My only "personal disagreement" with what you have here is what you're calling a sensor array, under the bridge. To me, that always struck me as more likely to be the "torpedo magazine," speed-loading torpedo casings into the launcher apparatus.
That is such an excellent tip! I've been vaugely thinking the sensor array was funny and lack of torpedo space was fishy but just didn't put them together in that way. Jackill showed it as a sensor array. So "torpedo magazine" it is. Thanks for that one. Update complete:
Our B'rel-class will be out shortly. I didn't 'discover' this thread until we'd finished (I've been BUSY!!). We paralleled various ideas discussed here. You'll see which soon.
So the wings are? Giant heat sinks? Those are some mighty big guns at the end of the wings! Something to do with changing the centre of gravity for impulse, and in combination with some kind of variable warp field technobabble? A combination of all of the above? I have no problem with function complimented with form (with the exception of Frack Gehry's abominations), especially if the technology allows for it but the fact that they move, at the very least, must have a reason. LCARS 24, in the movie, it didn't look like they were lowering those PMMA sheets that far down into the ship. There's no space a little higher, nestled between the "radiator baffles"?
If you mean when Sulu lowered the tank by helicopter, it appeared to go where I originally put it: into that large cargo bay forward of and higher than the computer core (previous page of this thread). But the ship was cloaked at the time, so it's hard to say. Maybe that's where it was loaded but then got moved once someone realized where it would have to be for the whales to swim out. Or the director didn't have a schematic of the ship or care.
I have the large, physical model of this ship and your placement of things, per the schematic seem to make sense. Where you have the whale tank area, there is a large, circular hatch directly below that; it seems like the ideal and only logical place for it. Also, on the instruction sheet for the model, it lists the tubular thing that wraps around the nose section as being part of the cloaking mechanism. I just always assumed that would be some sort of an emitter for the entire device, but always assumed it would be set up in engineering. Great work on the schematic.
One possible way to explain this away while doing minimal damage to the internal layout of the ship is to say that Sulu just lowered the sheets on top of the shop, or to the ground next to the ship, after which they were moved to their final location by other means. After all, Sulu must have had the sheets all bundled up as a single underslung load - I can't imagine him doing constant back-and-forth trips to the factory. Yet the sheets had to be lowered in place one by one (as we saw in the interior view), and I also can't see Sulu hovering over the park doing skycrane work for any significant length of time. So he'd probably deliver the whole bundle and fly the chopper back, after which action would move indoors and Scotty would manipulate the four or more sheets in their proper places. There's no topside hatch of the sort that would be practical for loading or offloading cargo. But some topside features could well be interpreted as maintenance hatches of the engine systems, providing access to outsize items such as entire reactor cores. Sulu could have lowered the sheets to the engine maintenance spaces of the vessel, and those spaces could be expected to have the means of delivering large pieces of (repaired) equipment to key areas within the aft hull. In general, I'd argue that the aft hull would almost purely consist of oddly shaped engine and utility spaces, not neatly laid out decks with corridors and cabins. With a little imagination, those odd shapes could serve our need to deliver the plexiglass sheets from a top maintenance hatch to the bottom. Or, if that fails, then we could argue that Sulu lowered the bundle to the grass next to the ship, and the sheets were loaded using the belly hatch. Scotty would merely have been using the ship as an ATC tower to help Sulu aim the sheets to the cloaked stretch of grass and avoid hitting the ship in the process. Timo Saloniemi
Re: radiator--an engineering/thermodynamics question that I do not know the answer to: is increasing the surface area like that a viable means of heat exchange in a vacuum? Also, I wonder why they actually built whale tanks. It's not like George and Gracie would have dehydrated inside the thirty seconds it took for the Bounty to get back to the 23d century. Shouldn't simply beaming them onto the cargo deck floor and then beaming them out have been totally sufficient for our heroes' purposes? Edit: although some whales can suffocate under their own weight during stranding--don't know if this applies to humpbacks, baleen whales don't usually strand because they don't get close enough to the littoral like toothed whales do when hunting seals and such.
A radiator surface will indeed work better if its area increases, even in a vacuum. However, it is not a smart thing to put two radiator surfaces facing each other in a vacuum; since there is no convection by a medium to take the heat away from between the surfaces, the radiators will merely be casting their heat to the opposing radiator... Hence, a stack like the ones atop the BoP is not optimal - but it may still be better than a simple flat surface for two reasons. One, it does increase the effective area a bit (although not as much as a "washboard" surface with ridges sloping at 45 degree angles), and two, it may be a good idea to hide the radiator surfaces from the enemy, even at the price of efficiency. I'd assume our heroes would have to prepare for a long journey home, with provisions for the whales for at least a day of sustenance. Also, I'd think they would have insufficient data on what works on humpback whales and what doesn't - the Klingon computer wouldn't have all that much data, and the species would be alien to our heroes, and doubly so for the resident living computer memory bank Spock. Timo Saloniemi
Another point about the plexiglass is that the doors of that upper cargo bay I mentioned do allow lowering things in, which you can see from some of the CGI shots I linked on page 1 of the thread. Then, if they can beam whales and such a large volume of water, I would think they could beam the plexiglass sheets or even the assembled tank from one compartment to another, if necessary. People tend to use the resources they have, extravagant as it may sometimes seem to people who don't have them.
I don't remember. But there's also a rumor that beaming up the whales and water caused severe shaking, leading to a major gagh spill--right into the tank--and that all the gagh disappeared in seconds.
I think you might be over-estimating the size of the whales. I got the impression that George and Gracey were about 22 feet or so. Some thoughts on the moving wings, the weapons pods on the wing tips seem a bit large, what if they are more than just weapons? Voyager's warp engines reposition themselves prior to going to warp, perhaps the pods and wings contain elements of the warp drive. The coils could be of a different shape, and be inside the wings. the wings position down for warp flight. Level for atmosphere, acting as actual wings. And go all the way up for landings, raising the warp drive and weapons away from the ground debris we saw in TVH. The reactor would still be inside the main body. Along with the converters, antimatter pods, deuteruim tanks, impulse engines. If the bird has bussard collectors, they would be in the leading edges of the wings. Possible a short range craft wouldn't need them, existing only with stored fuel. The cargo hold should be adjacent to the main ramp, convenent for loading and unloading. That's how the whales got out. I have no idea how the panes were "lowered" into place. .
Industrial Light & Magic created the visual effects for the whales. Most shots of the humpback whales used scale models shot at their studio or life-sized animatronics shot at Paramount But some of the shots, including a scene of a whale breaching, are stock footage of actual animals. I'm not sure what size figures they used in creating their movie magic, but I show the whales in the figure scaled to average size of adult (Gracie was pregnant) humpbacks, even though scaling them down a tad, as they may have done for the film, would have made it easier to fit them into the drawing.
I'm not so sure about that. The aft ramp was very narrow and had a tiny little door; the whales swam out from some sort of a wide sliding-door arrangement that Kirk blew open, supposedly on the underside of the ship. Now, the model wasn't built for ST3 with the leading idea that there should be a whale offloading port underneath... Or anywhere else for that matter. But it sorta makes sense that a landing-capable ship would have a ventral cargo door that could handle outsize items, in addition to having a personnel ramp. The Defiant in DS9 has a circular ventral feature that was never meant to be a cargo bay, either, but it is seen serving as one: the circle splits in the middle, and the tractor beam emitter that lies at the center of the circle apparently retracts up. The circular feature at the bottom of the BoP could do the exact same thing. Timo Saloniemi
Another possibility for the BoP wings: just like on many modern day aircraft, they could contain the fuel tanks. You could move the deuterium tanks there, and free up badly-needed space in the body of the ship for other things. Also, looking at the thickness of the wings in various shots, I don't see why they can't contain things like batteries, power cells, or other secondary machinery. And I don't think we should discount this suggestion: ...the idea that the Klingons would want to make intimidating-looking ships (even at the expense of practicality) is not far-fetched at all. Likewise, if the BoP really is a Romulan design (another whole debate, I know) then I could see the Romulans also going for a deliberate "bird-like" appearence for the same reason, and it certainly matches up with the classic TOS romulan Bird of Prey.
Good point about the size of the door. How would you explain the storm of large bubbles that exited the bird when Kirk open the submerged hatch, the chamber where the whales were was half flooded, opening a floor hatch wouldn't release an air pocket near the ceiling.