Some conceits to be aware of before people advise me on this or that:
• Enterprise-the-series takes place, for me, in an alternate timeline. That "NX class" doesn't exist for me, but I do make use of various of its components distributed around my timeline where they make the most sense.
• I reject everything after Picard goes into the Nexus as being his Nexus fantasy. No Sovereign or Luna classes. Riker keeps the Enterprise-D to turn into the "All Good Things..." dreadnought.
• I go by first sources wherever possible. Since any production like Star Trek devolves into a years or decades long game of Telephone/Whispers, there are going to be instances of lack of communication, miscommunications, butting egos, misinterpretations, etc. I use as much as I can, but leave out what doesn't fit, massage things to fit, and generally try to alter things as minimally as possible to preserve the extant canon -- borked as it too often is.
• If it exists, I've probably seen it or own it -- but there's no guarantee everything in any given work has clicked. I've known about a lot of issues, a lot of approaches, a lot of contradictions. There's a good chance I won't cite sources, as no one source has everything. For instance, I've pieced together Matt Jefferies' observations from five different books, multiple magazine articles, the occasional trading card or comic book tech page, and a few oddments people have posted online over the last twenty-five years. There's a good chance I won't remember exactly where I originally read something -- just that I did. I have multiple editions of The Making of Star Trek, the Concordance, and the Compendium. I have the 2nd season TOS writers' bible. I have the first printings of FJ's Booklet of Plans and Technical Manual. I have "The Case of Jonathan Doe Starship". I have Star Trek Maps and the Spaceflight Chronology. I have most of FASA's reference books (and several of Last Unicorn's). I have a pile of fandom and semiofficial stuff from the likes of Todd Guenther and David Kimble and David Schmidt and Shane Johnson. I have commentary and sketches from the likes of Matt Jefferies and Andy Probert and Rick Sternbach and Mike Okuda. I have The Art of Star Trek and Phase II: The Lost Series, original and TNG "Sketchbooks", Continuing Mission, Making of DS9 and Voyager... and so on ad very nearly infinitum.
So.
I've tackled a bit of an ambitious project that I started back in the late '90s. Basically a retrospective on four hundred years of Human spaceflight, published in the 2380s. I was helped a lot by James Dixon's chronology (although I leave out all the things the primary timeline characters would be unaware of, like Star Fleet Battles and the Mirror Universe). But, as I said, first sources, and an eye for things that don't work. If you count TNG's stardates back, you hit zero at the beginning of 2323. So something happened to stardates. Coming at it from the other direction, when TOS started they were envisioned to be something like the ships' logs of the Age of Exploration, counting time into the voyage, rather than an outside referent. E.g., "WNMHGB"'s stardate 1312 would have been thirteen months and twelve days into Kirk's mission. Later, strict adherence to that model was relaxed, and we got plenty of stardates that had the second pair of digits well over thirty, but the background intention was there. If, during TOS, it was 1200 units per year, rather than TNG's 1000, the Five-Year Mission is covered in all the stardates from TOS and TAS -- with the exception of a couple issues and one outlier (B.E.M., which is cringe for multiple reasons).
I'd like to point out here that the Enterprise's stardates in TMP only work if they stopped for the two-and-a-half years the ship was in dock being overhauled. Over the rest of the TOS films, the stardates remain a mess. But I at least like to look at TOS' stardates as being relatively consistent and useful for dating. Because NBC aired the episodes in whatever order, Gene pulled that explanation out of his butt at a convention that allowed for stardates to be non-sequential and all that other crap. Unnecessary. Just say they were aired out of order. Putting things in stardate order is easy -- and worked better than the aired order, anyway -- especially the first season.
So the 2285 date for TWOK works. It's a year and change after that Romulan ale was bottled ("It takes this stuff a while to ferment."). Kirk's birthday has traditionally been regarded to be in late March. If the Kobayashi Maru Test and subsequent training cruise were to be followed by assessments and exams -- and presuming Earth's academic calendar has remained a constant for the next few centuries as for the past few, then that works for being near the end of the school year. The script says it's Kirk's 50th birthday. No, there's nothing that states that in the film, but it's driving Kirk's arc throughout, as well as Shatner's performance. Nick Meyer wrote and directed, so I'm gonna take that as being just as good as if it were stated. The Okudas included stuff from scripts with less support. Math tells us, then, that Kirk was born in March of 2235. The season 2 writers' bible tells us he's "about 34" at that point. Stardate spans and "Charlie X" taking place on Thanksgiving show that season 1 covered over two years and overlapped with a good bit of season 2. A lot of brain-sweat later, it worked out that TOS started in September of 2267 and ran through July of 2371. TAS is mostly interspersed, but three follow on. "How Sharper Than A Serpent's Tooth" and "The Pirates of Orion" carry us into 2272, and "The Counter-Clock Incident" works great as a post-FYM "milk run" ferrying a V.I.P. before heading in for dockyard time.
This flies in the face of the official timeline, yes, but that's because I actually did research and reasoning, rather than arbitrarily add 300 to the original episode airdates. My way, Communications doesn't flop back and forth between Operations and Command for half a season.
So I had enough there to work with for the time being. Back to the beginning. It's generally recognized the history of the Star Trek universe is not ours. I put the fission point no later than the mid-1800s. I have no way to prove or disprove the Greek gods were visiting aliens, for instance. But I can find no evidence of a Thaddeus Riker serving on either side in the Civil War, nor of society salons hosted by one Madam Guinan in San Francisco, nor of anyone named Edith Keeler who lived in Chicago in the 1930s. Our Roswell incident was a crashed Project: Mogul high-altitude listening device, rather than a Ferengi spaceship. We have no Cetacean Institute in Sausalito (that looks suspiciously like the Monterey Bay Aquarium we do have), and on and on and on. The steady advancement of Human spaceflight past the 1960s is a biggie that's been commented on. My conceit is that Kennedy wasn't assassinated -- by whatever mechanic. No Nixon. No NASA defunding. Continued/escalating Cold War tensions. Orbital nuclear weapons platforms...
That and the middle act of 2001: A Space Odyssey were predicated on what was in the media at the time. NASA and the US Air Force were quite public about their plans. Once the Apollo program ended at Apollo XX, they were going to continue joint development. The space shuttle we got was the Air Force version, based on cargo bay size requirements. It and its civilian counterpart were meant to be service vehicles to orbital space stations, the first to be online by 1980. It and its successors would be staging platforms to build permanent outposts on the moon by 1990, and, later, to launch manned explorations to Mars and the outer planets by 2000. They had it mapped out and were on track for it until Nixon began a long series of budget cuts to NASA, and signed nuclear-weapons treaties that were ambiguously enough worded that they also nixed the nuclear-powered spaceships being developed and the Air Force's plans were nearly wiped out. We did still get the space station service vehicle, although Nixon vetoed the stations...
The biggest technological handwave at this time is gravity manipulation/continuum distortion. Humans had it by the time DY-100 ships were plying the routes between Earth, the moon, the space stations, Mars, and the asteroid belt mining platforms in the 1990s. The same tech probably resulted in gravity augmentation on the moon and Mars so colonists' muscle mass and bone density didn't deteriorate. With minor refinements, it's still the basis of the artificial gravity on starships, as well as what we would come to call impulse drive. I mentioned elsewhere that it's one of the tech details Diane Carey pulled out of the ether that actually ended up working better than the general fandom understanding at the time, or the official explanation of the TNG+ era. A distortion coil gets hit with energy pulses. The faster the pulses, the greater the distortion, and the faster the ship moves as it glides "down" the gravity incline.
Cochrane's big breakthrough with warp was taking a bunch of those distortion coils, stacking them, and firing them rapidly enough the spacetime distortion was enough that the vessel would be going faster than light, if it were moving at all. The bright flash of Cherenkov radiation is when the image of the vessel exceeds the speed of light -- which is, of course, impossible.
So, naturally, I want to display all this. I'm doing Vostok I up to the Phoenix in 1:72, along with my shuttlecraft and aerospace models from other things I know and love, from the F-14 to the VF-1 Valkyrie to the Galaxy Rangers' Interceptor to a crap-ton of Star Wars stuff to... Then I'm doing the Phoenix in 1:500 to bridge the scale jump and continuing up to the Daedalus class in that scale. Again, repeating the Daedalus in 1:1000 and continuing in that scale up to the Excelsior. Finally, repeating the Excelsior in 1:1400 and staying in that scale for the rest.
This, of course, means being confident in the "true" sizes of these ships. I'm fairly settled in the Daedalus, after much delving and mathing. After some consternation, I'm sticking with the designer's intent with the Ambassador and Galaxy classes -- though I am including Andy's original take on the Ambassador as a later configuration as the tech evolved. Ten-Forward complicated things, but I ultimately decided to keep the saucer rim as one overheight deck and make it work. I do not like the chunky saucer and exaggerated hull plating of the four-foot filming miniature. I am, however, going to partially disagree with Andy on the big windows aft of the main shuttlebay -- I really do like that as part of the arboretum complex. That's not to say portions of the ship's botanical-research area couldn't also be a crew lounge.
Which brings me to... *sigh* ...the Constitution and Excelsior classes.
I've seen at least most of the analyses and arguments on here. @blssdwlf makes the best case for sizes of the original and refit Enterprise that I've found, and @Praetor has done the best deconstruction of the Excelsior that I've seen. I'm grateful to have all the insights on these, from the original designers and model builders all the way up. So here's where I'm at and needing help...
CONSTITUTION
I like Matt's original schematic of the Enterprise, and have seen the overlays and know they're not a match for the filming miniature as built. They are the basis for AMT's model kit -- in particular the first-issue version from 1966 that was used for the USS Constellation. From this, from the sizing discussions, from Ships of the Star Fleet and ships like the Endeavour and Constitution [II], as well as the TMP refit, I like the image of a class that was evolving and incorporating the latest technology and techniques over its service lifetime. So I am going with Matt's three-view of a 947'/289m Enterprise as where it was c.2255. I'm doing stuff I won't reveal yet to dial that back to an "as launched" version c.2245. I am using the series-production version scaled up 14% to 1,084'/330m to represent Kirk's ship, after a conjectural refit between him and Pike -- around 2265. I admire blssdwlf's work to get the shuttlebay to fit. I have thoughts on the bridge, engineering, and placements of things.
ENTERPRISE
Yes, Scotty went overboard and created a whole new benchmark. I stand by the fandom designation and the sign on the simulator in TWOK. I love Andy's design and Kimble's rendering (I have the first, TMP issue of that lovely, lovely cutaway poster). But I also recognize the problem of fitting the sets into that shell, and agree with Peter's assessment of a 355m movie ship. Oh, and on the matter of docking ports. When Spock comes aboard in TMP, the bridge docking port is labeled #3. In the spirit of "What would the Thermians do?", I suggest #1 is port ventral saucer, #2 is starboard ventral saucer, #3 is bridge, #4 is secondary hull forward port (interconnecting neck is usually considered part of that structure), #5 is secondary hull aft port, #6 is secondary hull forward starboard, and #7 is secondary hull aft starboard. Kirk's party in TWOK just docked at the cargo bay airlock and made their way up to the torpedo bay. As for the travel pod being available at "cargo 6", there are not six docking ports in the cargo bay area -- I posit that's referring to a frame number, an internal locator designation a la what's in use on the Enterprise-D. I'll get into the torpedo bay later.
EXCELSIOR
Nilo drew a size comparison of this ship next to the Enterprise, where the former was 1,500' to the latter's 1,000'. But even then, that didn't work. All one has to do is overlay the ships at those sizes and not only is the Excelsior's saucer rim not high enough, the bridge dome is way too small to hold the set shown in TSFS. I'm largely ignoring subsequent alterations to the miniature for the sake of determining scale. Those two landmarks are the primary referents for figuring size. I saw Praetor do a lot of lovely scaling work. I like an Excelsior in the 520m to 620m range, but want to fine it down more. Sadly, his thread is locked and he hasn't been around in a while. blssdwlf's been MIA, too. I hope they're doing okay, and really want to dig into all of this with them.
Now, after that, what I'm really needing help with... I've seen a lot of names tossed around on the forum. To save me six months of searching and comparing and all of that, would folks be willing/able to tell me who does the most accurate plans of the TOS Enterprise filming model as actually built, the TMP Enterprise filming model as actually built, and Excelsior as actually built? For that matter, has anyone done revised plans of the Reliant that reflect the revelation that the saucer is smaller than the refit Enterprise's, taking the engines and bridge into account?
There are so many oversights and gaffes in what ends up onscreen, I want to start with the models themselves and go from there. One of the points that's been concerning me lately is: How is it that Matt Jefferies, in his original cutaway of the Enterprise, and whoever did the Excelsior and Enterprise-B MSDs managed to all miss the primary hull undercut? All of them have the lower deck of the saucer rim going straight back, which is an impossibility. I know the arguments for and against treating such cutaways as actual midline cross-section views, but it goes deeper than that... On all three of these ships, as built, the lower deck of the saucer rim can only be reached from the deck above, not straight out from the central portion of the deck. That, to me, has indicated that whatever is out there is more of an extension of the upper deck than a continuation of what's in the central part of that deck or a whole separate thing. Crew quarters? Sensors? Life-support machinery? Two decks? A single overheight deck? Both in various parts? How many of the lighted and dark things we take to be windows are actually windows? And what is it about this design feature that it was used on multiple ship classes over half a century? It had to be truly advantageous for something so apparently impractical...
More later once I can actually attach pictures. Been on here fourteen years, but only really started posting recently. TrekBBS back in the early 2000s was... *ahem* ...not a place I felt like dealing with. I have some pretty nonstandard views on a few things, and didn't want to spend my whole time on here arguing. It's grown into a much better community over the years, though. I love that some of the familiar names from the old days on rec.arts.startrek.tech and the Flare sci-fi forum are still around on here. Hi, Mark. Hi, Timo. Hi, Mim. Hi, Boris.
• Enterprise-the-series takes place, for me, in an alternate timeline. That "NX class" doesn't exist for me, but I do make use of various of its components distributed around my timeline where they make the most sense.
• I reject everything after Picard goes into the Nexus as being his Nexus fantasy. No Sovereign or Luna classes. Riker keeps the Enterprise-D to turn into the "All Good Things..." dreadnought.
• I go by first sources wherever possible. Since any production like Star Trek devolves into a years or decades long game of Telephone/Whispers, there are going to be instances of lack of communication, miscommunications, butting egos, misinterpretations, etc. I use as much as I can, but leave out what doesn't fit, massage things to fit, and generally try to alter things as minimally as possible to preserve the extant canon -- borked as it too often is.
• If it exists, I've probably seen it or own it -- but there's no guarantee everything in any given work has clicked. I've known about a lot of issues, a lot of approaches, a lot of contradictions. There's a good chance I won't cite sources, as no one source has everything. For instance, I've pieced together Matt Jefferies' observations from five different books, multiple magazine articles, the occasional trading card or comic book tech page, and a few oddments people have posted online over the last twenty-five years. There's a good chance I won't remember exactly where I originally read something -- just that I did. I have multiple editions of The Making of Star Trek, the Concordance, and the Compendium. I have the 2nd season TOS writers' bible. I have the first printings of FJ's Booklet of Plans and Technical Manual. I have "The Case of Jonathan Doe Starship". I have Star Trek Maps and the Spaceflight Chronology. I have most of FASA's reference books (and several of Last Unicorn's). I have a pile of fandom and semiofficial stuff from the likes of Todd Guenther and David Kimble and David Schmidt and Shane Johnson. I have commentary and sketches from the likes of Matt Jefferies and Andy Probert and Rick Sternbach and Mike Okuda. I have The Art of Star Trek and Phase II: The Lost Series, original and TNG "Sketchbooks", Continuing Mission, Making of DS9 and Voyager... and so on ad very nearly infinitum.
So.
I've tackled a bit of an ambitious project that I started back in the late '90s. Basically a retrospective on four hundred years of Human spaceflight, published in the 2380s. I was helped a lot by James Dixon's chronology (although I leave out all the things the primary timeline characters would be unaware of, like Star Fleet Battles and the Mirror Universe). But, as I said, first sources, and an eye for things that don't work. If you count TNG's stardates back, you hit zero at the beginning of 2323. So something happened to stardates. Coming at it from the other direction, when TOS started they were envisioned to be something like the ships' logs of the Age of Exploration, counting time into the voyage, rather than an outside referent. E.g., "WNMHGB"'s stardate 1312 would have been thirteen months and twelve days into Kirk's mission. Later, strict adherence to that model was relaxed, and we got plenty of stardates that had the second pair of digits well over thirty, but the background intention was there. If, during TOS, it was 1200 units per year, rather than TNG's 1000, the Five-Year Mission is covered in all the stardates from TOS and TAS -- with the exception of a couple issues and one outlier (B.E.M., which is cringe for multiple reasons).
I'd like to point out here that the Enterprise's stardates in TMP only work if they stopped for the two-and-a-half years the ship was in dock being overhauled. Over the rest of the TOS films, the stardates remain a mess. But I at least like to look at TOS' stardates as being relatively consistent and useful for dating. Because NBC aired the episodes in whatever order, Gene pulled that explanation out of his butt at a convention that allowed for stardates to be non-sequential and all that other crap. Unnecessary. Just say they were aired out of order. Putting things in stardate order is easy -- and worked better than the aired order, anyway -- especially the first season.
So the 2285 date for TWOK works. It's a year and change after that Romulan ale was bottled ("It takes this stuff a while to ferment."). Kirk's birthday has traditionally been regarded to be in late March. If the Kobayashi Maru Test and subsequent training cruise were to be followed by assessments and exams -- and presuming Earth's academic calendar has remained a constant for the next few centuries as for the past few, then that works for being near the end of the school year. The script says it's Kirk's 50th birthday. No, there's nothing that states that in the film, but it's driving Kirk's arc throughout, as well as Shatner's performance. Nick Meyer wrote and directed, so I'm gonna take that as being just as good as if it were stated. The Okudas included stuff from scripts with less support. Math tells us, then, that Kirk was born in March of 2235. The season 2 writers' bible tells us he's "about 34" at that point. Stardate spans and "Charlie X" taking place on Thanksgiving show that season 1 covered over two years and overlapped with a good bit of season 2. A lot of brain-sweat later, it worked out that TOS started in September of 2267 and ran through July of 2371. TAS is mostly interspersed, but three follow on. "How Sharper Than A Serpent's Tooth" and "The Pirates of Orion" carry us into 2272, and "The Counter-Clock Incident" works great as a post-FYM "milk run" ferrying a V.I.P. before heading in for dockyard time.
This flies in the face of the official timeline, yes, but that's because I actually did research and reasoning, rather than arbitrarily add 300 to the original episode airdates. My way, Communications doesn't flop back and forth between Operations and Command for half a season.
So I had enough there to work with for the time being. Back to the beginning. It's generally recognized the history of the Star Trek universe is not ours. I put the fission point no later than the mid-1800s. I have no way to prove or disprove the Greek gods were visiting aliens, for instance. But I can find no evidence of a Thaddeus Riker serving on either side in the Civil War, nor of society salons hosted by one Madam Guinan in San Francisco, nor of anyone named Edith Keeler who lived in Chicago in the 1930s. Our Roswell incident was a crashed Project: Mogul high-altitude listening device, rather than a Ferengi spaceship. We have no Cetacean Institute in Sausalito (that looks suspiciously like the Monterey Bay Aquarium we do have), and on and on and on. The steady advancement of Human spaceflight past the 1960s is a biggie that's been commented on. My conceit is that Kennedy wasn't assassinated -- by whatever mechanic. No Nixon. No NASA defunding. Continued/escalating Cold War tensions. Orbital nuclear weapons platforms...
That and the middle act of 2001: A Space Odyssey were predicated on what was in the media at the time. NASA and the US Air Force were quite public about their plans. Once the Apollo program ended at Apollo XX, they were going to continue joint development. The space shuttle we got was the Air Force version, based on cargo bay size requirements. It and its civilian counterpart were meant to be service vehicles to orbital space stations, the first to be online by 1980. It and its successors would be staging platforms to build permanent outposts on the moon by 1990, and, later, to launch manned explorations to Mars and the outer planets by 2000. They had it mapped out and were on track for it until Nixon began a long series of budget cuts to NASA, and signed nuclear-weapons treaties that were ambiguously enough worded that they also nixed the nuclear-powered spaceships being developed and the Air Force's plans were nearly wiped out. We did still get the space station service vehicle, although Nixon vetoed the stations...
The biggest technological handwave at this time is gravity manipulation/continuum distortion. Humans had it by the time DY-100 ships were plying the routes between Earth, the moon, the space stations, Mars, and the asteroid belt mining platforms in the 1990s. The same tech probably resulted in gravity augmentation on the moon and Mars so colonists' muscle mass and bone density didn't deteriorate. With minor refinements, it's still the basis of the artificial gravity on starships, as well as what we would come to call impulse drive. I mentioned elsewhere that it's one of the tech details Diane Carey pulled out of the ether that actually ended up working better than the general fandom understanding at the time, or the official explanation of the TNG+ era. A distortion coil gets hit with energy pulses. The faster the pulses, the greater the distortion, and the faster the ship moves as it glides "down" the gravity incline.
Cochrane's big breakthrough with warp was taking a bunch of those distortion coils, stacking them, and firing them rapidly enough the spacetime distortion was enough that the vessel would be going faster than light, if it were moving at all. The bright flash of Cherenkov radiation is when the image of the vessel exceeds the speed of light -- which is, of course, impossible.
So, naturally, I want to display all this. I'm doing Vostok I up to the Phoenix in 1:72, along with my shuttlecraft and aerospace models from other things I know and love, from the F-14 to the VF-1 Valkyrie to the Galaxy Rangers' Interceptor to a crap-ton of Star Wars stuff to... Then I'm doing the Phoenix in 1:500 to bridge the scale jump and continuing up to the Daedalus class in that scale. Again, repeating the Daedalus in 1:1000 and continuing in that scale up to the Excelsior. Finally, repeating the Excelsior in 1:1400 and staying in that scale for the rest.
This, of course, means being confident in the "true" sizes of these ships. I'm fairly settled in the Daedalus, after much delving and mathing. After some consternation, I'm sticking with the designer's intent with the Ambassador and Galaxy classes -- though I am including Andy's original take on the Ambassador as a later configuration as the tech evolved. Ten-Forward complicated things, but I ultimately decided to keep the saucer rim as one overheight deck and make it work. I do not like the chunky saucer and exaggerated hull plating of the four-foot filming miniature. I am, however, going to partially disagree with Andy on the big windows aft of the main shuttlebay -- I really do like that as part of the arboretum complex. That's not to say portions of the ship's botanical-research area couldn't also be a crew lounge.
Which brings me to... *sigh* ...the Constitution and Excelsior classes.
I've seen at least most of the analyses and arguments on here. @blssdwlf makes the best case for sizes of the original and refit Enterprise that I've found, and @Praetor has done the best deconstruction of the Excelsior that I've seen. I'm grateful to have all the insights on these, from the original designers and model builders all the way up. So here's where I'm at and needing help...
CONSTITUTION
I like Matt's original schematic of the Enterprise, and have seen the overlays and know they're not a match for the filming miniature as built. They are the basis for AMT's model kit -- in particular the first-issue version from 1966 that was used for the USS Constellation. From this, from the sizing discussions, from Ships of the Star Fleet and ships like the Endeavour and Constitution [II], as well as the TMP refit, I like the image of a class that was evolving and incorporating the latest technology and techniques over its service lifetime. So I am going with Matt's three-view of a 947'/289m Enterprise as where it was c.2255. I'm doing stuff I won't reveal yet to dial that back to an "as launched" version c.2245. I am using the series-production version scaled up 14% to 1,084'/330m to represent Kirk's ship, after a conjectural refit between him and Pike -- around 2265. I admire blssdwlf's work to get the shuttlebay to fit. I have thoughts on the bridge, engineering, and placements of things.
ENTERPRISE
Yes, Scotty went overboard and created a whole new benchmark. I stand by the fandom designation and the sign on the simulator in TWOK. I love Andy's design and Kimble's rendering (I have the first, TMP issue of that lovely, lovely cutaway poster). But I also recognize the problem of fitting the sets into that shell, and agree with Peter's assessment of a 355m movie ship. Oh, and on the matter of docking ports. When Spock comes aboard in TMP, the bridge docking port is labeled #3. In the spirit of "What would the Thermians do?", I suggest #1 is port ventral saucer, #2 is starboard ventral saucer, #3 is bridge, #4 is secondary hull forward port (interconnecting neck is usually considered part of that structure), #5 is secondary hull aft port, #6 is secondary hull forward starboard, and #7 is secondary hull aft starboard. Kirk's party in TWOK just docked at the cargo bay airlock and made their way up to the torpedo bay. As for the travel pod being available at "cargo 6", there are not six docking ports in the cargo bay area -- I posit that's referring to a frame number, an internal locator designation a la what's in use on the Enterprise-D. I'll get into the torpedo bay later.
EXCELSIOR
Nilo drew a size comparison of this ship next to the Enterprise, where the former was 1,500' to the latter's 1,000'. But even then, that didn't work. All one has to do is overlay the ships at those sizes and not only is the Excelsior's saucer rim not high enough, the bridge dome is way too small to hold the set shown in TSFS. I'm largely ignoring subsequent alterations to the miniature for the sake of determining scale. Those two landmarks are the primary referents for figuring size. I saw Praetor do a lot of lovely scaling work. I like an Excelsior in the 520m to 620m range, but want to fine it down more. Sadly, his thread is locked and he hasn't been around in a while. blssdwlf's been MIA, too. I hope they're doing okay, and really want to dig into all of this with them.
Now, after that, what I'm really needing help with... I've seen a lot of names tossed around on the forum. To save me six months of searching and comparing and all of that, would folks be willing/able to tell me who does the most accurate plans of the TOS Enterprise filming model as actually built, the TMP Enterprise filming model as actually built, and Excelsior as actually built? For that matter, has anyone done revised plans of the Reliant that reflect the revelation that the saucer is smaller than the refit Enterprise's, taking the engines and bridge into account?
There are so many oversights and gaffes in what ends up onscreen, I want to start with the models themselves and go from there. One of the points that's been concerning me lately is: How is it that Matt Jefferies, in his original cutaway of the Enterprise, and whoever did the Excelsior and Enterprise-B MSDs managed to all miss the primary hull undercut? All of them have the lower deck of the saucer rim going straight back, which is an impossibility. I know the arguments for and against treating such cutaways as actual midline cross-section views, but it goes deeper than that... On all three of these ships, as built, the lower deck of the saucer rim can only be reached from the deck above, not straight out from the central portion of the deck. That, to me, has indicated that whatever is out there is more of an extension of the upper deck than a continuation of what's in the central part of that deck or a whole separate thing. Crew quarters? Sensors? Life-support machinery? Two decks? A single overheight deck? Both in various parts? How many of the lighted and dark things we take to be windows are actually windows? And what is it about this design feature that it was used on multiple ship classes over half a century? It had to be truly advantageous for something so apparently impractical...
More later once I can actually attach pictures. Been on here fourteen years, but only really started posting recently. TrekBBS back in the early 2000s was... *ahem* ...not a place I felt like dealing with. I have some pretty nonstandard views on a few things, and didn't want to spend my whole time on here arguing.
It's grown into a much better community over the years, though. I love that some of the familiar names from the old days on rec.arts.startrek.tech and the Flare sci-fi forum are still around on here. Hi, Mark. Hi, Timo. Hi, Mim. Hi, Boris.
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