U.S.S. Ariel - Federation Shuttlecarrier

[Cary L. Brown]

More warp nacelle stuff...

I also did some further work on my warp nacelles. These are pretty much done. I have done the "family table" thing I mentioned earlier, so in reality both of these nacelles are the same nacelle model.

There is only one major thing I have to deal with re: the nacelle... if you look closely at the upper rear, you can see that one of my "art deco tier" elements is not as smooth as it ought to be. This is one of the quirks of the surfacing module in Pro/ENGINEER... it doesn't like to do what you tell it sometimes, in this regard. So, I've got to figure out how to "work around" the bugs in the code, basically. (This is the same issue I've been having with the secondary hull, by the way.) In other packages... Maya, Lightwave, etc... this functionality works very nicely... it's not that I'm doing it "wrong," it's that it doesn't want to do what its' supposed to. Oh well... I'll figure out a way around this eventually.

(And by the way, that's how I justify spending so much time on "hobby" work this way... I'm teaching my self tricks within the software, which I can then use in my professional work.)

 

[aridas sofia]

I like the nacelles. They have the chubby, beefy look I intended for the LN-65.

As for the bridge not working with the later sets...

You've caught me.

The low height areas at the saucer's outermost regions are for atmospheric and other life support recycling as well as farm areas for fresh fruit and vegetable production, and storage. However, the entire saucer is conceived as a semi-monocoque design, with the saucer skin and its various field geometries providing part of the structure, but part being supplied by a hollow, trunk structure connected via the thin deck structures to complex ribs that sit under the radiating force field grid at the hull surface. You can see the ribs in my cross section of Avenger, here:

http://www.cygnus-x1.net/links/lcars/blueprints/general-plans-uss-avenger-class-sheet-5.jpg

This will also show you the intended deck heights relative to the deck thckness and the saucer edge. The idea was that the gravitational plating in those decks and the antigravitational force field grid were in a constant tug of war that acted kind if like a suspension span on a bridge, and formed the field component of the "semi" monocoque structure. This gravity tug of war also was meant to be a big determinant on the warp dynamics of the ship-- its relative ease using its other gravity-antigravity generators -- the nacelles -- to manipulate the surrounding spacetime fabric.

 

[USS Mariner]

Re: More warp nacelle stuff...

Cary, what are your thoughts on Rhinoceros 3D? I'm working on a version of the Baton Rouge from Spaceflight Chronology, and I've had a great time working with it. My take of the stardrive hull is similar in many ways to the Ariel, mainly because I'm basing it off of the HL-10 lifting body.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

Re: More warp nacelle stuff...

Cary, what are your thoughts on Rhinoceros 3D? I'm working on a version of the Baton Rouge from Spaceflight Chronology, and I've had a great time working with it.

I have no personal hands-on knowledge of Rhino... but I've never heard anything bad about it, and I know McNeel and Associates by reputation (all good). So, the fact that I've never touched it is more due to having made choices to try to master the tools I've chosen rather than to try to "sample" all options. (I do try to "sample," honestly, but only for sampling, not for real use, frankly stated.)

If you like Rhino, I'll keep that in mind. I may try the "demo version" at some point.

One thing that jumps out at me re: Rhino is that it's "NURBS based." That's good, from a surface-modeling standpoint... but I get the impression it's not SOLIDS based. Am I mistaken about that? What I do pretty much universally involves solids (though I've been getting more into the hybrid surface-to-solids functionality recently... one of the things I've been using this ship project to train myself on, in fact! It would have been near-impossible to get that bridge module done just right without that functionality... creating a closed surface-based feature and then "solidifying" it.)

My take of the stardrive hull is similar in many ways to the Ariel, mainly because I'm basing it off of the HL-10 lifting body.

Well, I'm interested to see the Baton Rouge given a final "just as intended" high-def model someday. This is one of six or seven ships from that book that I really, really like (including the oft-neglected Sawyer-class scout, which I converted to use "Vulcan shuttle" nacelles, a while back).

I remember a DC comic which showed Kirk's prior command, the Alexander (before he was promoted to the rank of Captain, he commanded the Alexander). This was shown as a Baton Rouge class ship... and I've always carried that idea around in my mind. In TOS, they did mention at some point (can't recall where, mind you, but I do remember hearing the line) about Kirk having commanded... if memory serves, a "destroyer-type ship" before Enterprise. (Anyone else remember the line?) So, I'd guess that by that point the Alexander was upgraded quite a bit from the "as launched" configuration. As a small destroyer, I'd really more closely associate this with a coast-guard type vessel than a major ship-of-the-line. And I'm sure that Kirk did SOMETHING while in command of that vessel to earn him the command of one of the most advanced and powerful ships in the fleet.

So... the Baton Rouge class holds a very special place in my "personal version of canon." I'd love to see her done justice!

 

[USS Mariner]

Re: More warp nacelle stuff...

One thing that jumps out at me re: Rhino is that it's "NURBS based." That's good, from a surface-modeling standpoint... but I get the impression it's not SOLIDS based. Am I mistaken about that? What I do pretty much universally involves solids (though I've been getting more into the hybrid surface-to-solids functionality recently... one of the things I've been using this ship project to train myself on, in fact! It would have been near-impossible to get that bridge module done just right without that functionality... creating a closed surface-based feature and then "solidifying" it.)

In Rhino, you can go from curves to surfaces and then to soilds and anywhere in between. Very powerful tools, powerful to the point of frustrating sometimes.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

I like the nacelles. They have the chubby, beefy look I intended for the LN-65.

As for the bridge not working with the later sets...

You've caught me.

The low height areas at the saucer's outermost regions are for atmospheric and other life support recycling as well as farm areas for fresh fruit and vegetable production, and storage. However, the entire saucer is conceived as a semi-monocoque design, with the saucer skin and its various field geometries providing part of the structure, but part being supplied by a hollow, trunk structure connected via the thin deck structures to complex ribs that sit under the radiating force field grid at the hull surface. You can see the ribs in my cross section of Avenger, here:

http://www.cygnus-x1.net/links/lcars/blueprints/general-plans-uss-avenger-class-sheet-5.jpg

This will also show you the intended deck heights relative to the deck thckness and the saucer edge. The idea was that the gravitational plating in those decks and the antigravitational force field grid were in a constant tug of war that acted kind if like a suspension span on a bridge, and formed the field component of the "semi" monocoque structure. This gravity tug of war also was meant to be a big determinant on the warp dynamics of the ship-- its relative ease using its other gravity-antigravity generators -- the nacelles -- to manipulate the surrounding spacetime fabric.

Hi Aridas,

I'm still bugged by the deck spacing. Basically, to get the internal structure you've shown me, the deck heights are 2.638m (or 8' 7-7/8"). That's a pretty low ceiling height, far less than has ever been seen in any incarnation of Trek, except for shuttle interiors and Jefferies tubes.

Basically, a 6' tall guy can reach up and put his bare hand on the ceiling, flush, without stretching.

And the windows at the p-hull edge still don't line up properly with eyelines. Realistically, the primary hull needs to be thicker, I think... to give the two decks proper "window eyelines". But that does change the appearance a bit.

(FYI, I know that this is also derivative from the TMP Enterprise... which leads me to conclude that the size of the TMP Enterprise is also a bit on the low side to make things fit properly. Does anyone know what the actual physical height of the corridor sets for TMP was?)

EDIT:

Now, given this deck spacing, the deck arrangement you intended is possible, of course. Decks 1 and 2 are different heights, but everything else matches acceptably, as seen here:

Basically, the windows on the upper rim row only make sense if they are "seated eyeline" windows, while the lower rim windows only make sense for "standing" viewing. But I can live with that, I guess.

Now, for a ship to have as-seen-on-screen sets, the ceilings should be ~9' 6" tall, not 8' 7" tall. This basically requires a full upscaling of the model to 110% of your listed size numbers.

Then again, for my TOS Enterprise, I found that 947' didn't work, and I had to upscale to 1067'... or 113%

Now, I know you based your ship on the TMP ship dimensions. However, as it turns out, I think we've also seen that TMP-era sets don't really work ideally in the model at the scale given, do they? I strongly believe, for example, that the bridge I've got here is literally too small to hold the set we were given in TMP (much less later-era ships).

SO... I'm inclined to go ahead and do a full 113% upscaling here, just as I did for the TOS ship. I'll apply this universally, and I'll see how things work out.

The secondary hull windows will upscale appropriately as well... but I have no problem with giving thicker deck structures in that region, the "neck," which is a principle load-bearing element. I'll try to keep the 9.5' ceiling height, however.

Your thoughts?

Edit 2: Well, the upscaling works passably well.

With the increased scale, I was able to get a full "as seen on-screen" ceiling height (2.9m, or 9' 6-5/32"). I kept uniform thicknesses for both the hull and the decks for simplicity's sake... 0.44m, or 17-5/16".

Not IDEAL, exactly... the upper windows still only make sense for "seated viewing" but at least they work a bit better. The lower level requires a step-up to get to eye-level for the windows, but there are a only a few of those viewports, relatively speaking.

The ideal is really to go for a much larger saucer than I've done here... See, even with the upsized scale the window centerlines are only 2.280 meters (7' 5-3/4") apart, and they simply won't line up on the existing decklines. Of course, on the pre-resized version, they were only 2.024 meters (about six and a half feet) apart!

Ideally windows should be spaced evenly between decks, so that the eye-level is uniform at each deck. If we assume the decks are spaced as seen on-screen (2.9m, or 9.5' plus some undefined interstitial space... let's stick with 0.44m because ~18" seems reasonable to me)... then the windows eyelines should be 3.34m apart.

That means that for the Ariel to keep it's as-drawn shape and to also match up with what was seen on-screen (on the TMP ship), with these windows not requiring steps-up or seated viewing, you'd need the ship to be upsized to 165%!

My solution is to put these into high-bay "lounge" areas, instead, and I'll keep my new sizing. The windows will be viewable from a performated-metal-type (and very thin!) viewing platform above (think of a catwalk) and a step-up platform below. This way I can keep the working deck structure, due to the resizing I've got, to match your intention, and still have the windows make some form of logical sense.

 

[aridas sofia]

Well, I have never felt bound to the sets as dictators of the size of a ship. The sets are designed with photography in mind and thus incorporate distortions and other alterations from what would make sense on a "real" inhabited ship. So, on my ideal Ariel the ship would remain as I sized her but I'd play with the sets to achieve the desired effect. As for the windows and their height vis a vis the decks, I'd go with angled windows before I'd do anything else.

BTW did you receive the AI file I emailed to you that included the framing for the saucer?

 

[Cary L. Brown]

Yes I did get that, and thank you for that. From that, I was able to be certain that you intended it to be subdivided by 22.5 degree regions, and I THINK that you've got some sort of additional internal structure at the 45-degree elements (or are those slanted lines supposed to be Jefferies tubes?)

My decks are based upon that. However, the spacing thing is a real show-stopper in my book. There is simply no way to reconcile 6' spacing between rows of windows, unless the ship is entirely populated by Hobbits.

Here's a slightly better view of how the windows look in my upscaled version... you still have the "looking up/looking down" thing you suggested, but here it at least somewhat works.

It's an issue with the TMP design, of course.

There's another solution... I could simply determine arbitrarily that these things aren't WINDOWS at all... ie, that they're simply sensors. This is not as unreasonable as it may seem, up front... since 99.9% of the time, you'll never be able to see anything worthwhile out of a window anyway, on a starship.

The only time we ever saw windows on the TMP-era ship was in ST-V, in the "wheel room." I've sort of arbitrarily determined that this was actually at the front of the B/C deck superstructure on the 1701-A, and those were "really" shuttered windows on the inset region of the superstructure, or maybe even just a viewscreen (and not real windows at all).

But I've seen some folks try to reconcile those to the rim windows... which totally fails unless the ship is more than twice the "official" size.

Part of the fun, for me, in doing this sort of thing is trying to fully reconcile what we've seen on-screen. Now, for the Ariel, it was never seen on-screen, but it's clear that it was intended to share design lineage with the TMP Enterprise.

At no point did we ever see anything on-screen that told us that the TMP Enterprise was exactly 1000' long, nor that the TOS one was 947' long. All we did see were the models, along with clear indicators of the "rough" size... and the sets, which we can be pretty clear about size-wise.

Any differences which would make what was seen on-screen look different are differences I can't personally reconcile. Corridors can't be brushing the top of Yeoman Rand's beehive!

So... the real set size is important to me, and the physical shape of the model is important to me, but the quoted dimensions... not so much.

The big issue with the Ariel is that there is clearly different deckplane scaling in the primary and secondary hulls, again determined based upon window lines. The secondary hull dimensions work out perfectly at the size you provided.

Still... the Ariel is your design. I'll keep working her out at the size I've determined, but I'll produce a scaled-down version at the end, for those crews full of Shire-folk.

(FYI, for the record, the true upscaling is exactly 1.1267:1)

 

[blssdwlf]

Does anyone know what the actual physical height of the corridor sets for TMP was?

This may or may not help: I had derived the height of the long hallway in front of the TMP engine room to 7'.

 

[aridas sofia]

Re: the primary hull ribs I drew up for you, the four red ribs (with those angled parts you were unsure about) are the main structural elements and support the red circular top (and bottom) plates seen in the top view. All the green ribs connect to this main structure.

As I mentioned above, the windows should be angled to be in line with the viewer's eyes. So, windows below eye level would be angled upward and those above eye level would be angled downward. That would provide a full window's view regardless of the window's placement relative to deck height.

Also, IIRC there was a scale bar accompanying the Enterprise top/plan view displayed in "Day of the Dove". When this has come up before on the TrekBBS and the HD stills were consulted, the ship came out to ~950'.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

Does anyone know what the actual physical height of the corridor sets for TMP was?

This may or may not help: I had derived the height of the long hallway in front of the TMP engine room to 7'.

How did you manage to derive that? It was, after all, a "forced perspective" corridor, wasn't it?

Are you saying that you derived it from a model you built, or from on-screen photo-analysis?

What I'm really looking for, if anyone has it, is actual set-construction details, by the way... but barring that, other info can be helpful (for instance, Ancient did some photo analysis on TOS sets that established the 9'7" ceiling height of the TOS corridor).

 

[JES]

You know, I've always liked the saucer section of this vessel. To me, it really seems a little reminiscent of one of those types of UFO's that get reported all the time.

Aridas, you wouldn't have happened to have been a little influenced by flying saucers while designing the primary hull, would you?

 

[Cary L. Brown]

Well, I have never felt bound to the sets as dictators of the size of a ship. The sets are designed with photography in mind and thus incorporate distortions and other alterations from what would make sense on a "real" inhabited ship. So, on my ideal Ariel the ship would remain as I sized her but I'd play with the sets to achieve the desired effect. As for the windows and their height vis a vis the decks, I'd go with angled windows before I'd do anything else.

BTW did you receive the AI file I emailed to you that included the framing for the saucer?

I've been thinking a lot about this... I've basically stopped work while I decide how to proceed.

I am well aware that on modern naval vessels, and particular submarines, ceiling heights are quite low. But I'm also very aware of the psychological impact that this has on the crew, being underwater for months on end in such claustrophobic conditions.

A couple of years ago I was assigned to a project, developing an active propeller-balancing system for the E-2C "Hawkeye" radar aircraft. That was a cramped little space, just big enough to walk through, and you did have to duck your head from time to time if you were above average height. It was servicable, from a purely practical standpoint... but you NEEDED to get out of there and get some space if you didn't want to go bat-sh** crazy.

Now, a starship is even more subject to this sort of thing. It's not as if you can "just" surface to get some fresh air, after all. And while occasionally the Enterprise would make planetfall, and beam down a team or two, the overwhelming majority of the crew would be unlikely to set foot off the ship for as much as a year at a time, I'd guess.

SO... you really need to consider psychological issues, and we know that the people in Trek times are essentially the same as we are, today.

Most homes have ceilings which are between 8' and 10' in height. 8' ceilings tend to make a room feel "confined" though, so you need lots of windows for that space if you're going to stay in it.

My own home, today, has 9' ceilings. My last home had full 10' ceilings, plus two "open" areas. These made the place MUCH more comfortable. I grew up in a house with 8' ceilings, and it just feels cramped to me today. I'm much more likely to stay indoors if I'm a roomier space. I need to "get out" in a smaller space.

Further, what we've seen of Trek ships tends to go along with this. We see very tall ceilings, we see big, cavernous rooms (not "practical" except when you think of psychology, really).

I do not think that these are "filming cheats." If anything, I tend to think that the sets which were built might be SMALLER than the corresponding "real" rooms on the "real" ship (it's common to do so... sets can be smaller than the spaces they're intended to represent... the cinematographer just uses a wider lens).

Of course, there are cases where a larger set is used to represent a smaller "real" space as well... but that's normally based upon the need to get a camera rig inside. This, for example, is a valid explanation of the size differential between the external Galileo prop and the internal Galileo set. But in that case, we have a real number to work from... and Warped9's work on this is ideal, as far as I'm concerned... reaching a happy medium between the two.

But we literally were never told in any TV show that the Enterprise was 947' long. If we were... that would be a "stake in the sand." All we got was a short glance at a diagram. The diagram does not list the ship's length, by the way, either. It has a "scale" which, WITH A LOT OF EFFORT, can be used to derive a length that's accurate to, say, +/- 5%.

But I simply can't comprehend how anyone can use that... which was so clearly a "throwaway shot"... and which is significantly ambiguous... as the one "stake in the sand" which makes us have to toss out pretty much every filmed shot involving people walking around inside the ship.

I'm not trying to be argumentative... I'm really stumped by how this works. We have seen the exterior of the Enterprise, and we've seen the interior of the Enterprise, and the two need to match up as well as possible. And yes, once time we saw a blurry, quick glance at an on-screen diagram which didn't even really look like the real ship model anyway.

The nice thing about CAD programs is that they can scale their output easily. SO... I think that this is probably what I'm going to do. I'll make everything fit, properly, based upon the average contemporary male human height of 5'10", but also allowing for the average contemporary female human height of 5'4". I'll do my best to match the real physical sets and to put them inside the proper external hull shape.

I can then "downscale" it to assume that the entire original crew consisted of 5'2" men and 4'8" women. Maybe we've got a crew full of Hollywood action stars?

 

[aridas sofia]

I'm really stumped by how this works

It's really quite easy. It's a huge starship. Even on the original Enterprise or the Enterprise in TMP, we saw a bare fraction of what would fill the ship. Sure, on a ship as big as Ariel there would be immense, cavernous spaces, many of which might use proto-hodeck technology to be multi-use. There would be small and cramped corridors where structure dictates, and bigger, TOS-ish corridors where need dictates and space permits. That's why I'm so against the view adopted by many that the sets should dictate size. We have sets that constitute 1% of the ship's total square footage, and we don't even know for sure where most of those area are intended to be, and we are supposed to use this vastly incomplete data set to dictate anything?

In the end, if you want to do a shuttlecarrier that looks sort of like Ariel and deviate from what I had in mind in certain major and fundamental ways (like size) then you are of course free to do so. You asked for my help and input, and I've given it. There are areas where I'm very interested in what people have to say about the design, but obviously you've hit a few where it was thought out. What I've told you is what I intended Ariel to be. Your take on the design is also valid and I encourage you to pursue it.

 

[blssdwlf]

Does anyone know what the actual physical height of the corridor sets for TMP was?

This may or may not help: I had derived the height of the long hallway in front of the TMP engine room to 7'.

How did you manage to derive that? It was, after all, a "forced perspective" corridor, wasn't it?

Are you saying that you derived it from a model you built, or from on-screen photo-analysis?

What I'm really looking for, if anyone has it, is actual set-construction details, by the way... but barring that, other info can be helpful (for instance, Ancient did some photo analysis on TOS sets that established the 9'7" ceiling height of the TOS corridor).

The part that Kirk walks through is not a forced perspective corridor. Now the corridor beyond where Kirk enters is a forced perspective backdrop.

The corridor I modeled is derived using Kirk as the control. It's not 100% finished as I only did it as a quick TMP internal build out to reference for my TOS Enterprise, so it's probably 7', +/-2".

As I've pointed out in another thread, on the TOS Enterprise at 947' the only set that doesn't fit is the flight deck.

OTOH, the TMP ship at 1000' has far more issues as the production people didn't follow the designer and thus the cargo bay doesn't fit, the rec deck probably not also and the engine room only fits once it is moved further back.

Since there has been no dimensions shown or mentioned for the actual *filmed* ships, then I don't see why there would be a problem scaling up a ship to what you think it should be

edit: Forgot to mention that depending on where you were in the TMP secondary hull, deck height varied between 9' and 12' (excluding flight deck).

 

[publiusr]

Might even be nice to see the saucer on a Balson class secondary hull for that Galaxy class look--TMP style

 

[publiusr]

Something I just noticed. That saucer hull might have already been modeled--by accident. Remember FASA's 1701-A refit miniature? The secondary hull looked as big as an Abassador class sec-hull, but the saucer was very flat, and the bridge actually seemed smaller in relation to everything else.

Heck, the current issue of Popular Science--or is that popular Mechanics--has a do it yourself electron microscope--just the thing to get views of small metal miniatures for orthos of them just in case...
http://benkrasnow.blogspot.com/2011/03/diy-scanning-electron-microscope.html
http://www.microscopeforums.com/f18/diy-solutions.html
http://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2011-03/video-diy-scanning-electron-microscope

 

[Cary L. Brown]

This may or may not help: I had derived the height of the long hallway in front of the TMP engine room to 7'.

How did you manage to derive that? It was, after all, a "forced perspective" corridor, wasn't it?

Are you saying that you derived it from a model you built, or from on-screen photo-analysis?

What I'm really looking for, if anyone has it, is actual set-construction details, by the way... but barring that, other info can be helpful (for instance, Ancient did some photo analysis on TOS sets that established the 9'7" ceiling height of the TOS corridor).

The part that Kirk walks through is not a forced perspective corridor. Now the corridor beyond where Kirk enters is a forced perspective backdrop.

The corridor I modeled is derived using Kirk as the control. It's not 100% finished as I only did it as a quick TMP internal build out to reference for my TOS Enterprise, so it's probably 7', +/-2".

As I've pointed out in another thread, on the TOS Enterprise at 947' the only set that doesn't fit is the flight deck.

OTOH, the TMP ship at 1000' has far more issues as the production people didn't follow the designer and thus the cargo bay doesn't fit, the rec deck probably not also and the engine room only fits once it is moved further back.

Since there has been no dimensions shown or mentioned for the actual *filmed* ships, then I don't see why there would be a problem scaling up a ship to what you think it should be

edit: Forgot to mention that depending on where you were in the TMP secondary hull, deck height varied between 9' and 12' (excluding flight deck).

Hi Peter,

Regarding that scene... I think you're slightly confused about orientation. That's OK, I was too for a loooong time. I finally sat down with my DVD and the pause button and framed through the scene. I'm totally convinced that the corridor Kirk enters through has him moving from aft to fore, in that shot. He walks into the deck above main engineering, from aft, and goes to his right (screen left). He then looks downwards, to the opposite side of the shaft, where we can see Scotty and Decker at the control console. He then walks around to the one-man elevator and descends to the main engineering deck. I did this because I'd originally thought that this corridor was from the front as well, and when watching my DVD suddenly had a moment of "cognitive dissonance" and had to dig into the scene more carefully.

Now... I view that region aft as being an engineering access area... basically the equivalent of "Jefferies Tubes." In my view, the corridor you see there is probably flanked by the hydrogen slush tanks.

In "real set" terms, we do know that this is the same door and corridor subsection used for the front of engineering, however... the upper level didn't actually have that detail, it was just a redressing of the main level set (ingenious as it may have been). So it's true that there's an identical corridor on the main engineering deck going forwards from that point (which, frankly, cannot possibly fit into the hull of the ship with the engine system as designed by A. Probert... apparently it's another "TARDIS" chamber like the Rec Deck?)

I treat the existence of that forward-facing corridor as a filmmaking snafu, like how in 2010 we see the entire Leonov all on one plane, even shot that way in a continuous shot, despite it not being intended to be treated that way. Left-hand doesn't talk to right-hand and as a result you get occasional bursts of nonsense on-screen. (Since the existence of that front-leading corridor is not required by the story, I can mentally retrofit it out of existence. Your mileage may vary.)

My main reference for the corridor is the one we see in TMP, just after Kirk leaves the transporter room. This corridor is quite large and open, with a pretty high ceiling height. That's the same corridor I want to have in any TMP-era starship saucer. If that corridor won't fit into the ship, then there's a mismatch.

Now... regarding the Ariel... I'm putting it on hold for the time being. My intention has always been to create the ship Aridas intended, but now that I've hit a point of actual contention, I don't feel comfortable continuing to work on this ship without he and I being in agreement... and I'm convinced that the ship simply can't work without compromising one of the following:

1) The external shape.
2) The internal configuration.
3) The scale.
4) The set configurations as seen on-screen.

Aridas feels, and it's his right to feel that way, that the first three are the most important, and the fourth is what should be compromised.

I feel that the third is the one that can be compromised in order to ensure that the first, second, and fourth can be retained.

It is impossible to accomplish all four, however. This is not a flaw in the Ariel, it's actually a flaw in the TMP ship, upon which the Ariel is generally based.

If this were the movie ship, I'd be quite comfortable doing my own version, including the (as I'm now convinced, totally necessary) upscaling. Or a TV show ship. Those are, in a sense, "public domain" concepts (with obviously legal limitations, of course).

But the Ariel is specifically Aridas' work, and I don't feel it's my right to compromise his concept in any way. So, I'm no longer comfortable working on this. I just can't bring myself to do things that "feel wrong" to me, and I can't put the crew into a ship with 7-1/2' ceilings where on-screen ceilings were more like 10'. This will just "feel wrong" to me.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

Okay, I've decided to really dig into the TMP sets and determine the real on-screen set height. This may take a while.

One thing I found pretty quickly was this:

http://pat.suwalski.net/film/st-stages/stages/stage9-tmp.jpg

That's the actual set arrangement used in TMP. It may be hard to tell, but the engineering set is at the very center of this arrangement. So... it IS the same corridor in the "engineering" shot and in the "post transporter accident" shot, and in every other corridor shot as well, simply redressed slightly, much as in TOS. (That is.. unless what they used for that shot was actually the smaller "wild" corridor which they show coming off of the transporter room... )

There are several good shots of the corridor to be found here:

http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Corridor

I've downloaded those and will start trying to figure out real set dimensions. I've been making use of Shane Johnson's diagrams, since I have yet to see any actual set construction plans. If anyone has actual set-construction plans, I'd love to see them.

They did reuse these corridors for TNG, but they rebuilt them somewhat. They made them wider, and I think that they MAY have increased ceiling height as well, (which I did not previously think was the case, but I'm trying to keep an open mind).

I'd REALLY like to get those set construction prints!

The only "stake in the ground" I have now is that William Shatner is known to be between 5'8" and 5'9" tall. So I'm going to call him 1.74m tall. That's my "stake."

EDIT:

Okay, so I have one other "stake"... we know that Steven Collins is 6'1", and there's a great shot of him walking down the corridor on Deck 5. That might be a better reference (we know that Shatner wore "lifts" sometimes, after all, and looking at his feet in that corridor scene, I think he as wearing them then!).

 

[blssdwlf]

Hi Cary,

Since Kirk enters the upper level engineering deck from the starboard side, it is possible that the corridor Kirk uses to first enter the upper engineering level is from aft to front, but I am favoring everything behind the "giant hexagon" as machinery space and not another corridor (which in my thinking places it forward). YMMV. Anyhow, I am counting the corridor forward the main level engineering since I'm not really building Andrew Probert's ship (although one day I'd like to) but the one that made it to the movies

EDIT, just read your next post. Curious - could you just ignore the filmed deck heights from TMP and make the Ariel's corridors only in the same design but not TMP's filmed height to get it all to fit? Since the Ariel never made it on screen, it could be what the designer intended...

The corridor Kirk walks out into from the transporter room is the same height as the "forward corridor" since they branch off from each other set-wise. The "junctions" where these corridors meet up do appear to be taller though.

Shatner usually tried to portray Kirk at 5'10" to 6'. Collins does sound like a better secondary measurement.

I'm looking forward to your deck height reconstruction!

Oh, and if you'd like to compare notes on how I viewed Kirk's path around engineering, I've included the graphic below. FWIW, the movie Enterprise seems to be okay at 355m...