Saucer-Rim Windows

[Maurice]

DS9Sega,

And the TMP engine room corridor doesn't fit where it's supposed to go

That was actually acknowledged if not directly -- Andrew Probert actually had a deck plan drawn up of the Refit-Enterprise, and he actually drew the corridor out into nowhere...

What deck plan? Where?

the TOS shuttlecraft interior doesn't fit into it's exterior mockup

Really? How so?

The interior set is taller than the exterior mockup, for one thing. There are windows on the outside of the doors, but not the inside. The rear compartment is also much too large to fit inside.

I know I should know this, but what's Jupiter 2?

Googling it would've taken less keystrokes than asking the question.

What would be won by that? The Trek universe as portrayed does not require all of the sets to be aphysical or impossible. It only features a limited number of such errors, and then a wide fuzzy area of things that can be interpreted as non-errors with no in-universe penalty.

There's clearly the difference between our perspectives...I don't care if every little thing fits... especially since things not fitting is a norm throughout TV shows/movies. While I love good production design, the fact that a set doesn't quite fit inside a house or hull doesn't bother me enough to spend time trying to figure out how to justify it or make it work, especially when that violates the intent of the filmmakers for no benefit expect to say that tab A fits in slot B by moving Tab A to location C.

 

[CuttingEdge100]

Tigger

"Lost in Space"

Okay that makes sense. I thought Lost in Space sucked and know very little about it. Regardless, Lost in Space is not Star Trek.


DS9Sega,

What deck plan? Where?

Well I wouldn't say it was a precision drawing as a sketch. Regardless it had lines depicting decks, and it showed the position of the front engineering corridor and had written to the effect of "corridor out into nowhere"

The interior set is taller than the exterior mockup, for one thing. There are windows on the outside of the doors, but not the inside. The rear compartment is also much too large to fit inside.

Okay, I understand. The shuttlecraft design could physically fit within the contours of the shuttle-bay though right?

Googling it would've taken less keystrokes than asking the question.

Oh... In either case comparing Lost in Space to Star Trek is kind of like comparing apples to oranges. I don't know if they made any effort in Lost in Space to have the insides of the ship conform to the outside. In Star Trek, they generally made an effort.


BTW: What were you talking about in regards to the ship having 1.5 decks in the saucer section?

 

[Maurice]

Tigger

"Lost in Space"

Okay that makes sense. I thought Lost in Space sucked and know very little about it. Regardless, Lost in Space is not Star Trek.

Excuse me for this but DUH. On the other hand, Lost in Space is as much Star Trek as most other TV shows are...the sets are built to look good on camera and facilitate the action required by the script, and often do not they actually fit into the ship/house/etc. It's about selling an illusion, not precise draughtsmanship. It's less noticeable on Star Trek because its starships are honking huge.

DS9Sega,

What deck plan? Where?

Well I wouldn't say it was a precision drawing as a sketch. Regardless it had lines depicting decks, and it showed the position of the front engineering corridor and had written to the effect of "corridor out into nowhere"

My guess is that you're misattributing notes I added to one of Andy's sketches when I posed it on Flare Sci-Fi forums some years ago, and its floated around since then:

​

The interior set is taller than the exterior mockup, for one thing. There are windows on the outside of the doors, but not the inside. The rear compartment is also much too large to fit inside.

Okay, I understand. The shuttlecraft design could physically fit within the contours of the shuttle-bay though right?

But it's debatable if the hangar deck (not shuttlebay) as depicted in TOS would have fit in the ship, so we're right back tot he same problem.

Googling it would've taken less keystrokes than asking the question.

Oh... In either case comparing Lost in Space to Star Trek is kind of like comparing apples to oranges. I don't know if they made any effort in Lost in Space to have the insides of the ship conform to the outside. In Star Trek, they generally made an effort.

Oh, don't give me that Apples and Oranges malarkey. The production people who made Lost in Space were professionals as much as the Trek people. Yes, the tone of the show was sillier, but that doesn't mean the set designers were idiots. On Star Trek, Matt Jefferies made an effort, sure, but the realities of TV production catch up with you and you have to cheat something sooner or later...unsually sooner.

BTW: What were you talking about in regards to the ship having 1.5 decks in the saucer section?

You're misattributing someone else's comment to me. I haven't written anything of the kind in this thread.

 

[CuttingEdge100]

Timo,

IMHO, the ideal choice would be to have the Enterprise of TMP and TOS be a bit bigger than conventionally thought, so the saucer concavity would not present the problem of 1.5 decks inside. That would solve all the bridge problems, too. But given the currently accepted confines, the easy solution IMHO is to move the sets around until they do fit - something that can relatively easily be done with both the offenders, the Rec Deck and Main Engineering.

What do you mean when you say 1.5 decks inside?

 

[Maurice]

Timo,

....What do you mean when you say 1.5 decks inside?

I can probably answer this for you. Due to its concave underside, the widest part of the saucer isn't a full two decks tall once you get in a short ways from the edge, so effectively you can't fit a full two decks into a large portion of what is probably deck 6 (based on diagrams seen in TWOK). You can see how Andy Probert posited fitting the Rec Deck into this space with a nod to this 1.5 deck problem, at the second to the last image HERE <clicky>.

 

[Timo]

You, that's the bill. You can see it nicely in the bits of Shane Johnson work that TGT provided on the previous page. The Rec Deck side view shows the concavity protruding roughly half a deck up from the floor, so that e.g. the doorway we see close to the rim would not fit in a location closer to the center.

Regarding the other piece of art, the Probert piece that Eric colored and labeled in the previous post, it helps demonstrate a neat trick: take the warp core and move it back by the length of the "impossible" forward corridor, and it lands in a perfectly acceptable place. The lower part of the core now sits next to the forward wall of the cargo bay (which we never saw in the movie), the upper part probably truncates in a big fuel tank like in TNG-era designs, while the aft parts now are as short as built, rather than as long as made to look like through the use of forced perspective...

In this model, the lower end goes through the supposed botanical garden, explaining the strange blue light emanating from those windows. It then terminates next to that big square hatch at the bottom (a hatch hiding the motion control rig arm mount, really, but since its seams are left visible, it could be the analogy of the circular yellow hatch that the TOS ship had at its bottom in a comparable location), which now becomes the ejection hatch for antimatter pods (and it was an ejection hatch in TOS-R, too, ejecting the satellites used in "Operation: Annihilate!").

Just musing. But were the ship to be configured like that, it would be "physical" at no penalty.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Maurice]

...Regarding the other piece of art, the Probert piece that Eric colored and labeled in the previous post...

Are you referring to the image I posted earlier with the callouts? If so, *I* labeled it, my name's not Eric (or Eric the Half Bee...).

 

[CuttingEdge100]

How thick is the saucer rim? Also how tall is the area inside the rim that goes from the upper deck's ceiling to the lower deck's floor?

CuttingEdge100

 

[Maurice]

How thick is the saucer rim? Also how tall is the area inside the rim that goes from the upper deck's ceiling to the lower deck's floor?

Dod you look at that drawing I pointed you to? The height is indicated on the right.

 

[Timo]

Are you referring to the image I posted earlier with the callouts? If so, *I* labeled it, my name's not Eric (or Eric the Half Bee...).

Good God, I'm sorry, I must have been half asleep typing those last messages of yesterday... Yeah, I meant the one labeled by you.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[CuttingEdge100]

DS9Sega,

Well the saucer doesn't seem to physically have room for two decks at the rim then. Unless they were very short decks

Unless Probert made errors with the size of the rest of the deck's size, that seems to be the answer...

 

[Maurice]

DS9Sega,

Well the saucer doesn't seem to physically have room for two decks at the rim then. Unless they were very short decks

Unless Probert made errors with the size of the rest of the deck's size, that seems to be the answer...

First of all, he designed the ship, so I rather doubt he messed up the proportions.

Second of all, 20 feet in height is plenty of room for two decks. How high are your ceilings? 8 feet, probably. If the distance between the ceiling of the Rec Deck and its floor were 20 feet, two 8 foot high spaces would leave room for a 4 foot thick floor between them. Even if the nine and a half feet, that's still room for two decks and a foot thick deck between them.

 

[trevanian]

DS9Sega,

Well the saucer doesn't seem to physically have room for two decks at the rim then. Unless they were very short decks

Unless Probert made errors with the size of the rest of the deck's size, that seems to be the answer...

First of all, he designed the ship, so I rather doubt he messed up the proportions.

Second of all, 20 feet in height is plenty of room for two decks. How high are your ceilings? 8 feet, probably. If the distance between the ceiling of the Rec Deck and its floor were 20 feet, two 8 foot high spaces would leave room for a 4 foot thick floor between them. Even if the nine and a half feet, that's still room for two decks and a foot thick deck between them.

He didn't WANT the rec room on the saucer, he wanted it down in the secondary hull, where they put the OTHER big windows. Harold Michaelson wanted it aiming out the back of the dish, and the compromise was to shunt it over to one side so the rec deck wouldn't also be the impulse power (make a wreck of the rec.) So if it doesn't exactly fit (and the two level is a LOT taller than a regular two level given how high up they painted the ceiling to be), this is one we should be able to live with.

Now the DE officer's lounge hovering in space ABOVE the rec deck, THAT is the thing that is utterly unacceptable ...

 

[Maurice]

Now the DE officer's lounge hovering in space ABOVE the rec deck, THAT is the thing that is utterly unacceptable ...

According to Andy, the room is actually so low it would hang four feet out of the bottom of the saucer.

 

[trevanian]

Now the DE officer's lounge hovering in space ABOVE the rec deck, THAT is the thing that is utterly unacceptable ...

According to Andy, the room is actually so low it would hang four feet out of the bottom of the saucer.

Oh that's LOVE-ly. Puts paid to all those DE claims of calculating out an exact view rearward from a particular spot on the dishtop, eh?

Maybe somebody can do an animatic, then put an upside down sombrero over the people's feet sticking out into space.

 

[David cgc]

"Calculating" is probably overstating it. It'd be the work of seconds to put the camera in the appropriate spot just by sight.

 

[FalTorPan]

^ Agreed. The DE folks already had a 3D CG model of the Enterprise. All they'd have to do is stick a virtual camera behind the model's windows, point it in the right direction, and see what the camera sees.

 

[Timo]

So what reason do we have to suspect that they didn't do that?

I mean, the logical assumption would be that they did exactly that, and everybody calculating that the camera is in the wrong place is either in error, or blindly quoting somebody in error. Putting the camera in the right place is easy, calculating where it was is difficult.

The other argument is that the camera had to go where the nacelle would look the best, regardless of other factors. But the first argument still sounds stronger on the surface, as it doesn't seem as if the looks of the nacelle would change radically if the camera moved up or down those few meters.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[CuttingEdge100]

I'm going to see if I can find a good diagram of the Enterprise Refit. If I can, I think I'll scale it so that a certain number of pixels equals a certain number of meters, and then see if I can come up with the exact measurements for the rim thickness myself.

It's my opinion though that Mr. Probert made the decks a lot larger from the neck down than in the saucer section. It is also my opinion that the docking hatches seem to have been designed a little too big for the design.


CuttingEdge100

 

[trevanian]

So what reason do we have to suspect that they didn't do that?

I mean, the logical assumption would be that they did exactly that, and everybody calculating that the camera is in the wrong place is either in error, or blindly quoting somebody in error. Putting the camera in the right place is easy, calculating where it was is difficult.

The other argument is that the camera had to go where the nacelle would look the best, regardless of other factors. But the first argument still sounds stronger on the surface, as it doesn't seem as if the looks of the nacelle would change radically if the camera moved up or down those few meters.

Timo Saloniemi

The nacelle doesn't look all that great in the DE. Of course, the nacelles don't look terrific in the docking shot from the other lounge in the original either.