck 2 (or right below the bridge)... how the heck would it take a person 30 mins to reach a lower deck using the Jeffrey's tube? Its literally an access port with a ladder. You'd be there in a few minutes at best (though, this is hardly a proper representation since there was a problem in the holodeck and the Doctor didn't have a good understanding of the ship and his memory circuits were degrading).

 

[Vale]

Or in VOY, I remember when in the first season, the Doctor had a problem while in the holodeck and holo Janeway said with the turbolifts down, it would take her 30 mins to get to the mess hall.. which is on deck 2 (or right below the bridge)... how the heck would it take a person 30 mins to reach a lower deck using the Jeffrey's tube? Its literally an access port with a ladder. You'd be there in a few minutes at best (though, this is hardly a proper representation since there was a problem in the holodeck and the Doctor didn't have a good understanding of the ship and his memory circuits were degrading).

If ship's systems are failing, you can't have completely open corridors or access tunnels. A small hull breach could lead to a catastrophic decompression of the entire vessel if forcefields don't work correctly. Doors and hatches will seal automatically in the event of any problem ("fail closed"). We see Jeffries tubes have hatches dividing the crawlways into discrete sections and that split the ladderways between decks, and in some episodes we also see people having to manually "pump" the hatch mechanisms to break open the seals between sections. I imagine that having to manually operate those mechanisms to move across half a ship would be both exhausting and time-consuming.

 

[yotsuya]

It is a bottleneck. Two turbolifts can't pass each other. The refit Enterprise only has one path for the turboshaft.

I have two out of three warp cores, three bridges, and I still need to reconfigure the Ent B secondary hull. But I have filled in some empty areas with some equipment. Almost time for a preview.

 

[Deks]

If ship's systems are failing, you can't have completely open corridors or access tunnels. A small hull breach could lead to a catastrophic decompression of the entire vessel if forcefields don't work correctly. Doors and hatches will seal automatically in the event of any problem ("fail closed"). We see Jeffries tubes have hatches dividing the crawlways into discrete sections and that split the ladderways between decks, and in some episodes we also see people having to manually "pump" the hatch mechanisms to break open the seals between sections. I imagine that having to manually operate those mechanisms to move across half a ship would be both exhausting and time-consuming.

It would be, but it wouldn't take 30 mins to get from the bridge to the mess hall.
A lot of the hatches inside the Jeffress Tubes are open... only junction points seem to be closed... so manually opening them wouldn't take long.
I would attribute maybe 5 to 10 mins of time to get from bridge to the mess hall via Jeffries Tube even if a ship is falling apart.
And on other occasions when the ship wasn't in a good shape... manually opening the hatches didn't take excessive amount of time and the crew still got very fast to where they wanted to go.

 

[yotsuya]

It would be, but it wouldn't take 30 mins to get from the bridge to the mess hall.
A lot of the hatches inside the Jeffress Tubes are open... only junction points seem to be closed... so manually opening them wouldn't take long.
I would attribute maybe 5 to 10 mins of time to get from bridge to the mess hall via Jeffries Tube even if a ship is falling apart.
And on other occasions when the ship wasn't in a good shape... manually opening the hatches didn't take excessive amount of time and the crew still got very fast to where they wanted to go.

The TOS pressure compartment diagram shows that it covers large sections. So the entire ship would not suffer decompression. Also, the TNG Jefferies tubes don't exist in the TOS or movie era. TNG ships have plenty of space for such crawl spaces all over, but TOS and movie era ships don't. We see the deck thickness several times and there is no extra space. Any Jefferies tubes would be along the hull or in designated areas where vital systems are located. The ships are not crisscrossed by Jefferies tubes. That is a much later design feature. That is one reason decks in older ships don't have to have that extra space and can be more compact.

 

[Henoch]

The ships are not crisscrossed by Jefferies tubes. That is a much later design feature. That is one reason decks in older ships don't have to have that extra space and can be more compact.

I never thought that the TOS 45 degree Jefferies Tubes extended to the next deck. These tubes granted access to to power and utility systems and connections on that deck. This way, they can be placed anywhere and not have to worry about a connection to the deck above it. Never in TOS did we see a "down" tube, only "up" tubes. The only theory I come up with is that the the tube might give access to the internal machinery/equipment on the deck above it, say, into the bottom of the transporter but I'm not too keen on this theory.

 

[yotsuya]

Well, here is the preview, along with the TMP refit.

 

[137th Gebirg]

Very nice!

 

[Mres_was_framed!]

Thsi look

Well, here is the preview, along with the TMP refit.

This looks impressive.
Regarding the Excelsior's neck, there is a piece of equipment perhaps you can put forth an opinion/explain what it is. While most of the neck it is "vented" or "ribbed," there are two openings near the top of the neck. Given that, on the Enterprise refit and Reliant, there are similar dark details around the torpedo launchers, and even the Galaxy class has a dark detail around its torpedo launchers, I would think that the openings in the Excelsior's neck are torpedo launchers, too, and the "vented" neck is some kind of way to make the launchers more efficient.

But, we see several times that the torpedoes come from a lower area in the secondary hull and do those ports not have dark areas around them. In your opinion, is the onscreen detail of weapons coming from those areas an error, and the launchers are in the neck, are there two sets of launchers, or are the openings in the neck something else?

 

[publiusr]

Lovely. You better be a good shuttle pilot for Excelsior!

 

[Vale]

Thsi look

This looks impressive.
Regarding the Excelsior's neck, there is a piece of equipment perhaps you can put forth an opinion/explain what it is. While most of the neck it is "vented" or "ribbed," there are two openings near the top of the neck. Given that, on the Enterprise refit and Reliant, there are similar dark details around the torpedo launchers, and even the Galaxy class has a dark detail around its torpedo launchers, I would think that the openings in the Excelsior's neck are torpedo launchers, too, and the "vented" neck is some kind of way to make the launchers more efficient.

But, we see several times that the torpedoes come from a lower area in the secondary hull and do those ports not have dark areas around them. In your opinion, is the onscreen detail of weapons coming from those areas an error, and the launchers are in the neck, are there two sets of launchers, or are the openings in the neck something else?

Those structures on the Excelsior's neck, which are clearly visible when the ship's not head on, are partly obscured by the saucer when viewed from the front. If they're photon torpedo launchers then they'd have to be designed to fire downwards. The port and starboard launchers we see in The Undiscovered Country are already present on the original model from The Search For Spock, so they weren't added as an afterthought.

This shot from Star Trek: Generations suggests they might be docking ports, like those on either side of the Constitution-class refit's photon torpedo launcher section...

...Though admittedly the structure of them in closeup doesn't look very much like a docking port, or indeed anything else we're familiar with (image brightened and adjusted for clarity). Perhaps some sort of specialised sensor arrays?

 

[David cgc]

That Workbee that emerges from whatever-it-is cleverly does so while someone is passing in front of that part of the ship, to disguise that it's definitely not a door and it's definitely not open. You can get a pretty clear look at the detail on the neck in this photo (I remember one that's even closer, but that's clear enough). It seems to be a stacked pair of cones, a bit like the phasers on the Reliant. (Please, please don't let this start a debate over if the cones on the ends are the phasers, or the nubbin on the side.) The certainly could be phaser banks. The fact that they're a bit blocked by the lower saucer wouldn't matter, since the Reliant's could fire off-axis (assuming the beams came out of the tips of the cones, which they did).

 

[Vale]

That Workbee that emerges from whatever-it-is cleverly does so while someone is passing in front of that part of the ship, to disguise that it's definitely not a door and it's definitely not open. You can get a pretty clear look at the detail on the neck in this photo (I remember one that's even closer, but that's clear enough). It seems to be a stacked pair of cones, a bit like the phasers on the Reliant. (Please, please don't let this start a debate over if the cones on the ends are the phasers, or the nubbin on the side.) The certainly could be phaser banks. The fact that they're a bit blocked by the lower saucer wouldn't matter, since the Reliant's could fire off-axis (assuming the beams came out of the tips of the cones, which they did).

It makes sense that Starfleet's most powerful new ship of the era would have phaser cannons, but if that's what they are then the positioning of them seems very strange, especially as they could have just lowered them by a couple of decks and avoided any issues of the saucer blocking a forward firing arc. Or do what the Ingram-class did, and put them on the nacelle pylon "elbows" – which would be more in line with how they're integrated into the Miranda-class pylons anyway. It begs the question, why design the fleet's most powerful ship in such a way that it cannot bring both its heaviest weapons to bear on an enemy at the same time?

*Edited for clarity, because I shouldn't be allowed to write forum posts after 2am.

 

[Mres_was_framed!]

That Workbee that emerges from whatever-it-is cleverly does so while someone is passing in front of that part of the ship, to disguise that it's definitely not a door and it's definitely not open. You can get a pretty clear look at the detail on the neck in this photo (I remember one that's even closer, but that's clear enough). It seems to be a stacked pair of cones, a bit like the phasers on the Reliant. (Please, please don't let this start a debate over if the cones on the ends are the phasers, or the nubbin on the side.) The certainly could be phaser banks. The fact that they're a bit blocked by the lower saucer wouldn't matter, since the Reliant's could fire off-axis (assuming the beams came out of the tips of the cones, which they did).

That is an amazing photo! Is that attached to a site that has more of these? The URL did not seem clear on whether there was a way to go back to main page for more.

I have never seen the front of the Excelsior in that much detail, and the lower openings where torpedoes are seen to come out in the movies have emitters in them, too Also the blue stripe on the secondary hull goes in, not out, which from many art works, I thought was the opposite.

Given the ribbing, and location in the neck of the upper openings, and the emitters being present in the lower openings which have no ribbing, I would say that the upper ones were torpedo launchers and the lower ones where phaser canons like those of the Reliant, but that contradicts what is shown onscreen.

If then, we are to accept that those openings in the neck are phaser canons, that would suggest that those phasers are tied into the warp core as described in TMP.

 

[David cgc]

That is an amazing photo! Is that attached to a site that has more of these? The URL did not seem clear on whether there was a way to go back to main page for more.

Here's the original source.

 

[Henoch]

Given the ribbing, and location in the neck of the upper openings, and the emitters being present in the lower openings which have no ribbing, I would say that the upper ones were torpedo launchers and the lower ones where phaser canons like those of the Reliant, but that contradicts what is shown onscreen.

I agree with torpedo launchers on the top and phaser canons on the bottom, but screwed up in special effects. Could the upper features be refueling ports or some sort of umbilical connections?