TOS warp drive

[Albertese]

Also in "The Naked Time" while scotty is cutting through the wall to open the door by hand, people keep running up to him via a long curved corridor.

--Alex

 

[Mytran]

Actually the corridor outside engineering is one of 2 straight corridor segments, which of course is connected to the curved segment.

I'm going to need a cap for this, because I vividly remember the corridor immediately outside of engineering being a curved section as depicted in "The Ultimate Computer." Specifically I'm thinking of scenes here and here in which Kirk and company follow a curved corridor and then pass through a door on their right that opens immediately into engineering.

Of course, the Engineering set was redesigned in between the 1st and 2nd seasons, so they could easily be considered separate rooms, perhaps even in different hulls.

The set plans shows the two types of corridor next to the redesigned engineering, straight and curved.

Throughout the 2nd and 3rd season only the straight one was filmed, reinforcing the idea that Engineering was in the secondary hull. From The Changeling:

The one exception is of course The Ultimate Computer - suddenly there's a curved corridor again, fuelling the debate about just where the hell Engineering is meant to be

 

[Maurice]

Just to be clear, even in this episode the curved corridor doesn't go directly to Engineering. If you watch, they walk the curved corridor and turn into the usual straight radial corridor seen on the set plan, at which point they enter Engineering. The curved corridor appears outside Engineering in Day of the Dove, too. The Klingons rush out and this fight happens. That's just the way the set was built, the just didn't usually follow the crew down the curved part to the Engineering door.

 

[Mytran]

Just to be clear, even in this episode the curved corridor doesn't go directly to Engineering. If you watch, they walk the curved corridor and turn into the usual straight radial corridor seen on the set plan, at which point they enter Engineering. The curved corridor appears outside Engineering in Day of the Dove, too

True, but it's much less obvious from this angle and could be a cross-shaped intersection filmed at an odd angle.

Come'on, couldn't it?

 

[Gagarin]

More mysterious, to me, than TOS warp drive... how did they get those ladders to go below the floor? I thought the floor of the Enterprise sets sat directly on the soundstage.

 

[Mytran]

I thought they simply dug a hole in the floor - something like that is mentioned in Inside Star Trek, although they were talking about doors at the time.

 

[Maurice]

Some soundstages have pits in the floor, and chances are they put the ladder where it was for precisely that reason.

 

[T'Girl]

More mysterious, to me, than TOS warp drive... how did they get those ladders to go below the floor? I thought the floor of the Enterprise sets sat directly on the soundstage.

The TOS set was built on a really old sound stage, the actual floor had a profound tilt to it, the book Making Of Star Trek describes it as a ramp, I guess if you were to open all the doors to the multiple sound stages, you would be looking up a hill on the deslu lot.

The TOS set was built on a platform for this reason, parts of the platform were five or six feet off the main floor. Early on there was a lot of problems with the sound of the actors walking and running on the plywood, Roddenberry was pissed off at the cost of putting in carpet to muffle the sound.

 

[Mytran]

I thought those problems were only in the soundstage that they filmed the pilots on?

 

[Gagarin]

I thought those problems were only in the soundstage that they filmed the pilots on?

This is what I understood also.

 

[Captain Robert April]

Yeah, the Culver City location was built during the silent era, so the soundstages weren't really soundproofed (several shots were blown by planes flying overhead).

However, the Gower Street lot wasn't exactly a new studio, either. After all, when Lucy and Desi bought it, it used to be RKO Pictures. I think the big globe with the radio antenna is still there at one corner of the outer wall.