The Enterprise-B Deck Problem: can we solve deck fifteen?
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- Опубліковано 8 лют 2025
- 'Star Trek: Generations' introduced us to the Excelsior II-class Enterprise-B. But it also gave us a puzzle: the location of deck fifteen. In this video, we look at the problem and attempt to solve it in-universe.
Music: 'Zodiac Structures', by NoMBe (UA-cam Music Library).
#StarTrek #StarshipEnterprise #culture
Solution 4: for whatever reason, the secondary hull decks are counted separately from the saucer section decks. If we go with that, and assume roughly 17 decks each. In that case, it would be very easy for that to be deck 15.
This is actually how real ships work. The main deck is in the middle of the ship at the hull top then the numbers go up into the superstructure and and up again as you decend down into the Hull. The superstructure decks have a 0 designation before the number. The 02 would be the second level up into the super structure, where as Deck 2 would be the second Deck into the hull for example. This absolutely could solve the issue at hand, If one were to count down from the bridge (01) to an arbitrary "main deck" somewhere and again count the Deck below that starting at 1 again with no 0 prefix.
We did it! Case solved!
Yes but how do we figure for Star Trek V which according to what must be the main turbo lift shaft that a re-fit Constitution has at least 78 decks?
I'm just being pedantic. And someone did a video clip edit fixing the number of decks.
@@Decrepit_biker Oh cool! There we go, I was just looking for an excuse when I picked up on them saying the evidence points to the deck actually being deck 29 out of 34. Which is right around double 15.
@ That is the most annoying part of Star Trek V.
…
I know what I said.
I think maybe the Enterprise-A stole the Enterprise-B’s extra decks. That’s how they had “Deck 78” in Star Trek V, Scotty was just going round stealing decks from the rest of the fleet.
That's the second part of being a miracle worker! Inflate your estimates AND always have spare kit you nicked stashed about.
I didn’t know Scotty was a skater; street or ramp?
Scotty was simply a time lord..
@@NashmanNash that or if the ship can separate then deck 15 being so low makes sense because it's deck 15 on the star drive section of the ship not the saucers deck 15🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
@@jblyon2 Re-used doors from space dock that are reversed to show the old number on the inside of the turbo shaft. Nobody is ever going to see it... Right?
Completely viable other option if you’ve ever been on a real ship like a cruise ship. There are often “wacky decks” I’ll call them. An entire deck number used for one room, or a deck number that doesn’t align with the others because of a strange quirk of the elevators or stairs. Several times I’ve had to navigate an up and down maze to find a deck that “should have” been right there but wasn’t because a ship design obstruction.
In order to get from deck 8 starboard to deck 8 port on one ship, I had to go up two decks, through a basketball court, down 3 decks, forward about 200 feet, then up one deck and back. The destination was literally on the other side of the wall, but you couldn’t get there from here without navigating a maze. In that case it was because they had locked down an area for children by removing several doors, but I’ve seen it for other reasons too.
Also, the designer could have just called it deck 15 while it actually was several decks high, for honorary reasons like ship history or tradition.
If the dorsal neck is filled with equipment bays and has no physical deck structure, then there is no reason for it to have any deck-level designations. Deck-level designations in the secondary hull may pick up directly from the lowest level of the primary hull.
This is what I always assumed.
I like this solution the most - the dorsal neck also has no windows or anything save for it's strange grill-like surface that wraps all around, plus a few ports filled with greebling which can be assumed to be sensor or weapons equipment. If there were decks inside, I would call them "sub-decks" or something.
It’s the easiest explanation for sure but what about the msd? It does show deck lines so still contradictory. This could all be fixed with a slight dubbing over the words spoken and then everyone would be happy. Lol
@@superhayes256 I'm guessing the updated one didn't come in until Tuesday
@@aloperubyaspendale I love the grill-like surface and want to know what it could be for. There is also some of that texture on the Ambassador class as well but it looks more tacked on there (in the hopes of signalling a design lineage between Excelsior and Galaxy classes).
I love how Trekkies will spend hours debating these fine details, while Tuvok is clearly on the bridge forgetting to be Vulcan and nobody bats an eyelash.
Thats Tuvok's human transporter clone, His name is 2vok
He’s just come back from an under cover mission from his stint on Sulu’s Excelsior, and hasn’t had time to have his ears surgically reattached.
The decks on the saucer level , particularly the saucer level are mostly very low decks but when you get to the ventral side of the saucer section and especially the engineering section you have so much multi deck spanning compartments that the decks become much further spaced apart with subdecks …. So deck 15 might have sub decks a(lpha) b(eta) d(delta
So the main FLOOR is deck 15 but if 15 deck runs the height of four residential decks then they are laid out from top to bottom Deck14 , deck 15a, deck 15b , deck 15(d) and then deck 15
If it spanned 5 decks you would have had a deck 15 g(amma) before getting to Deck 15 prime
@@DAFLIDMANStill better then tuvix.
Obviously- the camera has picked up some unresolved time-travel shenanigans from the Voyager era.
Maybe deflector control actually spans several decks, and the entrance is on deck 15, so the actual damage to "deck 15, deflector control" may be minor, but the shot with Scotty, Chekov and Harriman is showing the more serious damage in the lower sections?
That's a good option. The deflector does span a lot of decks.
That makes sense, he had to go down a few ladders...so "deck 15, detector control" is the actual access hatch and he could be virtual on deck 18. So if there is a hull breach, the whole area would be decompressing...like the galaxy class having a hull breach on the main shuttle bay , it would affect the whole shuttle bay.
The neck of the excelsior could be two high decks with shuttle bay and storage, even though it would be practically six decks
I like your idea that the "neck"/dorsal is one big open space w no decks per se, which also makes sense as the warp core is in there, at least according to the onscreen MSD.
I concur. We see a worker tug exiting the neck through a large hatch at the commissioning. One can assume that the neck is a large cargo bay where everything would be ready for Tuesday.
I think the neck either doesn't count as a deck, or the whole thing only counts as one deck, which would eliminate a lot of the decks we think would be in that space.
Actually looking at the MSD there are a bunch of decks in there with main engineering being on about deck 18 with the warp core actually extending from deck 13 to around deck 28 with 30 decks listed, but it also looks like the warp core is directly above the main navigational deflector, so I guess this class of Starship didn't have an ejectable warp core? Seems like an odd design choice, the warp core is in the back of the neck structure, so it wasn't compromised by the damage caused by the Nexus which hit about 3 decks above and in front of main engineering.
The dorsal being a single empty space is also how I see the original series Enterprise, to explain away those pesky appearances of Deck 12 and Deck 14 (which are shown as quite expansive!)
True the TOS-R dorsal has lights which seem to be windows, but the dorsal itself is so narrow as to make it pointless as living space. I interpret those "windows" to be a sensor pallet instead. YMMV 😁😉
Maybe the other decks would be installed on Tuesday
Was just about to make this comment. How did no one else think of this? 😅
😂😂😂
Or we follow navy rules, where the deckname is navigational, not structural: If you have an access junction that's vertical leading to a room that's structurally deck 21 but the door is only on 15, that compartment is considered to be deck 15 access. This means in a damage report, you report 15 because it is accessed only via an entryway on 15. Its probable that its meant to have another compartment added to the voidspace in the structure after shakedown that would add secondary access redefining the compartment's location and turning the 15-entryway into a redundancy which is not unusual if a submarine is being reserviced, or if a sub-island is added to a carrier after initial seaworthiness is validated in drydock.
Simple deck 15 can be horizontal as well as vertical...the lifts can move horizontally as well. solves the deck 78 problem in STF
Technically and canonically, the Excelsior II class was a newer, but different class ship which served in the late 24th/early 25th centuries. We see them in Star Trek: Picard. One such example is the USS Excelsior NCC 42037, a dinstincly different ship than the original USS Excelsior NCC 2000. The USS Enterprise-B is not an Excelsior II class ship. It is an original Excelsior class, albeit refit/modified.
Alternatively saucer and star drive have separate numbering. If we count from the base of saucer flat (i.e start of the neck) downwards - you can get a deck 15 around the deflector (dased on MSD)
We need to start a gofundme to get this man a better microphone.
How do you stop the weird inflections
His microphone is fine.
This is a great video on one of a number of questions concerning the Excelsiors and E-B.
It’s not so much the one that bugs me the most, that’s the bridge fitting the module on top or is it below that. The LCARS shows it being the bridge, it looks like a bridge and meeting lounge in back (or ready room), yet it doesn’t seem to scale as the more official type scales are concerned between the E-A, E-B and E-D.
The E-E is just as annoying, given the changes in each film of adding more doors and corridors plus the angles of the ready room… but hey, it’s all fodder for content here to look forward to. 😉🎉
I would love to see cover later ship problems like the delta flyer fitting in the voyager shuttlebay, or the size and decks of the defiant
I've always thought the neck has no habitable space on it, just turbolift shafts and whatever techno shenanigans make it look the way it does. Therefore I say it's not a deck. May help.
it has windows in ED.
@@esecallum I'm talking strictly about the B.
According to the MSD it has a number of decks, it also has the warp core to the rear of the neck which extends from around deck 12 to about deck 25 with main engineering and the intermix chamber being located at about deck 18, not sure why the deflector controls are so many decks higher than the navigational deflector, I guess it due to the fact that the primary navigational deflector is located in such an unusual location at around decks 28 to 30 directly under the warp core, so it kind of makes sense for deck 15 with deflector controls to be located in a different area of the ship instead of right near the navigational deflector.
@@onidaaitsubasa4177 yeah and the d has a Porsche and a giant duck. The E's had a different ship I'm uncomfortable with MSDs and their canonic accuracy!
The dorsal has two cargo doors forward. If you wanted to say there's tall cargo bays to resolve this problem that's a way to do it absolutely
Dude... thank you for this. I'm not kidding when I say that the whole 'Kirk Deflector Sequence' had always bothered me for the very reasons you state, and your calling it out is much appreciated ;)
They could label their decks differently. Some buildings don't have a 13th floor for example.
This does assume (somewhat reasonably I'll add) that the physical order of the decks match the presented order. This is not always the case. for real world examples, split levels, high rises where physical floor 13 is presented as 14. etc.
I think the easiest answer is the neck simply has larger decks. There are no windows or anything in that area implying no one lives there and suggesting it could be a much larger area for storage that would . But that only waves away so much, because if that's Deck 15, then there is still no way to have near 34 decks.
Solutions 3 (and 4 🍺🤣) Are reasonably more acceptable. I once tried to do a deck chart on a sweet fan made Constitution Class redesign, and the window placement on the secondary hull caused a lot of problems with trying to set up a layout. Meaning, they put windows in various random places without any Deck consideration. My solution was to re-adjust the windows to line up properly with the decks in Photoshop.
0:40 there is actually a ship called the exelsior II class in the picard era and it looks different, I believe the enterprise b is just called an exelsior I enterprise variant
Thank you for making this video! I’ve wondered the same thing about “deck 15” ever since I first saw that movie first-run in the theater. In “Star Trek V: The Final Frontier,” I think director William Shatner gave the finger to Enterprise D - a 48 deck ship - by having the turbo elevator shaft of Enterprise A feature “deck 98.” This made Enterprise A seem twice as big as Enterprise D. I suspect the paltry “deck 15” reference was a return finger from Next Generation loyalists to make Enterprise B seem extra small.
Maybe Harriman couldn't talk to the Engineering section because the Speakers we're not until Tuesday
You’re my herooooo
The speakers we are not until Tuesday indeed.
If the neck was only 1 or 2 decks then it could work. Having a double deck in the engineering section would help too.
It could simply be that some of the decks in the secondary hull are taller than others for the sake of more cargo space. The only things in that part of the ship worthy of note are, from fore to aft: the navigational deflector, main engineering, the cargo decks, and a couple of shuttlebays. The connecting interhull might also have as little as two or three decks to accommodate some of the ship's important systems. My theory, anyway. There are always others. 🖖😎👍
We already know form The Undiscovered Country that the excelsior class was noticeably larger than enterprise-A. We need them side by side at the end, even if the camera is closer to one vs the other in that closing shot
My thoughts are that maybe there's a few oddly named decks (do starships have a mezzanine?) that don't have a number. Maybe some decks have areas that span multiple decks (so there could be, like, a deck 5A, 5B, and 5C because part of deck five takes up the space of three levels. Like you said, maybe some decks are just really tall. Maybe the decks in the neck (if there are decks in the neck) have so little use (storage?) that they're given some other designation so only "real" decks get a number. Maybe a mix of all of the above.
Well..the DS9 technical manual is rather often ignored in the trek community when it comes to dimensions...
5:11 honestly? The designers put more thought into stuff sometimes than the writers. The writers need to tell a compelling and great story 22-24 times a season. For me, what I see trumps what I hear (dialogue) or read (books).
It looked like there was a mezzanine deck as Kirk climbed down; perhaps that counted?
Why simulate a torpedo blast? Well, Scotty finds that a hole can be punched into the ribbon big enough for the B to slip out of if they detonated a photon torpedo. Unfortunately, the B was only fitted out for her ceremonial maiden voyage around the Solar System, and wouldn't have stuff like tractor beams, medical staff, and photon torpedoes, until next Tuesday. How convenient, as the plot requires Kirk to be on a 78-year bus ride into the Nexus to be united with Picard for the big climactic teamup.
Yeah! 30 years. Thats like Marty Mcfly traveling back to 1955. Can you remember how he see's the world ! Its a complete different place. Thats equivalent to when this ship was designed for the movie and it still holds up better than much of whats been produced there after.
simplest solution seems to be that the decks aren't all counted as consecutive numbers. for example, the neck decks might be functionally and structurally distinct and designated with their own sub sequence before the normal numbering resumes in the engineering hull
I find it convenient to suggest that there is only one deck on the neck of the B to accommodate the torpedo and docking bay and move on to the stardrive.
Could've been longer in exploring the visible windows and assuming more machinery gaps. I mean Jeffries tubes are between decks after all...
I just assume that the Excelsior was the first and experimental ship. By the time it turned into an actual class, it had already gone through several adjustments by Engineering teams, which included deck separations.
The empty blackness of space is occluding starts, giving a weird cavern effect to the ship flybys, couldn't unsee it once i noticed it XD
Solution 5, is that the Enterprise is not an Excelsior 2, to begin with, it is an Excelsior 3S design. with the S standing for special. This was the baseline of the class after 10 years of the Excelsior 2 design after replacing the transwarp drive and tinkering with other technologies before Enterprise-A/Yorktown's decommissioning. The standard 3 design would go through until TNG when the Excelsior 5 design is represented by the Hood and the Excelisor 6 is represented in the Lakota of DS9. Each modification to the design would take 10-15 years to update to the new standard. The S-variant in the 3 series would be exposed in the Tomed Incident in 2311. One of the new technologies rumored to be in it consists of new phaser banks, an enhanced warp drive, and increased sensor suites for intelligence and science labs. However, the crown jewel was a reversed engineered cloaking device from the Romulans from the original Enterprise missions. Then they built it as their own using the engineered one and it was better than the Klingons cloak. There would only be 45 of the 3S design but after Tomed they were refitted to the newest 3N model which removed the cloak and replaced it with a dispersal field and a fighter bay for a squadron of fighters.
You see a work bee with cargo pods exiting the neck so there must be fewer decks in there to accommodate cargo containers and the hangar doors (which I always thought were torpedo launchers because of the detailing on the AMT model kit despite what we see in the movie). Like why would you have just a teensy cargo bay with two big entrances in the neck when you could use that space for torpedo bays that fit, unlike the Constitution Refit's :)
As to why there were no engineers to handle the deflector, Harriman didn't even check if the engineering staff had a spare person, he volunteered right away, so he knew that no one would be available without having to ask. And based on the original itinerary it seemed like the Enterprise wasn't even supposed to go to warp, so simply flying the solar system on impulse wouldn't have needed a big engineering staff, or could have been done entirely on automation- Scotty was able to rig the Enterprise to do a lot more while being ran by just Kirk and McCoy in Star Trek III so the Enterprise-B ought to be more easily automated, especially for a simple sublight cruise. Plus with all the missing components and missing people like the medical staff it looks like this was a hastily arranged last-minute press event, not the sort of thing you'd expect for something big like an Enterprise launch. Maybe they had a proper ceremony planned but like a new arms treaty with the Klingons said any ship launched past the following Tuesday had to meet certain requirements so they moved up the Enterprise-B's launch. We don't even know if some of the Enterprise-B personnel we see are really part of the crew or just random senior officers that were grabbed off the street, like that oddly elderly communications officer.
Or maybe they divided the decks between the engineering section and the saucer/ neck section. Since the engineering section is designed to separate from the rest of the ship, just to make getting around easier for people, they divided the deck count between the two parts. The engineering section has its own decks 1 to 15 and the saucer section has its own decks 1 to ?.
1E to 15E and 1S to ?S.
Maybe some of the decks are currently not-habitable because of how much more equipment the ship needed. This deck was temporarily 'Habitable Deck 15' so that none of the non-essential personnel onboard (IE- the journalists and non-Starfleet persons) and the under-trained crew onboard would find themselves on a deck with no gravity/life support.
There is another "solution"
Most decks aren't fill yet so the official count will be installed on Tuesday as they fill the decks :P
There's been a lot of scale discussion since SNW established hard on-screen numbers for the length of the Constitution class for the first time, which were larger than the prior figures from reference material. Although the new scale actually fixes some longstanding issues, where the old figures implied each deck could only be a maximum of 8 feet tall, including the floor/ceiling/space between decks, which meant the actual livable space inside would only be 6 to 7 feet tall and the crew would be ducking under doorways. Depending on the space between decks, the 1701 can be recalculated to need between 402 and 440 meters in length to properly accommodate the actual 10 feet tall decks. Which is nearly exactly where SNW established it, at 442 meters. Now, that would also imply that Excelsior is much larger than some reference figures have suggested (since the Excelsior was stated on screen to be an exceptionally large class compared to the Constitution), and in fact that's exactly how TNG & Generations depict it. The Excelsior class appears alongside the Galaxy class a couple times during TNG, and it's obviously much larger than the old 470m figure. As you mentioned, that damage shot from Generations also implies it to be quite large. Fans have recalculated that around 622 meters makes more sense considering the existing evidence. So if both the Constitution and the Excelsior get scaled up, not only does that help with their existing scale problems, it also matches more closely with what was depicted on-screen in TNG & Generations. Regarding deck 15, it's easy enough to imagine a non-standard deck arrangement and variable deck height, with secondary hull decks possibly being counted separately from saucer decks.
For all we know the neck could count as something between 8 or even just 1 deck.
Errors in fan materials surrounding the movie? That is always a possibility.
The rest of the decks will be installed on Tuesday
It's still just been 30 years, a very long 30 !
It's been a weird 30 years. The first twenty of them were 5 years long and the last ten have been 25 years long.
Remember one of the ships of the line calendar can't remember what year they had all the Enterprise ships docked at a museum space station but the Enterprise B was an original Excelsior ship
At this point I've more or less come to terms with that as tight as Star Trek scripts are, they're still liable to making continuity errors. (How many decks does the Enterprise E have again?)
The way I reconciled it when watching it as a teenager was that, because the front of the ship is curved, the decks could be smaller or longer following the contour of the ship. But various official diagrams of other ships (including the original Excelsior) prove this isn't how Starfleet labeled things.
The explanation was that somebody gave Kirk/ Shatner a pin and left the room
Saucer: Deck 01, 02, 03, 04 etc. Hull: Deck 1, 2, 3, 4 etc.
Many ships, especially in Star Trek early eras (ENT, TOS, TMP) have their future commanding officer, "customize" the ship to their specifications. Certain things can be changed later, by a new CO.
Given that Excelsior had a speculated Saucer-separation function, it would make some sense to have the Saucer have differing deck designation.
Harriman being the first CO of Ent-B, with his young fresh-faced enthusiasm and penchant for drama and publicity, could easily have requested the seperated designations as a great new idea for increased userfriendliness, though in reality - as seen by new MBA's getting to work in production companies - would cause a number of confusions into the daily life of those working under him.
Good in theory, bad in practice.
Another problem is that Star Trek has never been good at scale. Just look at when a Galaxy class ship docks at DS9 and compare the size of the station promenade windows with the ship Bridge section. And they think the fans will never notice any inconsistency in continuity. 🤔
I get shy some might think this is a bit off, but that partly is down to how one might consider the neck the engineering deck and the general lay out of the saucer to be.
I think you can likely bodge a solution with the variable height but realistically speaking i'd be happieer with a deck count under 30 but a lot more than 15.. If you just put me on the spot didn't show me an MSD I'd likely just shrug and say looks like about 22 decks to me (total).
One thing that does help is that there is alot of space given to the deflector dish and the cargo bay int he secondary hull - allowing the deck to be far far larger in the secondary hull. The deflector is much bigger than a single deck for example.. just as a shuttle bay is taller than a single deck. so one solution to that is to keep the ceck numbers low for parts of the ship that are much much taller and where there is a normal deck layout adjacent to say the shuttle bay or warp core or defelector disch or cargo bays those small tucked ins stacks would have the number of the top deck with a letter suffix so deck 15, deck 15-a, deck 15-b and so on where as deck 15 proper would be cavernous..
I love your videos!
I second that.
Star Trek has always had trouble with ship size scaling.
One solution to get more or less decks might be if we count the Jeffries tubes ("horizontally") as decks as well, which would easily double the amount of decks available and could possibly be worked into the same issue in Star Trek 5 with it's ridiculous amount of decks as well. So simply redefining what deck means.
Like Excelsior-Era might be a time of new grounds and experimental design choises, which same as uniforms fell out of grace after the era ended.
Hence they could have a varied deck size, or what constitutes as a deck in that era.
A possibility could also be that Kirk did what was needed to be done on Deck 15 but then needed to go to some other deck further down to finish the plan and the deck where He was when the Energy Ribbon hit was where he was triggering the planned fake torpedo launching.
My head cannon: the writers goofed, or didn’t care enough to actually think about what the right number would be
Exactly, director could have even had her say different deck numbers until something sounded good. Then of course the visual effects shots were made many months later.
@ there’s also the option of not stating deck numbers at all. Just say “engineering section” and then try to reach him. When he doesn’t answer, people get worried.
Another solution, there are the number of decks as described. However, their are also secondary/maintenance/equipment decks or large array of equipment between the levels mea int that deck height is not universal. With some areas being maintenance sections, non-liveable areas, or deterurium storage tanks.
Post 2: I have to agree with another poster that each section of the ship has their own decks. IE: Saucer section and then Secondary hull. I believe the B separates as it has a Battle Bridge. So it would make sense the star drive has their own numbered decks like "Deck 15".
Counting Decks aside, what’s always bugged me was the scale of the deflector control room and the depth that a panel in the scene falls too to suggesting that Kirk better not lose his footing or suffer a fall at a great heights, compared to the scale of the hole that the three are standing in afterward. There is some Tardis physics happening here. Movie magic breaking the magic of disbelief. 4:14
The Excelsior model detailing suggests the class of ship is much larger than the 467M length (and even the 511M length) bandied around in the TNG era literature.
One quick and easy way is to scale the size of the deflector dish to that of the refit Connie class ... that would put the Excelsior into to the 600+ Meter range if both their deflector dishes were the same standard issue.
Another solution: the main deflector room is very large and cavernous, and covers the front end of several decks. So Admiral Kirk may have actually been on deck 15, in the deflector room, but was working above the hole where the lightning strike hit, and above the catwalk where we see the three men looking out from the inside. So, when the ship was struck, before the emergency force field activated, he could've been sucked downward and then out of the hole by the vacuum of space.
I come with a possible solution, though I don't know if it gets Deck 15 closer to where it seems to be. In Jbot Decals wonderful website he shows the numbering of the decks of the original Enterprise. The Bridge is deck one and there are a total of 11 decks to the saucer section.
Continuing down the neck to the bottom of the keel there are 24 decks. BUT Jbot also uses a secondary deck arrangement. Where the decks of the engineering hull are counted separately from the saucer. With this arrangement deck one becomes the highest deck in the neck. That arrangement drastically shortens the number of decks in the engineering hull.
For the mighty algorithm gods 🍻😊
To be fair, the "finding his way there" issue could be simply starfleet using the same type of compartment mapping the navy already uses.
And another possibility could be the saucer and secondary have their own deck numbers.
Bridge=s1
First deck of secondary= e1
If you compare to a Constitution class refit, the height is about the same, the Excelsior class's length makes up the bulk of the size difference. It isn't until the Ambassador class that ships started gaining in height.
Decks spacing are different than the evenly space floors of an apartment building….
The dorsal side of a saucer section and even some of the ventral side are fairly evenly spaced given that the bull of these spaces are given over to compartments for the “hotel” needs of the ship (hotel load is a term used in ship operation to describe the energy and other resources required for the livelihood of its occupants ) but once you get into the ventral side and especially the engineering hull you start to have compartments much taller than the minimal 3 meters required for crew quarters etc … in these compartment and decks spaces above the main floor get a alpha/beta/delta/gamma designation …
A compartment like shuttlebay or cargo storage, engineering that has a catwalk area looking down is an alpha deck. Voids with additional levels then have beta , delta and gamma decks with the main floor have a prime suffix or no suffix. These secondary decks air designated going highest to lowest with prime always being the lowest deck
5:50 that’s deck 01. Not 1. On most Navy ships I have been on count the decks from above and below the main deck differently. Usually going up further away from that center line. If I remember correctly on our boat 01 was one deck above 1. Deck 1 was where you boarded the ship with the flight deck up to the forecastle. The engine room main entrance was on deck 4, down to deck 7 where the screws came out. The highest point you could go was deck 07. But it was a tiny little spot for one of the radars.
I'm watching this from the past and Generations is still pretty new here. But yeah, solution three.
Scale is always going to a squirrelly proposition when many of the known sources appear on the surface as arbitrarily tossed out numbers.
But once you work out those numbers and picture them in your mind the ships don’t seem to be large enough. Especially when you try to fit in all of the in-lore devices that inhabit these vessels.
Which is when I try to make it make sense to me in my mind, I look at the windows. Place an average 6’ tall person in one of the vessels windows and kinda work out from there to get an idea of scale.
The problem I have with the recent Neo Constitution class Titan-A is the upscaling of an old design from the TMP era. The windows are an issue. There should be more of them if they’re sticking to a specific window standard. You just don’t make ginormous windows.
To be honest the whole Neo Constitution thing is lame when it was a fan design of a different class of starship. The Shangri La class. If it was Constitution then it should’ve looked more like the original Enterprise.
It’s entertaining trying to distill this universe into tangible things nonetheless.
i STO i don't think excelsior looks all that good, but on screen it truly is one of the most beautiful designs
I... didn't realise there was a problem here, so, this would be fresh off the bat. Could Starfleet have omitted deck thirteen to avoid cliche episodes? Could Herriman et al be on a deck other than fifteen for reasons sensible? Maybe decks fourteen and fifteen couldn't mustard up the forcefield? (Seriously aside, the damage report says thirteen fourteen and fifteen and McCoy and Scotty are on the top of those, so, they're on thirteen, right? )Maybe the word deck here refers to something other than the floors, perhaps the instruction manuals are kept in tape decks, and the signs show you which tape deck to refer to? Perhaps the floors are named after famous people and the floor Kirk has to go to just happens to be named after a chap called Deck Fifteen?
When you consider that there are Starfleet Vessels that have fully Grown Trees in them, the Decks must have different Heights, depending on what they are meant to accomodate.
Happy 30th Anniversary to this legendary film... 🖖🏻
DESIGN INTENT is the most important value when scaling and its different for every ship.
If the Bird of Prey needs to be able to fit two 50ft long whales that informs the design as a primary requirement.
For most ships the Design Intent is informed by the model itself. If there are consecutive deck of windows we have a minimum space between decks. This tells you the number of decks and it over rides statements a visuals in cannon
Solution: The rest of the ship was going to be installed on Tuesday, along with a pan-dimensional matter singularity module that would allow more decks to fit inside without having to alter the outer hull of the ship.
Few possible answers.
Most modern governments will consult any experts when making a replacement/modern system. So it is extremely likely Kirk both provided input and kept tabs on the design of the Enterprise.
Next. Given that's next to the engineering/shuttle bay area it's more than likely they have a larger space for those decks.
Also, they would probably need more space between decks to run necessary life support/duct work/pipes/Jeffreys Tubes.
Last: There are different types of maps - Points of Interest/Schematics/Emergency Exits/Simple Navigation... Now you would think that the ship engineer could pull up a finalized layout of the ship but they might not have been completed and finalized as this was a shakedown cruise.... which typically sends a ship out see what moves/breaks/needs to be moved when they come back. This also emphasizes why no one was ready for anything and nothing really worked.
I think normally dialogue should be given more weight, though I faintly remember lines in Trek, which cannot be correct. The shot with Kirk's colleagues should be viewed as is if this was a stage play, as visual to tell the story, not necessarily as shot where the stage set keeps the proportions.
I view Trek (and most other films) not like "this is what happend and somehow a camera was there", rather like someone telling a story from memory and we see the images in his mind. Parts of the story and/or those images can be wrong.
The easy answer is the designers, writers didn't know what they were doing, taking random numbers out of the air like is common. They want the ships to feel much bigger than the numbers they have decided for quite evidently in FX shots. There is visual evidence for a 1200+ m long Enterprise B. Intuitively, I felt in Star Trek 3 that the Excelsior's saucer is about as wide as the Empire State Building is tall, ~440 m. In ST IV we see a small shuttle that's slightly higher than 3 m high pass in front of the saucer and it looks like the saucer's decks are at least as high. And the saucer's width is about 130 times the deck-deck height, the ship's length is 2.55x the saucer's width. In the beginning of Generations the ship looks even larger. In the shot next to the space station the station has tall decks, perhaps 5 m tall to have those ceilings. And you can see the saucer's decks are not much less than that. This gives a saucer width of ~500 m which is the highest I have seen but feels reasonable based on what is shown on screen.
Enterprise A is imo 600+. m, perhaps 700 m. I felt that its saucer is about as wide as the Eiffel tower is tall. In ST3 we see a small shuttle of the same type pass in front of it, from which you get about a 600 m long ship. Now the shuttle passes some distance in front so this appears to be a minimum.
People evidently don't have a sense of scale. When I see renders of the ships with the "correct" sizes they look way too small. Like in Star Wreck: in the pirkinning. Also inconsistencies in the VFX, like the VGer walk it seems like the saucer cannot fit full-height decks. Also deck numbers I don't put much faith in.
Section 13, 14, & 15 on decks 20 through 28. The writers inverted the two descriptors.
I go pretty much with different Deck hights in between. My solution for the problem.
oh I love this kind of Nerdtalk. makes mmore sense than going to work for me. 😂
Enterprise-B at that instant did not have a full crew and could not afford any engineers during that emergency.
@3:58 “All right, hold the image - hold!” I paused it at that timestamp and just ball-parked 15 decks to where Deck 15 would be, according to Generations. Assuming lines of lights are windows. With roughly 6 decks in the saucer, 4 decks in the neck then 5 decks down from the neck. 🤷🏻♂️ I can’t account for there being 34 decks..
if your watching this in the future, more than 30 years old 😂
What is the shape of the objects the star textures are on? You can tell they're rendered on some kind of irregular shapes that the ships are being flown through. 4:28 is a pretty obvious example of this effect.
I don't think of Enterprise-B as a Excelsior Class II. Like in our modern world, such a variance in appearance could be attributed to Excelsior Class Block 3 or Block whatever. Thoughts?
Wait, what's this about a duck on the Enterprise-D? I'm very confused.
It's on the big display graphic of the ship in Main Engineering at the head of the T junction, on the opposite side of the room from the warp core. You have to look closely to see it. 🖖😎👍
What if the deflector control room is only accessible from deck 15 section B? Not actually on deck 15.
Maybe it’s just the fastest route to deflector control, since Kirk isn’t that familiar with the Excelsior class?
Yea ... i mean this particular place of the ship at exactly this location was named "Deck15". It may be located on level 42 or any number of decks or levels for that matter. It is still called "Deck15"
I assume that the neck section have only very a few decks. It have no windows nor any distinctive features but its torpedo bays.. Same for the engineering hull, some rows of windows are very far appart, so I guess that its internal components are that big that they need 2 or 3 times more ceiling clearance. In movies and shows they show us insanely huge rooms... so the Excelsior class is probably one of the most accurate when it comes to count decks (where catwalks in a 40 feet tall room aren't count as individual decks).
Can you please do a video on The Captain's Yacht on Galaxy Class and Soveriegn class Starships? Very Little Information out there other than in the LCARS and other Star Trek Book. I think this would be make an interesting video topic. Thank you
I was 14 when Generations was released. Even at that age I hated that "resonance burst" line from Scotty. He'd never spout such treknobabble nonsense, the writers seemingly not conversant with their characters. Generations isn't very good, but I've softened my opinion of it over the years. It is lit beautifully, and the visuals are very good. Picard season 3 also corrected one major gripe I had with it...
As a Captain he is required to know engineering as you he would have to have passed that qual in order to become a Commander, prior to being a captain, and an Admiral when the excellsior class began test trials, he would have basic knowledge of the ship class. Granted some of the newer tech beyond the NX-2000 would probably be out of his wheel house....
Similar to how the Vengeance in Into Darkness was supposed to be stupid large and yet Deck 13 is in pretty much the same spot as what you're discussing.
So I heard a rumor back in the day about the script for Star Trek generations. The rumor goes something like this the team of writers were sent to Hawaii and told that they couldn't come out of the room until they are done with the script, any discrepancies are merely based on the fact that these guys want it out of the room to enjoy the Hawaiian Sun.
but it's just a rumor.