So I wanted some blueprints of the TOS ship to compare against. I was looking for something by
@yotsuya, whose canon-respecting TOS Internals thread (along with the semi-recent note about the tiny curvature change aft of the connecting dorsal on the secondary hull) inspired confidence, but I didn't see a clean set to borrow. While I've been an avid reader of it all, I admit I'm not perfectly up on my Sinclair vs. Casimiro vs. Shaw (whose site's down anyway) vs. Kerr variations and debates thereon, and senility has sapped my recollection of certain model variations. So, I sidestepped the whole thing by going with Art Colvin's work off of Cygnus X-1 as my "Not Mr. Right, perhaps, but Mr. Right-Now".
Caveats thus noted, folks have various ways of overlaying the TOS parts and the TMP parts when going over the details of the TMP refit, but there's an advantage in that the two ships both have known scales (hush, you). In this case, however, only the TOS version is of known length . . . the HPC version could be a variety of lengths depending on how extensive one wishes to imagine a refit (which is intrinsic to the whole hypothesis of an HPC version) to be. My goal was to try to minimize any potential total rebuilding of shapes (and especially removal of spaceframe) wherever possible.
First I needed to resolve the separate saucer sizes issue, where the side-view saucer is wider than the top-view saucer whereas all other parts seem to match. Various creative ideas have been suggested, but, to me, it just seemed a simple error, necessitating a choice of which to be viewed as correct. For this purpose, while I was fond of the idea of an initial smaller saucer with later expansion, it seemed to me that maintaining the structural supports for the connecting dorsal would entail an overhang after a later refit expansion, so I went with the larger side-view saucer as the correct one, expanding the top-down saucer to match.
I then overlaid the HPC drawing atop Colvin's version of the Cage configuration, choosing to line them up along the ship's secondary hull "strongback" with relatively similar secondary hull size, treating it as one might treat the wing spars of an airplane 'refit'. At 1100px for Colvin's and 845px for the HPC as scaled, the resulting HPC ship size is 221.7 meters.
Features of this setup are the matching curve of the aft undercut, the near-identical forward nacelle girth, and the partial match of the nacelle pylon roots. The forward part of the connecting dorsal also appears to have almost the same angle.
Here's the setup realigned to the saucer.
As you can see, the saucer superstructure (i.e. decks 2 and 3) and bridge size actually match up nicely as viewed from above.
That's not the only possible scale, of course. Here, for instance, I rescaled and realigned the HPC ship so that the saucer thicknesses matched up a bit better, ostensibly. This resulted in a ship about 945 pixels long versus the 1100 pixel Colvin ship, or 248.5 meters.
This fits several preconceptions I had in my "mental pre-vis". The secondary hull also ends up with many nicely-fitting lines, including basically the whole keel and forward secondary hull, including on the top view. Only the shuttlebay area gets a little weird, but the ample posterior might work well for Animated Series fans and the shots of the ship with the loooooong secondary hull.
Unfortunately, some material removal is necessary on the saucer, which I'd prefer to avoid at all . . . unless you raise the HPC version up a bit. At that point, the various saucer convexities also match up rather delightfully, but things get weird otherwise.
Just to explore, observe:
Below is the same thing enlarged and with Yotsuya's decks roughly overlaid:
I'd mentioned earlier being intrigued by the idea of a single deck saucer rim, and if you imagine deck six with lots of hull and gear above and below, this sorta qualifies. The later expansion of the deck seven outer ring would lead nicely to an undercut, but the problem here is basically having to scrape off the outer parts of that deck five-and-a-half, which is quite unsatisfying.
As it stands right now, I'll probably keep playing with the ~222 meter version.
(Notably, this would, as I recall, make it no larger than the NX.)
More to come…
