Excelsior class

[Timo]

Looks like the excelsior could easily fit through those doors considering they are not completely open in that picture.

The interesting question is, could she still get out if she were something like 30% larger than suggested? Those doors should easily allow for the exit of a ship some 250 m wide, meaning the Excelsior could be up to 650 meters long and have one-third more decks than the "intended" scale would suggest.

What kind of a combination of miniatures would be used here? The scene with the Enterprise entering the dock features the sawtooth doors up close, but also has the curve of the outer station hull visible. The scene with her backing out has only indoors shots, plus then this closeup from outside. Then there are the shots with the whole station in sight. Assuming that the RotJ miniature was used for all the shots save for those that show the entire station, and also featured a completed section of exterior, why would the doors be different from shot to shot? (Are they? My monitor where I'm typing this is way too dark to tell if the shallow sawtooth pattern is really missing, or merely shadowed, in the exterior view.)

Also, what does the door sign say? "M5"? Does that mean "Enter under homicidal computer control only" or what? It doesn't seem as if the station could have more than four such doors.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[GodThingFormerly]

^ This is the exterior spacedock miniature on the ILM motion-control stage. This is a section of the recycled interior miniature. The scales to which they were fabricated are obviously quite different. I suspect that the structure visible here may have been a third partial miniature of a segment of the upper dome. Actually, in that screencap I can almost see a thin section covering the spaceward side of the door which may explain the apparent visual discontinuity noted by DS9Sega, although it is invisible in the following shot which is presumably of the full-size interior.

TGT

 

[Timo]

The existence of that third, "intermediate" miniature sounds quite probable. Note also that there's a slightly different relative scale in use for that single side shot of the Enterprise entering: she's quite a bit bigger there in relation to the doors than in the shots filmed with the interior miniature.

It would be possible to pretend that the doors have a thick inner sawtooth structure, plus thin smooth-edged plates outboard of those. The two sets would then move a bit out of synch, so that the sawtooth would be exposed in most shots, but partially covered in the side shot, and fully covered in the exterior top shot of the ship backing out, plus of course in all the shots showing the doors closed.

In reality, then, two of the three models would have the thin straight-edged plate over the sawtooth (or then no sawtooth at all), while only the interior miniature would completely lack it.

The odd thing is why they'd build the third miniature for just that single side shot. It's fairly detailed, with lighting and all. OTOH, IMHO it's the coolest of all the door miniatures by far, or at least the Star Waresque shot made with it is...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Basill]

I realize this thread is about the Excelsior, but I can't resist asking, just what portions of the Spacedock interior are the recycled Death Star reactor? Especially after reviewing images from ROTJ, other than being round with tons of greeble pipes for the illusion of immense scale, they don't really look a thing alike.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

I agree, the two "sets" differ, as far as I can see, almost totally in terms of detailing.

I suspect that when you're told that they "reused" it, what really happened was that they reused the physical structure, but peeled off and totally replaced all of the "dressing" elements.

In other words, imagine a house... tear down all the walls, rips out all the fixturing, just keep the 2x4 frame... and even remove/replace some portions of that... then totally redress it.

I suspect that's what was done, if in fact it's true that they "reused" it. They kept the 2x4s and the foundation, and just built the "new" thing on the same floorspace.

 

[JJohnson]

Looking at your third
picture there, you can somewhat see that the 'sawtooth' is on the interior, and the flat doors are on the exterior; it's simply the plating difference there. One problem solved!

The only other one I see is that it does somewhat seem like a scale difference between the top-down shot of the Enterprise entering, and the side-shot; perhaps I'm looking wrong though.

James

 

[Timo]

Yet that double structure can be seen only in that third picture. In the interior pictures, we can see that there is no such double structure: the sawtooth is seen in clear silhouette against the spatial background, without the flat outer surface.

So for the Trek universe, we can claim that there are two sets of doors that move at different rates, sometimes obscuring and sometimes exposing the sawtooth to outside view. But for the real universe, it still remains something of a mystery why some pics show the flat outer panels present while some show them missing.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[LiChiu]

If you look at the doors from this angle then they should be sawtooth inside and out.

And as for the size of the enterprise and how many decks the rim of the saucer should be, these shots should help get an idea.

 

[Bill Morris]

Nice shots. About windows on the saucer rim, the Ent-D and Ent-C both show more that one row of windows for some decks, one for some, and none for others. The Defiant shows three rows of windows on deck four, facing inward on both sides, as seen in the intro of DS9 from season 4.

A screencap that would be helpful is the split-second in Generations where the deck lines of the Ent-B MSD on the bridge are in focus. It's just a couple of frames, and TrekCore doesn't have that shot.

 

[LiChiu]

LCARS 24 said:
Nice shots. About windows on the saucer rim, the Ent-D and Ent-C both show more that one row of windows for some decks, one for some, and none for others. The Defiant shows three rows of windows on deck four, facing inward on both sides, as seen in the intro of DS9 from season 4.

A screencap that would be helpful is the split-second in Generations where the deck lines of the Ent-B MSD on the bridge are in focus. It's just a couple of frames, and TrekCore doesn't have that shot.

I cannot seem to find any frame in Generations with the MSD in focus but I took these shots for reference to get an idea of scale. You can see the men standing in the opening.

If you can determine from those shots how thick those protuberances on the secondary hull are then maybe you can extrapolate how thick the saucer is.

Plus there is this.

 

[Bill Morris]

Thanks, LiChiu. I was just looking at the movie again. The problem is the MSD you posted. It's from The TNG Sketchbook: The Movies, and people are claiming there are 34 decks based on that.

Here's what the movie and your screencaps tell me:

This shows where Chekov, Harriman, and Scotty were standing, on deck 15, as viewed in GEN from the outside of the Ent-B through the large hull breach caused by a discharge from the Nexus, as seen in the screencaps above. The space above the ceiling of that deck could also be seen, and it's more than 6 feet high. This placement is clear from a major feature of the hull clearly visible both in that scene and on the MSD.

 

[LiChiu]

You are right, they do say deck 15. If it was down that low in the ship then your suggestion of the scale would be correct. But from those images it looks like those protuberances on the secondary hull could be two or three decks thick.

 

[Bill Morris]

What I take this to mean is that the extra lines on the Sketchbook MSD are not floors but ceilings!!

Some of the very large MSDs that people have done with Adobe Illustrator show large space between the ceiling of one deck and the floor of the next deck above, complete with structural members, conduits, etc.

I'm not going to show that, since this is the target size for these informational schematics in the LCARS 24 library, and too much detail just muddies things. So I'll finish it up using 17 decks. As I mentioned, we know that it's around 15 feet from one deck floor to the next on the Ent-D and Voyager, according to well-established dimensions and numbers of decks. So that space between ceiling and floor above is large and can easily be confused with a deck in a cutaway or a scene showing a hull breach from the outside.

 

[LiChiu]

My point is since the edge of the saucer on the enterprise appears to be two decks then the saucer on the excelsior should be the same. The edge of its saucer looks very similar and the ship is supposed to be bigger.
Keep in mind movies that mention deck numbers can be way off. Remember Star Trek V when they rocketed up that turbo lift shaft?

 

[Bill Morris]

I know. It's a constant problem. And when they were rocketing up that shaft, the deck numbers were reversed. Hey, we're lucky they were able to make these Trek shows and movies at all, considering the cost and return. But I'm hoping for more, anyway.

 

[LiChiu]

I forgot they were reversed.
I hope for more too.

 

[Bill Morris]

I'm okay with two decks for the saucer rim of the Ent-D. It's 195 meters in overall height, with 42 decks, more than double the height of the Ent-B. So thicker rim, maybe.

 

[LiChiu]

When I say enterprise rim with two decks I meant the ent-A.

 

[Bill Morris]

When and if I get into doing the Ent-A, that's going to be a problem, what with this talk of 21 decks and 71 or so meters in overall height. It was easier programming a sudoku app to add to my LCARS system a few days ago. That only took a few hours.

But I'm also doing NASA MSDs for my LCARS library, and you wouldn't believe how hard it is to get the necessary details for those. At least it was for the ISS. And that's not even science fiction!

 

[GodThingFormerly]

Basill said:
I realize this thread is about the Excelsior, but I can't resist asking, just what portions of the Spacedock interior are the recycled Death Star reactor? Especially after reviewing images from ROTJ, other than being round with tons of greeble pipes for the illusion of immense scale, they don't really look a thing alike.

An ILM modelmaker noted the reuse of the ROTJ reactor chamber (mainly the off-camera support scaffolding, lighting system and the webs of radial pipes which composed the floor and ceiling) in a 1984 issue of either Cinefex or American Cinematographer covering ST:TSFS' visual effects.

TGT