Updating FJ's technical manual?

I agree.

There was never any indication that a back-up bridge exists beyond Auxiliary Control.

 

I could see there being a need for an "emergency bridge" in the secondary hull for when the it separates from the saucer, but the A/C should work just fine in other cases, like those we saw in the series?

 

In assuming he deliberately ignored the Auxilary Control Room, you presuppose that FJ had seen and noticed it in the first place.

After having read the interviews again at www.trekplace.com (which is an excercise I can't repeat recommending) there is no substantial hint he was aware of these and other interior compartments not featured in the studio set blueprint of The Making of Star Trek or in the film stills accessible to him.

You can read in these interviews how uncomfortable he was going to Star Trek Conventions and how he emphasized that his work should not be considered to be a bible of some kind (someone should forward these interviews to James Dixon and friends).

It shouldn't take a lot of imagination that during those conventions he meet Trekkers that did ask him those hard questions like "Where's the Auxilary Control Room". What was he supposed to say?

"Sorry, I based my work entirely on the information I got from The Making of Star Trek, a couple of film stills and an occasional item here and there I noticed while watching the reruns with my daughter"?

Fans looked up to him like a guru, almost a Carlos Castaneda thing, and he didn't have the heart to tell them that he was not the kind of Star Trek expert fans assumed him to be. IMHO, he made that clear in the interviews. Apparently he enjoyed his status as a guru because it enabled him to promote his ideas of space exploration and political participation.
I can't, won't and don't blame him for that.

Therefore, I believe that by emancipating ourselves from his work and using our own knowledge to come up with a different kind of technical manual would rather be something he would have approved and encouraged. Didn't somebody mention IDIC in the course of this thread?

Bob

 

Ignored, overlooked or just plain missed it brings into question whatever research went into the work and final product.

I admire and respect what FJ did, but I don't revere him for it.

 

Short of pestering FJ’s daughter about the A/C issue; at this point, we’ll probably never know for sure whether FJ knew of its existence or not?

What we do know is that FJ made it clear in his TM and BOGP’s that no two starships were exactly alike, and all had individual modifications that made each of them unique, and/or that all were in various stages of more or less continuous upgrades that rendered some older technical orders obsolete as they became superseded by newer ones.

This was FJ’s way of letting the fans “have their cake and eat too” as it were, regarding any changes he introduced, either by design or mistake. He even included spaces in his “section indexes” for what’s “current” and what it “replaces” so readers could assume whatever they wanted in this regard.

So, for those who are so inclined, an “updated” FJ tech manual might include those sections detailing what the previous tech orders specified, this could include specific facilities like the auxiliary control, or an addendum detailing more general fleet info like Alex mentioned up thread? This way a lot of supposed inconsistencies could be ironed out?

Of course, for those who want a whole new tech manual starting from scratch, none of the above matters?

 

Yeah, that would be one helluva project.

 

What's the point in knowing? Either he didn't know of its existence or he decided to ignore it.

In either case he wasn't qualified to be referred to as a Star Trek authority, mind a Star Trek expert.

One of the prerequisites to achieve such a status, IMHO, is substantial knowledge of the matter to some extent and its accurate, unbiased reproduction (which doesn't exclude different interpretations on why and how a certain component does function). YMMV, of course.

Bob

 

This is the first time I have read a post by you that gives me the impression you have actually looked into what Franz Joseph was about and not posted a preconceived idea that you tried to support with cherry picked data. I really, honestly congratualate you. Franz Joseph was what he was. Fallible, not a god or a guru. Fans made him into what they wanted him to be- a way of keeping Star Trek alive and "real". For whatever reason, he played along. The facts of Star Trek production, so important to the modern canon-obsessed fan, were simply not as important then as they are now, and what this man produced is reflective of that fact. There was an acknowledgement during the 1970s of the production's shortcomings - that sets were made to fit exteriors they couldn't fit within, or that sets were constantly being redressed to fulfill multiple purposes, etc - and rather than take that literally and feel bound to make a square fit within a circle, Franz Joseph took it as license to show us unseen spaces that were what he believed had actually been intended.

I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt as far as the degree to which his speculation was informed. You say he had TMoST and a few stills. i say he met and corresponded with Roddenberry, was lauded by him for his work and eventually hired by him to do the same kind of things for Roddenberry's Planet Earth series proposal that Wah Chang and Matt Jefferies had done for Star Trek. He met Jefferies. He met Justman. And he met these people only a few years after TOS had ceased production. How we can sit in our lofty, internet-informed perch and castigate a figure with such contemporary and personal access for daring to portray unseen intent instead of only what had been seen on TV is, in my view, assuming too much. Way too much. He did what fans wanted him to do, using a remarkable level of access to portray not only things that had already been seen, but things we only dreamed might exist.

 

The only TOS set I'm aware of where the interiors wouldn't fit into the exterior is the shuttlecraft and some of the redressing work Matt Jefferies accomplished is rather impressive because it went by unnoticed (e.g. laboratory).

However, I'm unable to see where Franz Joseph exceeded the quality of the original production. In his engineering hull there is - again - plenty of space devoted to gyms and dance floors, elements he equally recycled from the saucer.

Who castigates Franz Joseph? The question was how much, if any of his materials, should be incorporated into an upgrade of the TM.

According to the "unseen intent" available through The Making of Star Trek there were only 12 ships like the Enterprise and he ignored this by coming up with several dozens more. With only 12 ships like the Enterprise (an analogy to the US Navy aircraft carriers of the 1960's) it wouldn't sound like an inside joke, that the Enterprise is the only vessel within interception range, it's a connotation because of FJ's alteration of what had been actually intended.

And there is this noteworthy anecdote, in FJ's own words, that Gene Roddenberry's major criticism of his work was the militaristic overtone he added to the Star Trek Universe.

Apparently, such items would need to be fixed, too, if we were serious about honoring the original intentions of the creators and producers.

Bob

 

Watch the daily reruns on TV and note some observations perhaps?

Bob

 

Without the ability to replay that was of little use. I know. I even tried photographing off the TV screen but the results were at best barely useable.

 

He did that! But you have to keep in mind that there were no VHS or DVD's back then, so not being able to freeze-frame what you want to take a closer look at makes it hard to pin down the design of a set, when it only appears onscreen for a few seconds at a time and the camera keeps focusing on actors and not background. Heck even with these things it can still be hard to do without the aid computers and/or original plans for these obscure sets, neither of which FJ had in those days either!

 

You're thinkin' about doing just that.

I can tell.

 

FJ didn't ignore that since it was mentioned onscreen, which proves he was paying attention, but your ignoring what Albertese posted way back on page One of this thread.

http://imageshack.us/f/84/fjstarshiptimeline.jpg/

Surely the producers did not preclude the possibility of a growth in fleet strength, or that the 12 starships statement had to stand for all time?

 

Actually over the years I have thought about it. Thing is, though, it would probably never get published. The market for these books is quite small now and the fact that it doesn't really gel with what is considered "official" would probably get in the way too.

That said it would be possible to do a web based technical manual. That is something I'm seriously considering. My TOS and TAS shuttlecraft drawings could essentially be the first candidates for such a thing. One small difference could be that instead of having one sheet with three views like in FJ's manual you could have a sheet for each view which allows you greater detail. And being web based you could also use 3D models along with line drawings to really bring things to life.

You basically set up a contents page just like a book and then you can click on each item for a detailed look at the the subject.

Table of Contents:
- Lists all the materiel within the manual (and obviously you can start small and add as you go).

...click on a subject and...

Introductory Page:
- Starts with an illustration of the subject as well as a descriptive and perhaps also some historical content. From this page you can click further to more detailed views and specifications and whatever.


FJ went beyond what we saw onscreen and showed us conjectural things like new classes of ships. You could follow that reasoning as long as what you show is consistent with what was established onscreen. Some of FJ's ideas would have to be fleshed out more or even corrected. You could certainly now show classes of alien ships, equipment and uniforms as well as pre TOS materiel.

I would suggest a different name for this kind of reference manual. In the back of my mind I've had two names I've rather liked: the Starfleet Command Library or the Starfleet Starflight Catalog.

I know for myself while I certainly have a lot of ideas for this I've seen a number of other designs around that I think fit right in with my overall thinking. Some of Masao's designs as well as Vektor's very cool Vanguard design.

With this kind of site you could go beyond the TOS era and into the TMP era. I wouldn't be inclined to go beyond that because it's not where my interests lay and then it gets to be a monster project (as if it ain't big enough already).

 

Gentlemen,

having become a Trekker in the 1970's I'm well aware of the limited availability of visual reference materials but at conventions (which FJ also visited) we bought and traded prints from film stills or - where necessary - pictures taken from our TV sets. This may have been crude compared to today's standards but it wasn't rocket science. You just had to put some "passion" into it.

Of course, exotic sets had less feature time than in comparison a set like the transporter room. But given the regular appearance of the transporter room in the series it was obvious that the odd angle the console had in the studio set drawing in The Making of Star Trek was wrong, yet it reflects in FJ's works with the same angle. Did he understand that the function was to control and face the transport chamber?
Apparently, he didn't care to check or notice.

And the same story obviously applies to his reproduction of the type II phaser. The photo illustration section in The Making of Star Trek has several discrepancies but the most noticable (and in this context tragic) one is a photo cut-out of this phaser which altered its form.
And that's obviously the reason why it has the incorrect shape that FJ reproduced in the TM.

Ironically, the phaser is among the items which according to the interviews started the whole project and yet, it seems he never bothered to take another look at a picture of one of these at conventions or elsewhere.

Since he made it abundantly clear in his interviews how dispassionate he felt about Star Trek, these (or other) things don't come as big surprises.

But what amazes me in this thread is the myth building as if he had the great masterplan to unlock the mysteries the creators themselves were not aware of.

Bob

 

What amazes me in this thread is that you keep reading the same interviews the rest of us have read and keep finding things that aren't there.

And that you seem to have the ability to read the mind of a dead man. Because hey, there just is no way he looked at the thing, thought it was right, passed it by the fans who obviously said it was right, checked it against what he saw was on TV and confirmed to his satisfaction it was right, then considered the possibility that some guy forty years hence would claim he didn't care enough to get it perfect but decided such a clairvoyant was beyond the ability of mere mortals to debate, and thus went back to hand drawing and hand lettering the other hundred plus pages in the manual he was doing speculatively, without a contract, for a bunch of kids.

 

@ Bob,

What amazes me is that you are capable of such spectacular feats of mental gymnastics such that you can “rationalize” curved and circular corridors in the secondary hull of the Enterprise, yet when it comes to a no-brainer like the transporter console obviously not being bolted to the deck, which explains (in universe) why we saw it in various slightly different places and angles relative to the platform throughout the course of Kirk’s five year mission, you seem incapable of rubbing two brain cells together to make a spark!

And we’ve already discussed the phaser; nobody here is giving FJ a pass on this one, it was a mistake on FJ’s part and it was a biggie, nuff said.

And while some fans may make a guru out of FJ, none of them are posting on this thread (well, except for that one Ensign with the bad spelling ) yet you want to tar us all with the same brush anyway, despite our demonstrated willingness to hold him accountable wherever he truly deserves it, and our openness to correcting his mistakes, which is hardly the behavior typical of “groupies”.