The space station in "The Ultimate Computer", reamstered

[HarryM]

I think I'd like the Jefferies station a little bit better if it had only a single large ring not two. As it is it looks a little bit busy, "too many notes". I do like the Vanguard based design, though the CGI in the remastered ep is too low res and fuzzy, so the realization is poor, esp compared to the drop-dead gorgeous Vanguard novel covers.

 

[Wingsley]

The Vanguard and/or Vanguard-esque design is interesting, like a TMP-era retcon back to TOS.

The so-called Jefferies design is more in tune with TOS, although it does appear to be a bit busy. If the "rings" were instead just huge, thick super-saucers, they could provide plenty of volume for the habitat and inner workings of a busy large space station or starbase. HarryM makes a good point, though, a saucer instead of rings would add volume and make the design less busy.

 

[f14peter]

Ahhhh, another remaster debate.

Wouldn't that make us all ... remasterdebaters?

 

[mos6507]

Except the TOS E didn't have all that plating and aztec-ing.

Sure, it's retconning, but the way the plating and aztec-ing was done looks tasteful to me.

 

[Warped9]

I find such retconning usually makes the ship look more cluttered and less advanced than it did originally.

 

[Ithekro]

Maybe Pike was just strict and made the midshipmen and ensigns paint the ship for punishment. Kirk just decided to keep the paint job until the ship was refit.

Other captains (such as Defiant's) were not so inclined and kept their ships more bare metal looking. Or they prefered a clear coat.

 

[Warped9]

Uh...yeah.

 

[Wingsley]

Why couldn't they have used Matt Jefferies other space station design?

M.

I am very interested in learning about what the source material is for this space station concept. I had never heard of it before this thread. Are there any citations on the web?

 

[MGagen]

Ask and ye shall receive.

It was his original design for DSS K-7. The notation "Show 42" refers to "The Trouble with Tribbles." Obviously, they didn't have the budget for this design, so they cobbled together a design using the NASA model.

The neat thing about the drawing is that it provides a lot of scale information. I took a few liberties with the detailing (like interpreting the outboard pods as cargo storage compartments -- a reasonable surmise, given the action in TTWT).

Here's an orthographic view in scale with the 947' Enterprise and my take on the canonical K-7:

The name and markings are another liberty. We never saw SB-4 and with that low a number, I figured it might still have U.E.S.P.A. markings.

Finally, here's a look at my take on the hangar bay:

 

[Wingsley]

You did it to the same scale as Jefferies note in the sketch?

 

[spockboy]

Well my thanks goes out to Professor Quatermass for making these pics in the first place. Nice work in keeping Jefferies work alive.

 

[Hartzilla2007]

Wow Star Trek Online really over scale K7.

 

[Timo]

It's not as if the original episode really gives good opportunities for size comparison. There's that initial shot of the hero ship "orbiting" the station, but we can't even tell whether she's behind the station, or in front of it! A second, mirroring shot seems to show the ship on the foreground, suggesting a much larger station than in the above comparison chart.

Window rows on the station tell us very little, as we never see the corresponding insides... For all we know, the station really could take the Enterprise inside its docking bay. (Or be packed inside the Enterprise shuttlebay, with a bit of folding.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[CorporalCaptain]

The Enterprise is behind the station.
The Enterprise is in front of the station.

It's really pretty obvious.

 

[Wingsley]

^ The only issue with "The Trouble with Tribbles", remastered or original recipe, is that we learn that "there's a Klingon warship a hundred kilometers off your space station", which makes sense, but we never see any ships that look to scale like they are anything but less than a kilometer away.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

^ Well, we never see the Klingon ship under original recipe anyway.

 

[Christopher]

^ The only issue with "The Trouble with Tribbles", remastered or original recipe, is that we learn that "there's a Klingon warship a hundred kilometers off your space station", which makes sense, but we never see any ships that look to scale like they are anything but less than a kilometer away.

That's pretty typical of Trek effects shots. I think there was a TNG episode where a ship was said to be tens of thousands of kilometers away from another ship, but the exterior shot showed them just a few ship lengths apart.

Then there's "The Corbomite Maneuver," where the cube buoy is supposed to be 107 meters on a side and nearly 1600 meters away from the ship, but the FX shot shows it as no more than about 10 meters wide and maybe 50-60 meters in front of the ship. And then, conversely, the Fesarius is said to be a mile across, yet any given one of its domes appears to be at least as wide as the Enterprise saucer when the ship is said to be 5 kilometers away. By a rough estimate, it'd have to be 15-20 miles across to appear that size at that distance. And you couldn't explain it as the view through a zoom lens collapsing the perspective, since even if they were right next to each other, the Fesarius would have to be close to 2 miles across to appear that size next to the E.

And of course the TOS-R version doesn't fix the scale problems; the cube and the Fesarius appear at the same relative size in the new shots.

 

[MGagen]

In my image, the Enterprise and the unused Jefferies station are built to the scale MJ indictated. Since I have never seen an official dimensioned studio drawing of K-7, I came up with my own scale, based on deck heights indicated by the window patterns. Your mileage my vary.

Here is what a 2 km separation looks like:

This is about right to give us the faux "orbit" shots we saw in TOS.

M.

 

[Albertese]

...

Then there's "The Corbomite Maneuver," where the cube buoy is supposed to be 107 meters on a side and nearly 1600 meters away from the ship, but the FX shot shows it as no more than about 10 meters wide and maybe 50-60 meters in front of the ship. And then, conversely, the Fesarius is said to be a mile across, yet any given one of its domes appears to be at least as wide as the Enterprise saucer when the ship is said to be 5 kilometers away. By a rough estimate, it'd have to be 15-20 miles across to appear that size at that distance. And you couldn't explain it as the view through a zoom lens collapsing the perspective, since even if they were right next to each other, the Fesarius would have to be close to 2 miles across to appear that size next to the E.
...

For my money, I feel that generally people in Trek use the metric system and mentions of "miles" are always going to be idiomatic. For example, I work at a dental lab, making replacement teeth, and we measure everything in millimeters and tenths of millimeters. Yet, if something is even just a millimeter or more away from where it should be, it's often referred to as a "mile." So, I like to figure the Fesarius was a "mile" in that it was "freaking huge."

--Alex

 

[Christopher]

^Yeah, I suppose so. People who'd grown up using metric measurements all their lives might think of "a mile" as just a word meaning "really large" rather than having a specific numerical value. Kind of like how we use "myriad" to mean "uncountably many" when its original meaning in Greek and Latin was 10,000 exactly.