Warp core in TOS Enterprise
- Thread starter Josh_Lyman
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Since you asked...
On Franz Joseph's 1970s blueprints, the bowling alley is on Deck 21 aft:
Nothing better than after dispatching a dangerous foe, than a few hours of Disco Bowling!
middyseafort, the above picture is part of the following pan, assembled from screencaps. I think I made it but I could be wrong. I've had it for a while. If anyone else wants to claim it as their creation, I will gladly acquiesce.
Here also is the complete hi-res version - 802k, 1010 x 4052 pixels
In Up Till Now, Shatner describes how difficult it was to work with her. Apparently, she was pretty much playing herself in the episode.
He was in a play with her years before and she hated the director for some reason and decided she would not speak if he was in the room.
One night during a performance, she stopped speaking on stage because she thought she saw him in the back of the theater. 
Of course, the matter/antimatter reactor in TMP was different than what we saw in TNG, too... the entire RUN was a reactor... each segment was a reactor.
The only clear on-screen indication of where the matter/antimatter reaction took place on the 1701 was in the animated series, so many people reject that out of hand. In that show, it was established that the reactors were in the nacelles (since they had to go up inside a nacelle to reload some antimatter once).
I've always preferred that anyway... the idea that the nacelle was mainly built around power generation and manipulation, and that the actual space-warp itself was generated by a relatively small element (which in TOS-production was the sphere at the aft end of the nacelle).
There was NEVER any mention of a "warp core" until TNG.
In TMP, they refer to a "vertical intermix shaft" and a "horizontal intermix shaft" and the idea was that the matter and antimatter were mixed (and thus reacted) all throughout the shaft. Most likely, each segment had a matter injector at one end and an antimatter injector at the other end... reacted in the middle... and the resultant energy was channelled from one segment to the next... sort of like stacking AA-cells end-to-end.
In TOS, the only thing we ever saw that might've been related to power generation was also a series of cylinders behind the grill (as mentioned before). If you don't like the idea that the reactors were in the nacelles, you can say that this cluster was a set of reactors.
Actually, it might make sense for BOTH TOS-ish solutions to be true... that is, if the reactor system isn't a single reactor "core" (which is a very reasonable assumption... actually, from a ship-design standpoint, it's far MORE reasonable than having a "single point of failure" system!), that you have some reactor "segments" inside the nacelles and some more inside the secondary hull... giving you, effectively, three CLUSTERS of reactor elements.
The biggest annoyance I had with TNG (and later) was that they gave us a "single-point-of-failure" design... if anything goes wrong with the reactor, you either have to shut down all power or you have to let yourself blow up. Whereas, if you have multiple smaller reactors, and one goes south, you can shut it down completely, do the maintenance on it, and keep the rest of the ship's functions working at nearly-complete levels.
It just makes more sense to decentralize if you have the option... unless you think that "nothing could ever go wrong." Which TNG (and other post-TNG shows) have demonstrated, time and again, is definitely NOT the case!)
Or then not.
Nothing was explicated on screen, and the fact that the TMP "warp core" looks like a TNG "plasma conduit" might be taken to mean that the TMP ship had a fairly conventional M/AM reaction chamber somewhere down below and the vertical and horizontal shafts were taking the power to the nacelles and the impulse engines but were not involved in the reaction in any way.
Then again, jump-starting an engine might not involve creating a spark or spraying fuel or turning a crank in the usual place. There might well be a special "jump-starting spot" somewhere closer to the end of the propulsive chain than the standard power generation zone.
As for the single failure point thing, I'd actually be happier with a design where you can eject the single point that's going to fail catastrophically than with one where you have small kabooms going on in a dozen places and have to perform a dozen emergency operations to get on top of the situation. The military historically takes one of two approaches as regards vulnerability: either it distributes (the widely spaced engine rooms of a destroyer, say), or it concentrates where the protection is greatest (the centrally mounted engine rooms of a battleship). Starfleet might well go for the latter approach.
Timo Saloniemi
Well, remember that they finally accepted that Engineering is on the top "spine" of the secondary hull. While there are no visually-evident "blow-off panels" that doesn't mean there's nothing that we've just never been able to make out on our screens... and the same goes for the nacelles.
In other words, if each of the semi-vertical elements behind the engineering screen is a reactor core (with, say, the floor elements being something else?) it would be pretty straightforward to make each individual cylinder independently ejectable, wouldn't it?
Y'know, this discussion really proves how superfluous all that TNG-era technobabble really is. After all, the Original Series never got around to explaining exactly how the warp engines worked or what all the components were named and where they were located, and yet the stories didn't suffer at all! The production staff wisely didn't waste time inventing technical details that couldn't possibly contribute to a story in any meaningful way.
Not only that, but even with plots in which the malfunction of a piece of futuristic hardware was a major story point (Mudd's Women, The Enemy Within) the characters spent surprisingly little time (and used surprisingly little technical language) discussing the details of the malfunction. The focus was kept solidly on the human drama, and the show was better for it.
The technical aspects of Star Trek are fun to discuss, to be sure, but way too much of that stuff seeped into the stories during the TNG era, IMO, and it really hurt them.
Not only that, but even with plots in which the malfunction of a piece of futuristic hardware was a major story point (Mudd's Women, The Enemy Within) the characters spent surprisingly little time (and used surprisingly little technical language) discussing the details of the malfunction. The focus was kept solidly on the human drama, and the show was better for it.
The technical aspects of Star Trek are fun to discuss, to be sure, but way too much of that stuff seeped into the stories during the TNG era, IMO, and it really hurt them.
They explained that in one of the early books about TOS. Roddenberry noted that in police dramas they didn't explain in detail how a gun works. They just used them. Pilots don't describe how planes fly, etc. So the characters in TOS don't go into many details on how stuff on the Enterprise works.
As you noted they got away from this, and I agree it really hurt the stories.
Yup, I'm telling you. Here ...
And just for the heck of it ...
By the way, my 5000th post!
Way to go!!!! On your 5000th post!!!
Looking forward to 5000 more.....
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