I always appreciated that the AI running the turbolifts always knew how to time its speed, so that the passenger conversations always ended just as the destination was reached.
And, of course, adding to the ridiculousness of that scene, the decks numbers grow in the size as you go up, instead of down, like it’s supposed to be. :-)
I have emailed Andrew Probert, the designer of the refit Enterprise, many times. He said his plan was to have the turbolifts move upwards from the hangardeck, move forward paralleling the engine room. They would then turn in front of engineering and begin traveling upward between the torpedo tubes and just forward of the vertical intermix shaft in the dorsal connector. They would then end up in the saucer section just forward of the impulse deck.
Thinking about it when the Reliant phaser hit the port side torpedoes side launcher it must have taken out the turbo lift as Captain Spock stated that hit had taken out turbo lift and thereby they had to climb to a deck where the turbos where still working. I agree with the fact the neck section was too narrow and should have been a little wider to accommodate extra turbos shafts. It also best to remember if there was a evacuation of the star drive then there would be little time to get everybody out due to limited number of turbo lifts
Turbolifts also don't have to remain upright. They can turn sideways and the passengers wouldn't know it due to artificial gravity. This allows them to save space and pass through tight sections.
@@Novusod In ST TOS, the deck indicator lights in the turbo elevators either flashed horizontally or vertically, denoting their direction of travel. Had the elevators traveled in the way you describe, the light would only have flashed in the vertical direction. This would have been the case because the passengers would have been traveling head first or feet first if the elevators moved in the way you suggest. Andrew Probert had input into the cutaway poster of the refit Enterprise and all of the elevator shafts were oriented either horizontally or vertically. He also told me that if you look very closely, you can see that he drew representations of himself and his wife in the arboritem.
In the turbo lifts in TOS there’s a panel on the wall that when the lift was moving would either show a pattern of lights going from top to bottom, when Kirk and co we’re going to engineering, or bottom to top when they were going to the Bridge, sometimes the lights would go from side to side. I always thought this was showing how the lift was moving during the scene
It may well be that those lights are for the benefit of the crew inside rather than actually reflective of the outside, so lights moving on the vertical axis could still be shown even if the lift is traveling diagonally. (Of course, in actual fact the lights are just there for the benefit of the cameras and the audience :D)
I'm not gonna lie, throughout the video I was constantly saying to myself that there are probably two turbolift networks. After finishing the video I went and looked at Connie refit MSDs and sure enough, the turbolift in the secondary hull does in fact lead into where the core is (a deck or two below where the impulse engines are) to which another turbolift door sits on the other side (to the front) of the warp core. A pretty simple idea as a person would just have to walk around the warp core to get into the next lift to get into the saucer. Perhaps not the most ideal but definitely an easy solution.
Another point to consider if this is the case: If the Enterprise were boarded in the engineering hull, a few security people placed between those two lifts could control the pathway to the saucer section. Sometimes the best way to stop the enemy is to take away the ramp he's counting on...
exactly. just because it is not show in the movies or in the series, we can safely agree that things must be there to keep the crew alive and solve functional issues like having toilets and whatnot. having two turbolifts AND a small path to walk between them is fairly logical. like in huge buildings (like airports) having a lift between two sections is not possible but having two lifts and some walkway between them is all it takes. and it has some advantages too. should one turbolift break down, you can still at least cover half the journey unaffected by the broken one. :)
@@ComicsluvrWait... wouldn't that put the security bottleneck, and likely gunfight... kind of right on top of the friggin' warp core? This sounds like a bad plan.
@@CptJistuce LoL, like that time a Klingon held the warp core hostage with a phaser in TNG...maybe it would lead to a stand-off, but any fanatical person might just say welp, I guess we'll all blow up then!
On a similar note: The *Gateway Arch* at the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, was originally planned as just a monument. A viewing room at the top was considered, but the Arch's triangular cross-section and its overall shape being an inverted weighted catenary curve of 630 feet in both height and width, would have only allowed for stairs. Many engineers thought it was impossible to install elevators; the one-of-a-kind design of a tram system was conceived in just two weeks by a man named Dick Bowser, who never received a college degree. The tram system has been in use since 1967.
I always thought of the lifts as more like a pneumatic tube style setup. Given the control of gravity in the ship they could easily shift into diagonal, vertical, or horizontal. All that really matters is that at the end it orients to the destination. The entrances could be punchouts that allow for loading and the initial click simply the reorientation to the lift line.
They could simply go horizontally as well. Given the size of a Galaxy's saucer using a turbo lift for a cross saucer trip makes sense. Getting to the secondary hull of an Oberth flat requires the cabin of the turbo lift to tilt on its trip.
Functionally in episodes we have seen lifts jam, in next gen they had to pop the top of one and climb to a geofrey tube.. which also implies lifts usually run parallel to Geoffrey tubes
they are maglev I think. Fun note an RL elevator company has shown a functional elevator using this tech and it does work like a turbolift able to go vertical and horizontal.
There is some two dimensional thinking going on here! The "grav plating" idea that there's some magic artifical gravity generation going on in the decking inside the turbo lift means that the lift capsule didn't need to obey the idea that the lifts move strictly vertically like the elevator in a building. Imagine the turbolift capsule could take a curving path as it traveled the tube shift. It could travel in any configuration so it appears from the outside to being any orientation like flipping over on its side and the occupants inside would experience no change in its internal gravity always going down to its internal floor. It could do loops like a roller coaster car but sealed inside with the doors closed its occupants wouldn't experience any change in inertia. Inside the turbo lift the gravity is local. In fact the lift could be completely "upside down" in relation to viewing it from outside yet the occupants wouldn't be aware of that inside. This frees up the shaft to run any way you please instead of going in strictly vertical or horizontal directions as it travels as shown in the animations. The overall width of the dorsal is still a problem, but again what we see as shafts rising vertically between decks isn't necessarily restricted to being horizontal as well as vertical in the blueprints. The parts of the sets we see have to go vertically as that's the only practical way to build them in a sound stage, but who's to say with magnetic constriction inside the matter antimatter tubing once the they disappear up in the ceiling don't start curving like bending pipes like plumbing tubing? A tubolift shaft could be bang up against the mix tubing as it twists past it as the magnetic containment must keep any heat or radiation contained inside the "glass" we see in Engineering right? So the mix tubing could be bang up against the inside of the dorsal hull on one side and the tube shaft on the other and the structure members and hull plating in the fragile looking neck of the dorsal be the densest and strongest on the entire ship. It would have to be to prevent the thing getting twisted or sheered in half between the primary and secondary hulls as the whole ship moves through space. The structural integrity field must beef up that strength in relativistic speeds, but once the warp field forms the ship itself is experiencing no inertia changes or the crew would be goo. Practically the neck could have been lots wider like in the galaxy class and not really affect the look of the model ship, but Jefferies just drew it insanely thin and the model was built that way for looks. Now you REALLY want a brain-melting problem try fitting all the sets seen in the Discovery in the film "2001" into the round hull of its model! It's like Doctor Who's TARDIS where it's bigger on the inside due to "transdimensional engineering" so it's enormous interior fits inside a tiny exterior! The 4th Doctor explained it hilariously to Lela who listens and proclaims "That's silly!" to which The Doctor proudly proclaims "That's Timelord engineering!" I'd give anything to know the reactions in the actual 23rd century to our 20th century imagings of their time! As we look at old 1930s-50s scifi serials like say Buck Rogers, they will be rolling on the floor laughing at any of our current TV shows I'm sure. The transporter is likely to forever be the silliest "tech" ever imagined - but then again maybe it will inspire them to muse that tearing a human apart into its atoms and reassembling them is silly, but come up with a way to simply flip people through an inter-dimensional wormhole to their destination? The actual 23-25 century technology made so weird we can't even begin to imagine it now. Look at how bang up until the year 2000 no scifi show or movie anticipated smart phones. No one has them in "Blade Runner" set in 2019. Anything written decades ago in stories set after 2000 anticipated them. Scifi is just often lousy at predicting future tech...
In my opinion, we have a scale problem. They were never consistent in the overall size of the ships in relation to interior shots. The set designers treated the ships like TARDIS's. (bigger on the inside than the outside) "Look, there's just enough room for a turbolift." "But how.." "It just is!!"
The book "Mr Scott's Guide To The Enterprise" postulated that the turbolift slides into the dorsal on G-deck from the side, then goes down, aft, down, aft and finally down (behind the torpedo room) into the secondary hull. It's a lot of manoeuvres but it does fit!
I gotta say I love the attention you have given to your cutaways, makes it very easy to visualize the interior of the ship. Would love to see you cover other areas of the ship, especially those in the plans not shown on the shows or movies.
Every ship has that small area where the only option is to beam the entire turbo lift to the closest shaft. There's also the one where the turbo lift is shot into space and it utilizes its own thrusters to re-enter the ship at the appropriate shaft.
Not really: Most ships from the Excelsior onwards have a big enough neck to have a turbo lift pass through. And the nacelles were before and also after the NCC 1701 D only reachable by stair shafts. Also, don't forget, that you don't really need an easy access to that nacelles: When they are at warp, the nacelles are a no go zone anyway and when they need to repair something, they can also reach the nacelles by a small space walk! Just get out of the ship near the bottom of the nacelle and walk up that 200m to the entrance area in the nacelle.
I always tend to assume scaling issues when it comes to things like this. Especially given how big those dorsal windows look against the height of the deck, while we’re shown more traditional size portholes on the sets. If we scale up by 20-50% there’s plenty of room for the turbolift to go around. Similarly the size of the windows on the Excelsior model would actually be a little too small. They’re what looks best on the models of course, and I wouldn’t really want to swap the size of the windows on either of them. But the windows alone present a sizing and placement issue of decks and internal machinery, so I don’t think too hard about the rest of the insides. Scaling-up slightly would help fit the torpedo complex inside the bulge at the base of the dorsal too.
I'm also content to believe that the size of the sets are generally larger than they would be in the real world of the fiction. They designed them to be easy to shoot scenes in with both space for cameras and lighting and comfortable blocking of the actors. It's like your average sitcom living room set vs most actual living spaces, even relatively poor families like the Connors lived in extravagant excess if we take their floor plan as literal.
Let's not forget the filming whoopsie in one of the movies where a shaft appears to run vertically for 60+ decks (according to deck markers) in a ship with less than 30 decks total?
@@Krahazik you mean that scene where Spock has the rocket boots and the turboshaft looks like it could be a lobby to observation deck elevator on the Empire State Building?
was the point of this video to boost algorithm engagement by getting everyone to comment on all the incredibly obvious answers, such as lift orientation and chamber width? kudos. it worked. I'm happy to contribute as well
I think this gets solved if we don’t assume the vertical warp core goes all the way to the impulse deflection crystal. If we instead say that the core extends upwards towards an “impulse engineering complex” (one that has the deflection crystal in line with, but not necessarily directly connected to, the upper end of the warp core), then we can suppose that the turbolift shaft simply passes horizontally between the top of the core and the deflection crystal.
True. We all assume the core goes through the whole neck. But that is even not logical when we remind ourselves that this ship can saucer seperate! Most likely the impulse drive and the saucer section is just connected to the warp core by two high energy connectors where the hull is made steadier, and in between them on Deck F the turbo lift passes through.
There isn't a full end of the warp core on H-deck, instead just a lockdown/venting connector leading to the topside warp crystal. Hence a full room isn't used for the core leaving room for a turbo lift to pass through it and up to the main saucer.
Exactly this. You can kind of tell when Kirk enters the engineering space in TMP that the intermix shaft tappers as it goes upward from there, likely because the impulse engines don't need as much plasma as the warp drive.
@@captainyossarian388 Agreed, or it could split up against the walls on the way up to feed the individual impulse engines, leaving a gap for the turbolift to go through.
WHAT IS THIS NONSENSE ABOUT WARP CRYSTALS? The impulse engines ran on deuterium.. PRIOD.. No warp related anything. They were NOT powered from Engineering directly
@@ZakhadWOW I feel you're confusing two comments as one. Warp cores operated off of dilithium or lithium crystals (depending on class/age of ship), and impulse engines did indeed operate off deuterium. However the original person noting warp core crystals said nothing about impulse, the follow up comment did. That said the general model of a warp core is that antimatter is sent into an intermix chamber and deuterium is injected in as well to which it created a plasma energy put into a matrix made of the relative warp crystal (dilithium or lithium) which then basically became your warp plasma (the energy for warp) and electro-plasma (the energy powering the ship). Impulse drives otherwise were self-sustained with their own fusion reactor though correct (at least I assume that's what you meant by "not powered from engineering directly"), however they were still tied to engineering sorta, in that use of the impulse drives created a byproduct of electro-plasma also (which is why at least in some episodes of different star trek series', even if the warp core was 'shut down' or ejected, etc, the ship still had power likely fed by a general use of impulse drives).
The elevator in TOS moved both up & down, as well as horizontal and/or diagonal, similar to how both the Eiffel Tower and the Luxor Hotel in Vegas elevators work. In a few episodes when Kirk was in the lift, you could see in the back which direction they were traveling that was lite up to show which direction they were going.
I found a set of blueprints that seems to answer these questions fairly well (assuming the scaling is right, of course). It's something called the NCC-1701A Deck Plans by "Strategic Designs," created around the time of Undiscovered Country. In their design, a horizontal turboshaft runs aft down the saucer centerline on G deck, to a point just forward of the impulse engineering room. From there a vertical shaft goes straight down through the next eight decks, bisecting the two torpedo launch bays along the way, near the front of the hull, as you surmised. This shaft terminates on O deck next to Main Engineering. On O-deck (in the engineering hull), there is finally enough room for a horizontal turbolift tube to traverse around the intermix chamber core in a "semicircular" path, before continuing to head aft, running parallel to the horizontal part of main engineering, on its way to servicing the rest of the engineering hull. Your second issue concerned Kirk's path between the torpedo launch bay and the bridge. According to the blueprints, the door in the torpedo launch bay you mentioned leads to a service ladder shaft that runs just aft of the intermix chamber from M deck (torpedo launch bay) to H deck. The pathing gets a little tricky to figure out here, but it looks like the intermix chamber is just wide enough on J deck to support a catwalk all the way around the core, plus some doors between the intermix chamber and compartments fore and aft. Just forward of the intermix chamber, on J, there's a tiny observation lounge that has access to the turbolift system. So if I'm reading it right, they had to climb up three levels on ladders, enter the intermix chamber, and then take a short walk around the core, into the observation lounge, and into the turbolifts.
Nah, you're reading those wrong. That's a Jefferies tube. The turbolift shaft runs behind the intermix chamber, and just above the photon bay runs horizontal to go behind the photon bay and down into the secondary hull.
@@Jarsia Well, the way that you can tell on that deck plan, usually, is whether it has some medium-sized empty white circles in the passage. Other than a few exceptions here and there, those represent vertical turbolift shafts - the symbol legend shows this. And then, turbolift doors are usually the shaded circles that have one slightly flattened edge where they meet a walkable passageway. I do see a Jeffries tube in the aft part of O-deck (labeled "JT") that looks like it can be accessed by a turbolift door. Now the plans aren't perfect - I spotted a place in the saucer where it looks like they were missing vertical shafts. But their idea for a half loop around the warp core seems feasible.
@@Jarsia The one I was looking at was also from cygnus, but dated to 1992. That brings up a very good point, though. There's no such thing as a definitive blueprint. All of them are works of imagination, and equally valid. But I just had a thought - the ones I was looking at were for the Enterprise-A, not the refit. So it's not even the same ship, LMAO. It might have the same turbolift layout as the refit or it might not - impossible to know. The thing I liked about the Ent-A plans there was that they actually have an overhead view instead of the side view schematic. Seeing an overhead helps get a sense of the volume of the space and is more "fun" to look at. Though no more definitive of course.
As anyone who's seen THAT episode of Discovery knows, Starfleet used Timelord TARDIS-derived technology to make their Starships bigger on the inside and the Turbolift cars run inside the cavernous interior of the ships.
As Lucy lawless so eliquently put whenever somebody called out a flaw in Xena, she would reply: "A wizard did it." Then again she also proclaimed that "Xena Needs Xex!" so take it all with a grain of salt.
In the motion picture, there's a scene with Kirk in the turbolift just after arriving and surveying the cargo deck. At the rear of the lift cab, there's a map with a moving light showing the primary lift layouts. Going by that, the vertical shaft is either to the front or sides of the vertical warp core segment. As on the Discovery from 2001 not everything will fit, and we have to go with it :)
🖖😎👍Very cool and very nicely well done and very well executed and informatively explained in every detail way shape and form possibly provided indeed on the turbo shaft and everything else with in the dorsal inbetween that of the primary hull and secondary hull indeed!.
Kirk didn't leave the torpedo bay and go to the Bridge in TWOK, he went down to Enginering first which makes sense as he would have walked out the door to the warp core area and then down one deck.
But then he would have had to go through a door to access the warp core observation area, and THAT door would have had to be in the center. Having it off to the side means he walks into the starboard torpedo tube...ahhh gotta love those trekonsistancy issues lol.
@@02ujtb00626 Especially back then, I don't think they put too much thought into how spaces would fit within the ship. Kind of like how in most games, the interior space of a ship often does not conform to the exterior model of the ship.
A very good video overall. And to add to the problems presented, with all of the room that the Enterprise's neck needs to devote to a warp core shaft, a torpedo room, whatever rooms that are there that require portals, and a turbo lift shaft that snakes through there somehow...where is there any room for support structures? The saucer section is massive as is the engineering section. That dorsal pylon had to be crazy strong for how thin it was, and even if it was entirely devoted to an inner skeleton that could handle the load, it still looks like it's seriously in danger of bending or snapping if the ship encountered any torsion from even basic maneuvers. But here we are with just a stack of decks and some shafts running up through much of it, with the usual paper-thin hull plating along the outside.
It's been a long time since I had last seen "Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan", so I don't remember enough details about the movie in order to notice the ship design inconsistencies of the TMP era Constitution class starship refit design configuration. But there are some possible explanations to get around those design inconsistencies. One: the ship has 2 forward torpedo launch tubes, which means that it either has 2 torpedo launch control rooms for the forward tubes, or has just one room that is bigger than what was depicted on screen. Either way, the launch control room is probably not directly connected to the Turbolift shaft, so there may be a small corridor that is between those 2 sites of the ship. Two: the ship's "neck" may have 2 Turbolift shafts, one in the front with no deck access between the saucer section and the engineering section, and one in the back with access to all decks in the neck, but with that Turbolift shaft terminating within the saucer near the impulse engines. Three: the shaft for warp core may be way bigger in diameter than the warp core itself, possibly big enough to accommodate a Turbolift car, probably running on tracks through the warp core shaft instead of a separate Turbolift shaft occupying the open space of the warp core shaft. It would make sense to me that the warp core shaft might be much wider than the warp core itself, because the port-to-starboard width of the neck of the TMP Enterprise always seemed to me to be much wider than the port-to-starboard width of the neck of the TOS Enterprise. There may be other possible explanations for the design inconsistencies, but those 3 are the only ones that I can think of at this time.
When looking at the older USA Battleships, a lot of small and only designed as emergency escape tunnels in certain parts of the ship were filled with pipes and cables as they were modernized. Not worth it drilling holes through thick armor or lots of decks. What if the warp core goes through the old turbolift shaft. If turbolift tech has advanced like everything else, maybe the space needed for that has decreased letting room for it to go around the core. Makes no sense to have on each floor for there to be a big room where you can walk around the core. That space is definitely being used to run a lot of eps, data and what other "future pipes and cables" necessary for the ship to run.
dude, your solution to this is offscreen lift changes. I would assume over the course of the ship there would be at least two turbo lifts in the saucer, and possibly a horizonta one. There would be a turbo lift along the back of the dorsal, and the lower body would have two or three as well. I assume horizontal 'lifts' would be a must for quick transport around the ship, if you can go on an angle why not horizontal. This means he could get a lift upwards, get out, walk five meters to another lift and make it to his destination. Horizontal lifts would also make it possible to the bridge quicker than walking.
@@Melkur1981 While I'm on the subject of occams razor, I never understood why star trek ship designs have gravity (the floor) being always in the same direction when gravity is controlled through Gravity Plates. I would have assumed different gravity for each section. The Saucer can have floors on the x axis sure, but the dorsal section would be two big floors with the 'Foor' the part people walk on running down the middle (on the y axis), so that the big energy transfer cable can be accessed at any point from a single floor with people walking alongside it! The lift here would essentially work like a conveyor belt connecting the top of the ship to the bottom with one side going up () Possibly with a wrap around on either end like a Paternoster lift.. The lower part of the ship I would have the gravity going in a different direction again, on the Z access so create a large number of smaller floors that could be serviced by a single lift rather than have wider floors.
Simple, when the turbolift reaches the intermix shaft, a transporter dematerializes it and it's occupants and rematerializes them on the other side of the shaft :P
Thanks for the breakdown, great video! In regards to the Oberth, lets just assume that that canoe bit at the bottom is a large deuterium tank for long range exploration (and no crew space) and call it a day. Oh, and everyone sleeps at their station...
I always thought that there were smooth Jeffreys tubes in the pylons of the Oberth, where you just jump through a hatch and slide down to Engineering. So much fun. Maybe reverse gravity to slide back up? Ridiculous, yes, but just look at that thing.
The suggestion had been made on the Trek BBS, several years ago now that the lower hull I'd actually the warp drive or( my idea, a production prototype transwarp drive). This solves many problems in that a transwarp prototype explains why the Excelsior was built, and it eliminates the need for a crew down there. Too much potential for radiation. Now about the 'warp' engines... Two possibilities, the first is that they are deployable sensor houses. The second an emergency way home warp drive. It would be much slower than the transwarp prototype, but would get you home faster than impulse power. As to sensor capabilities the one sensor you really need for a survey ship is a better clock. By knowing the precise time better, a force multiplier is obtained. So 'conventional' sensors would be by the virtue of the better clock that much better. To compare the original LIDAR, with current top of the line versions. They can image the rainforest floor. Versus synthetic apicture radar.
I always imagined the connecting turboshaft ran vertically, as you show,... but all the way past the hull separation into the saucer. Also - extendable turboshafts would extend down from the dorsal connector when emergency-landed. also - the saucer would sit on (and crush) the lower sensor dome, upon touchdown, carrying the weight of the saucer when emergency-landed, relegating the 'landing legs' to the job of leveling & stabilizing, not supporting. Side note: Unfortunately, there is little to no communication (in my experience) between the Concept Designer and Production Designer / Draftspersons / or any other persons who can add random doors & other features (like a 20 foot corridor outside of Engineering) to a set which could never exist. Fortunately, there was great communication, in that regard, on ST:TNG.
Funnily enough, another poster and I came to a similar conclusion (about jettisoning the lower saucer and just using the legs for stabilisation) a few days ago! The extendable turboshafts is a useful extra feature though 👍
The Constitution is actually probably the least problematic of the Kirk era Federation ships. Both the Miranda and the Oberth have entire parts of the ship which cannot be accessed from the saucer - fully half of the latter - and the Excelsior is regularly shown to be absolutely massive, leaving entirely the opposite problem of why it needs so much more space…
The issue with the Oberth is compounded by the fact that its early design envisioned a 180m long vessel before it was canonized as 120m long. The windows are scaled for 180m and do not make sense with a 120m long ship. Back to the issue, I saw some blueprints showing both the Oberth and the Miranda using closed-circuit intership transporters to access their respective outrigger hulls. With the Oberth, it also had a Jeffries tube in each pylon with a single person lift that also allowed access. When looking at TMP era ships, one requires a bit of suspension of disbelief to presume that the building materials are far superior to anything we have now, allowing such narrow connections while maintaining integrity.
@@schwartzritterx5905 well, it's a space ship, and in space, the forces acting on the various structures are massively reduced compared to the gravity well on a planet
The excelsior is easily explained as needing much more space because its a ship that's designed o operate much further from port, and thus needs more supplies and fuel onboard to go longer distances. Likewise Excelsior is also a much more powerful ship than constitution, and having more powerful shields and weapons demands a larger hull to fit in bigger power generation and transmission equipment. If anything, constitution is far too small for an interstellar spacecraft.
I'm a bit puzzled as to what the source(s) are for the intermix chamber running up the dorsal section. And so far up it to boot. Because if it ran that high, wouldn't it interfere with the emergency saucer separation feature? Whatever, it would appear from this and other videos it appears the neck section is too thin to accommodate all it was supposed to have. I'm glad they came up with more logical measurements for TNG and onwards.
I wrote a reply but I think it got filtered. This will be a little shorter but I’ll try to cover the main points. Andrew Probert used to maintain a blog where he posted a lot of original blueprints and sketches for stuff he worked on. So that includes the TMP Connie, the Galaxy-class, the DeLorean, and AirWolf. He laid out his thought processes and was generally a stickler for trying to ensure there was enough room in the model to accommodate its inner workings. The blueprints at least include mention of the saucer separation, and show a sort of connector into the “impulse deflection crystals” at that point. It does seem a bit overwrought though. But on his own blog he criticised himself, wondering why he decided the warp core should connect to the impulse engines at all. His placement forward in the dorsal was a result of connecting to the impulse engines, and he knew he felt like it made sense back then to do double duty on the same power plant, but looking back on it he thinks it should’ve been separate systems. He did carry that insight over into the Galaxy-class at least, which had completely separate impulse reactors. The blueprints for the secondary hull also don’t make any mention of the lifts, mainly just the engines, shuttle and cargo bays, and the arboretum. I suppose he thought he was blocking-out the major parts and the rest would get squeezed-in, which works with wiring but less-so with elevators!
@@kaitlyn__L The only thing that makes it make sense for me is that for safety, antimatter is stored at the bottom. The intermix is in line to take it to the nacelles. The matter component must be stored by the impulse drive. It could be using the same fuel for the core as for the Impulse fusion drive. Also the EPS power could be sent up separately from the core into the dilithum Deflection Crystals to boost Impulse engines. We know that phasers were tied into the warp drive. This would explain why the core is crazy long compared to other federation ships. The Miranda just does not need that length between it's duel fuel sources. The Refit Enterprise really seems to just be a ship that has been as modernized as humanly possible because the ambitious Excelsior project took longer than expected to be completed and they needed ships capable of combating the Klingons. They got as powerful as a ship they could on that old platform.
Two questions: 1A, why would the warp core be up front when the necelles are in the rear? 1B, since the beginning when Mitchell died, it was stated the impulse engines have their own fuel pods. 2: If the Enterprise were real, it was be the size of a heli carrier. Even though there no weight in space, any bloody connecting dorsal would have to be wider then 4.8 meters or the stress of full impulse and high speed turns would shred it.
Same issues with those pylons holding the warp nacelles in place. The whole ship is like an ice sculpture of a swan: so elegant, so beautiful, but ridiculously fragile.
You're forgetting the "Structural Integrity Field" as well as the "Inertial Dampers" AKA: Wizards magic. They already made in universe excuses to justify the pretty designs.
Totally agree. I never imagined that the core would be in the ships neck. That's ridiculous. I don't care what the charts might say. It's in the lower body.
First, ask yourself how there's gravity on board the Enterprise and how people don't get planted on the walls during maneuvers. Then ask yourself why inertia would have any more effect on the structural parts of the ship than it does on the crew.
I've done extensive starship designing via AutoCad in the past and my measurements make the interconnecting dorsal 8 meters or about 25 ft not including the photorp complex. Plenty of room then. Also, this makes room for the guest quarters on these decks. i've also always thought that the Enterprise was larger than established measurements. For example, there is space between decks for power conduits, lwater and sewer and jefffreies tubes. Additionally, the sizes of the landing bay, cargo by and Rec One in TMP certainly speak to a much larger ship. Originally, A. Probert wanted the refit to be 2,000 feet long (later these designs were partially retooled for the D). Making the 1701 440 meters in SNW is arguably one of the few retcons that works. Also, somethign to note: In the episode Mudd's Women, Scotty, when talking to Kirk about getting dilithium crystals, says that nearly a million gross tons of vessel was then operating on 1 crystal.
I'm so glad you ended on "it's not real, so it doesn't have to make sense." It's amazing to me how well thought out most of the design and technology is in Star Trek, even though it doesn't have to be. If actual engineers had designed an actual ship, they would have figured out ways to fix these problems, like making the dorsal thicker, etc. These were designers making sets and props for movies and tv. It's ok that every single piece doesn't fit perfectly.
A really great video and I just love the ending, popping a cork and just enjoying the fiction for what it is. The ship looks beautiful and we all know that if it was real the dorsal would either be thicker or not be there at all. Thanks for keeping this wonderful fictional ship and world in perspective!
A wise person once said, "if you're wondering how he eats and breathes, and other science facts, (la,la,la!) Just repeat to yourself it's just a show, I really should relax..."
I can't believe they put the warp core there. That's crazy. I always assumed it was further back in the ship and that top blue plate was a sensor dome or fusion reactor for the impulse drives.
I have the Scotty manual. Elevator tube is on the back side, by the Jefferies tube..Shane Johnsons Mr Scott's guide to the Enterprise..problem solved.👈🤠👍🎶
Having been on set at the Paramount lot for one of the movies, I can assure you that very little attention to how these would have gone into the mechanics of how any of these items practically worked.
Thats why people are so impressed with the Star Citizen spaceship models. They have to be fully planned out how they work and what the layout is. So no doors vanishing into the wall without having space for it etc.
Being on the Paramount lot does not give you exposure to any of the pre-production & design process that you are commenting on. But sure, most workers on set don’t need to know this stuff. Not really relevant.
The answer I think is simple. The turbolift doesn't need to pass through the vertical intermix chamber. There are (2) turbolifts, one on each side. So you would simply exit at the intermix chamber, walk to the other side, enter turbolift and continue.
The same way Voyager 's hangar could accommodate multiple shuttles, the Delta Flyer, Neelix' shuttle, and still have a parking space for Alice; and how a runabout could fit in Enterprise-D's hangar; and how (according to the Picard production designer) La Sirena could be stowed in a Titan-A/Enterprise-G hangar: It's TV and movies. If they say it works, it works.
Most of the hangar space issues make no sense but the enterprise d's main shuttlebay took up parts of three decks of the saucer section and used a good chunk of the saucer section on those decks
I just love this stuff!!! Please do more sections on the refit like this. The illustrative graphics are perfect!! Enjoyed every second and then stopped to freezeframe many shots. One thing to note about the Oberth Class: if the designers had just put a connecting dorsal on it like what you are talking about here, 90% of the enigma would have been solved.
The deck plans from Strategic Designs actually show the turboshaft being behind the intermix chamber. It enters the saucer section at the back, and then goes around the intermix chamber inside the saucer section. The Jefferies' tube ladder, however, goes down the front and directly between the torpedo launchers where you have the turboshaft shown.
I think a lot of problems like this was solved with the A. A had D's style core and engineering layout in the 6th movie. You only saw the blue constricting coils as a reflection during the brief engineering shot with Scotty when leaving space dock. I have the cutaway poster of A, but it sadly doesn't show this core change upgrade.
Great video! I hadn't considered the notion that the turboshaft could span diagonally. I suppose if we want to rationalize a little bit, I could imagine Kirk left the torpedo bay to cross the balcony around the warp core shaft to a turbolift access on the other side. There's a set of deck plans made by the guy who does Cydonia 6 for both the original and refit Constitution / Enterprise that are just epic, especially because they make locations line up brilliantly pre and post refit in a way that makes sense pretty well. On his designs the turboshaft is in the aft portion of the dorsal, doing only a brief stairstep and basically swinging into the impulse engine complex near the saucer rim (avoiding the concave). He doesn't sell that particular blueprint anymore, sadly. I absolutely recommend his Intrepid / Voyager though, and can also vouch personally for the B'rel deck plan. He manages to make /everything/ we see on screen fit (and in Voyager's case, a few beta canon locales as well). He also has a Defiant and Oberth, I don't have those but I have to assume they are the same top quality work.
@@kaitlyn__L We ca probability ignore it and say the vertical intermix chamber stops two decks above main engineering. The saving grace is we never see how far up it goes, we see Kirk one level above engineering and it rises in front of him to the ceiling so it might terminate some where up around there.
Not so sure about the movies, but I know in tos the turbo lift would move both sideways and up and down as indicated by the flashing light on the wall, it would shift from vertical to lateral on some occasions, whenever Kirk and Spock would take it from the bridge down to engineering or wherever, so they could have time for their little 1-on-1 elevator conversations. As for the refit, I think we just have to pretend that we don't notice these little things, and just admire how good she looks from the outside.
When it comes down to it, saying things like this doesn't mean anything. Everyone knows it's just a show and that it doesn't have to make sense. That has nothing to do with what is being talked about here.
What if there were two turbolifts used? a person would need to use the saucer lift to reach the neck, walk past the chamber to the engineering lift to reach the rest of the ship. That makes more sense and solves many problems. The one issue is that you don't have a single continuous lift, but a split system.
The necks have always been a bit of a sore point for me ever since i started recreating ships in 1:1 scale in a game called Space Engineers. It's nowhere near as detailled or accurate as 3D renders like yours but you get a feeling of the space in there and the necks... even on the Galaxy Class you can't put much in there. I've been wondering for a while why they even have windows. The neck section of a Galaxy is already absurdly small towards the front but what on earth could be in the CONNIE neck? D:
@@AndrewProbert Thank you for your reply! Junkball is a channel on this platform with a video that discusses this topic: "USS Enterprise's Neck Width." The host has a humorous style that I enjoy; I watched the video a while back but just reviewed the video. His analysis shows the original Enterprise's neck viewed from the front or rear would be 3.85 meters, or 12.6 feet. My previous comment was based on memory, so eight feet may have been my own estimate of what the interior space might be.
What I’ve always wanted to know is why there is an awesome transporter room, with a raised platform, glowing discs above and below where each passenger stands, a control desk facing the platform so the operator can observe the results of their actions and the glow and hum of heavy machinery that enables the “beaming” process or… OR you can just stand anywhere in the ship and be transported to anywhere else within or without the ship, within the machine’s range. So what are all the glowing disks and raised platforms etc for?
I know they aren't canon but, iirc, the original "Star Trek Blueprints" had the turbolift shaft stair-stepping through the dorsal. There wasn't a refit-style warp core in the way at that time, though. Thanks for the video! It wouldn't be a TRUE Trekker video if you hadn't thrown a little shade at the Oberth class. 🤣
I do some sci-fi modelling occasionally as a hobby. Took me countless hours to create a spaceship, about the size of a modern destroyer. Ship systems, airlocks, armor plating, cockpit layout, crew accommodation ..... I feel like most sci-fi designs go for the "good enough for the big screen approach", but they fall apart when you really think about it. You're not supposed to think about it and most people probably won't.
Why does this remind me of Galaxy Quest when the fan asks Tim Allen some random question about how x could happen in episode Y while z happened in episode M only to be told, "It's just a TV show!"
I've always said the scaling of the TOS and TMP Enterprise was off due to the needs of things like a shuttle hangar, the torpedo bay, and things required for life support like water recycling, solid waste recycling, a fusion-powered propulsion system (Impulse Engines). The Kelvin-Timeline Enterprise (or as some call it, the JJPrize) got the scaling RIGHT...maybe not the looks right, but the scaling right. The Galaxy-sized vessel, therefore, should have been the size of the USS Vengeance (Star Trek Into Darkness).
There are hundreds of sites online that show the deck plans of Enterprise A, and show that the saucer section and engineering section have 2 different turbolifts. The top of the Engineering section Turbolift is close to the bottom of the Saucer section Turbolift. Simple answer is you cannot go directly from the bottom of engineering to the bridge in one turbolift, but have to hop out of the engineering one, cross a short hall, and get in the saucer turbolift.
I actually built a to-scale deck by deck model of the Enterprise refit in Minecraft, and to answer the torpedo room question, I had the intermix chamber run between the launcher tubes. In the official diagrams, the gantries for engineering actually do not start until the deck below the torpedo launcher. I ran the turbolift shaft in front of engineering and swung it to the side once it had reached main engineering. This is how it reaches the cargo/shuttle bays. It's a tight fit but there is just enough room. The torpedo room itself is accessed by a small lift from a few decks the deck above main Engineering. This is what I followed in the official blue prints.
The turbolifts aren't just up-and-down things, they're interior smart-shuttles with multiple pods in each system. There are a couple places on the ships where both systems go to and the systems can exchange pods but each system is independently powered and operated by computer. They literally go all over the place as well as up and down and they can even hold atmosphere for about 3 days if the shafts are breached. What will really blow your mind is that some of the ports on the sides of the ships are _turbolift ports_ for when secured to a dock and most the ships can be equipped to operate the habitable pods OR cargo pods through these ports and around the ship. They never really went into it but that's cannon.
The intermix chamber service area could have narrowed around the torpedo bay (and likely been reinforced, preventing Reliant's phasers from severing it), in which case, the door Kirk exited by could have led to a hallway or room allowing him to go around the chamber and to the turbolift. The real question then is whether he had to step over part of the torpedo launch track, since the torpedo bay clearly feeds into a double launcher. Not at all impossible, given that STVI shows Bones and Spock in that part of the bay as they upgrade a torpedo on the fly. The real problem, as you say, is that the shaft goes right through the Engineering lobby and there's no room for it to move over to the left or right before that. We can almost make it fit by assuming that the lobby isn't precisely forward of Engineering, but is off-center towards Starboard. That doesn't quite fit what we see on-screen, but it makes a little sense of Kirk walking down a long hallway to get to the lobby in TMP, which might be able to barely fit to the starboard of Engineering. Okay, not really, but it makes more sense than any other scenario I can think of. All this because the TMP designers wanted to show off a huge, mostly-empty, warehouse-style shuttle bay in TMP and have a vertical shaft connecting Engineering with the impulse engines.
I think that the thought put into this video represents about 1000x the amount of time the interior and exterior set designers and model makers coordinated on the design.
they never put this amount of thought into the design. realistic renders of the ships only began with discovery, which were necessitated by the VFX models that let them do shots pushing in from space into windows onto set. versions of this were faked on TNG onward but on disco they built full models of the ship, including hallways, and then did it for constitution class ships for enterprise, which required retconing the class to be larger because the canonical size of the ship did not work with the windows you see, the implied corridors within, for the 3d renders needed for vfx. love your videos.
To the Narrator: Best explanation and visual example for the reason why this movie and others like it fall so neatly into the category of Science Fiction.
Whats kinda funny is that in retrospect, the Constitutions (I and II) are now a minority in Starfleet's ship design history when it comes to the thin neck. All ships after it opted for much thicker necks, or just omitted the neck in general.
While putting the torpedo deck on top of the engineering hull, made a lot of sense, having the reactor and the plasma conduit run around the whole ship caused a lot of problems. Then when considering the incredible energy consumption of transporters, phasers, and deflector screens, the plumbing would have to be considerable on any account. That makes for a problem with the neck on the Klingon battle cruiser. It's just too thin to support the plumbing for shields and disruptors, let alone Photon torpedoes! Both ships could use some love from some engineers, who aren't on the clock. Of course, they're going to have to take significant liberties, that a lot of fans aren't going to like, such as sweeping changes to the weapon systems.
Would solve a lot of problems (including Torpedo room weirdness) if the intermix chamber stopped at the top of the secondary hull. I know the warp core and impulse systems are supposed to be connected in this era of starship design, but it just makes more sense to me that way imo.
Why are we assuming such a huge opening around the vertical core all the way up? It could very easily been encased in a closed shaft throughout most of the length with enough rm for maintenance access only. Much like boiler ductwork. That would free up a great deal on space around the core. Imo
St6 also showed the torpedo tubes... The loading mechanism. McCoy and Spock are doing surgery on the torpedo as it loads. The tubes must be hugging the warp core in that section
This all may be the best justification for the retcon in both the Kelvin and the Disco/SNW Enterprise. The ship is simply bigger than we thought it was and there's turbolift shaft on both sides of the warp core
Kind of but kind of not. The story goes that the JJ Enterprise was going to be the same size as TOS Ent, but they realized after they went to design and build their sets that nothing would fit properly. So they doubled the official length without changing the exterior model. That's why the windows are still in scale with the OG Ent, despite being the equivalent of two decks tall according to the rescaled dimensions. Just another production goof. The new specs probably just carried forward into the new TV series.
@@ironsides982 this isn't unprecedented. The Millennium Falcon and Galileo shuttle are 2 more examples of interior sets being twice as big as the exterior. I had the Enterprise RPG map from the old FASA days that was scaled for a thousand foot ship. It was too small. 4 people couldn't squeeze into a turbolift car. In Star Trek:The Motion Picture, that was the shuttle bay they were in when they watched the feed from the station being destroyed by V'Ger. I won't mention STV when the rocketed up the turbolift. That was just sloppy continuity. That was too tall even for the JJ-Prise
@@hollywoodguy70 Right, I remember hearing (cant remember where) that Shatner thought that the current number of desks sounded too low for whatever reason. They just numbered the decks up to whatever sounded good for those shots in the turbolift shaft. I suppose when you're depicting that kind of speed, 20 or so decks didn't read too well. The speed combined wit the number of shot depicting them in motion would have put them well past deck 20-whatever, so they quadrupled the deck count. Not that they needed that scene except to make the journey from the brig (on the bottom of the ship for some reason) seem more dangerous and exciting. LOL we all know ST:V had alot of issues.
Strategic Designs blueprints do a good job answering this pretty convincingly. 2 turbolift shafts go straight down from the bridge for the first 5 decks before branching out on deck 6. One of those horizontal branches snakes toward the port, aft quarter of the saucer, then drops down to deck 7, and follows the edge of the saucer around to the back, sliding just behind the intermix chamber shaft and just under the impulse engineering compartment. It then goes down 3 decks to deck 10, runs horizontal toward the aft, goes down another 3 decks to bypass the photon launcher room and the torpedo magazine above it, and then snakes down into the engineering hull.
I agree with your conclusion. At a certain point in just about any sci-fi series, the MST3K Law kicks in: Repeat to yourself, "It's just a show. I should really just relax." 🎶
I seem to remember some drawing that showed the lift from the torpedo room going down below engineering then forward to meet the main shaft between the saucer and secondary hull, which ran between the torpedo tubes to a point. The same drawing noted that during torpedo operation the lift shaft was closed and the torpedo tubes bisected the lift. So there could be no lift between engineering and the saucer during combat operations, which is why those small man lifts that ram the inside of the vertical intermix shaft existed, to provide movement via engineering between the saucer and secondary hull.
Possible that the one turbo lift ended (from the torpedo bay). Exit the turbo lift. Walk around the vertical intermix chamber, Then enter another turbo lift on the opposite side of the vertical intermix chamber.
We have the assumption that the turbolift is like an elevator car, a box large enough for some 4-8 people to stand and chat comfortably. Because that's what we see being used on all the Enterprises. Why not coffin-sized turbolifts for a single standing occupant? Or cockpit-sized turbolifts for a single seated occupant? These smaller turbolifts could easily fit within an Oberth's slender hull pylons.
Movie designers could have easily solved this by just making the neck wider and if anyone complained they could reply "c'mon you can't even fit a car length wise on that neck.
As far as I'm aware, there never was an emergency saucer separation on the Kirk era of the Enterprise, this was only a feature on the TNG Enterprise, which was actually used on a couple of occasions thinking back.
According to the canon manuals, there has always been the ability to seperate the saucer in an emergency, even in TOS, but it's not reversible. Like an ejection seat, using it means trashing the vehicle. TNG made it into a gimmick.
Its things like this why i love the enterprise E and F. Starfleet designs eventually did away with the neck and just attached the saucer straight onto the engineering section whilst heavily steamlining the design
When the lift reached the top of the interconnecting dorsal fin, it moved either left or right then straight forward avoiding Impulse Engineering. The Primary Hull cuts into the fin at that point allowing the lift once it arrives at the top of the fin to move either left or right then straight or on around the primary hull. Also remember there is a lift in the Warp Drive Engineering Room that runs from somewhere in Impulse Engineering to the floor of the main Intermix chamber. The Lift is open so one might want to hang onto the railing of the Lift as it travels down into Warp Drive Engineering.
The TMP refit is a problem. That vertical shaft stretching up to the impulse engines make it impossible for turbo lifts to run stem to stern uninterrupted. And we see that in TWOK when Spock has to pass through a hatch on his way to engineering to hot wire the warp drive. The Enterprise-A, on the other hand, has a different engine layout, thanks to reuse of the TNG engine room. That gives us enough wiggle room to imagine a different arrangement of the internals and remedy this problem.
Spock had to use the Jeffries tubes to get to engineering because the turbo lifts were inoperative below C deck. He told Kirk this after returning from the Genesis cave. They climbed up the tube from the transporter deck and presumably boarded a lift on C deck to get to the bridge.
Who's to say that the turbo shaft couldn't go up into the saucer section at little then semi-circle around the crystal section, and then back down 🤔... Okay, enough brain drain for tonight 😵💫. That hurt 🤕...
I like to think right at the top of the intermix chamber right below the impulse complex the chamber was closed so the lift can ether go left or right around the core-itself, just having the top section of that open chamber would fix this issue quite quickly, straight path along then around the core then behind a bit of a turbo shaft box around the core at the very top of the chamber.
the scaling issue of fitting everything in is a common issue, its why you load into the ships in Mass Effect for example. The Normandy you see exteriorly is way too small to fit what is inside it, Same with the Tempest in Andromeda. The ever in development game Star Citizen has had ships gain a lot of scale in its earlier years when they realized the interiors would not fit into the hulls they originally modeled for trailers and such. Because in that game you do not load anywhere which means ship interiors have to fit into their exteriors.
5:01 it seems quite obvious that there is an integrated transporter which beams the turbo lift pod from the rear of the intermix chamber to the front and vice versa.
@hunter-in-the-shadows My comment was a bit tongue-in-cheek. In the end it's a TV show and the real explanation is simply that none of the showmakers ever thought of this bit of continuity error ... it takes some dedicated fans to spot this. :)
I built this ship in minecraft with about 300 mods to make it fully working in everyway, I managed to get the turbolifts working just fine. I got the deck plans online and everything worked out almost 100% perfectly to scale within minecraft.
The "neck" concept only exists because Roddenberry wanted the saucer to detach. This was 1965 (the show's early development) and flying saucers were the "standard" in science-fiction. Roddenberry envisioned many episodes set on planets, and the saucer was how the crew was to get down to the planet. Thus - the saucer / neck design. But as they started writing scripts, they quickly realized the saucer landings would consume way too much time in a 48 minute episode. It simply wasn't going to work for a weekly series. So they invented the transporter.
I always appreciated that the AI running the turbolifts always knew how to time its speed, so that the passenger conversations always ended just as the destination was reached.
🤣
That's the kind of sophisticated stuff we can look forward to in the 23rd century 😂
Especially Spock and the Romulan Commander's lengthy ride all the way down from deck 1 to deck 2
AI of the future is scary 👀
Who's been holding up the damn elevator?
As we all know, the refit Enterprise has a straight vertical turbolift shaft that runs through 78 of its 21 decks.
huh?
@@crsrdash-840b5Star Trek V reference
@@RCAvhstape do you mean JJ enterprise?
@@crsrdash-840b5 No, the rocket boots scene from Star Trek V.
And, of course, adding to the ridiculousness of that scene, the decks numbers grow in the size as you go up, instead of down, like it’s supposed to be. :-)
I have emailed Andrew Probert, the designer of the refit Enterprise, many times. He said his plan was to have the turbolifts move upwards from the hangardeck, move forward paralleling the engine room. They would then turn in front of engineering and begin traveling upward between the torpedo tubes and just forward of the vertical intermix shaft in the dorsal connector. They would then end up in the saucer section just forward of the impulse deck.
This is how I'd always imagined it as well.
Yeah me too
Thinking about it when the Reliant phaser hit the port side torpedoes side launcher it must have taken out the turbo lift as Captain Spock stated that hit had taken out turbo lift and thereby they had to climb to a deck where the turbos where still working. I agree with the fact the neck section was too narrow and should have been a little wider to accommodate extra turbos shafts. It also best to remember if there was a evacuation of the star drive then there would be little time to get everybody out due to limited number of turbo lifts
Turbolifts also don't have to remain upright. They can turn sideways and the passengers wouldn't know it due to artificial gravity. This allows them to save space and pass through tight sections.
@@Novusod In ST TOS, the deck indicator lights in the turbo elevators either flashed horizontally or vertically, denoting their direction of travel. Had the elevators traveled in the way you describe, the light would only have flashed in the vertical direction. This would have been the case because the passengers would have been traveling head first or feet first if the elevators moved in the way you suggest. Andrew Probert had input into the cutaway poster of the refit Enterprise and all of the elevator shafts were oriented either horizontally or vertically. He also told me that if you look very closely, you can see that he drew representations of himself and his wife in the arboritem.
The more I watch those kinds of videos, the more inclined I am to believe Star Trek to be a work of fiction rather than a documentary.
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂.... Great comment 😂😂😂
In the turbo lifts in TOS there’s a panel on the wall that when the lift was moving would either show a pattern of lights going from top to bottom, when Kirk and co we’re going to engineering, or bottom to top when they were going to the Bridge, sometimes the lights would go from side to side. I always thought this was showing how the lift was moving during the scene
That's exactly what was going on.
Nailed it!
It may well be that those lights are for the benefit of the crew inside rather than actually reflective of the outside, so lights moving on the vertical axis could still be shown even if the lift is traveling diagonally. (Of course, in actual fact the lights are just there for the benefit of the cameras and the audience :D)
They had that on tng as well
absolutely correct, they also go sideways and around turns and things
I'm not gonna lie, throughout the video I was constantly saying to myself that there are probably two turbolift networks. After finishing the video I went and looked at Connie refit MSDs and sure enough, the turbolift in the secondary hull does in fact lead into where the core is (a deck or two below where the impulse engines are) to which another turbolift door sits on the other side (to the front) of the warp core. A pretty simple idea as a person would just have to walk around the warp core to get into the next lift to get into the saucer. Perhaps not the most ideal but definitely an easy solution.
Another point to consider if this is the case: If the Enterprise were boarded in the engineering hull, a few security people placed between those two lifts could control the pathway to the saucer section. Sometimes the best way to stop the enemy is to take away the ramp he's counting on...
exactly. just because it is not show in the movies or in the series, we can safely agree that things must be there to keep the crew alive and solve functional issues
like having toilets and whatnot.
having two turbolifts AND a small path to walk between them is fairly logical. like in huge buildings (like airports) having a lift between two sections is not possible but having two lifts and some walkway between them is all it takes.
and it has some advantages too. should one turbolift break down, you can still at least cover half the journey unaffected by the broken one. :)
@@ComicsluvrWait... wouldn't that put the security bottleneck, and likely gunfight... kind of right on top of the friggin' warp core? This sounds like a bad plan.
@@CptJistuce LoL, like that time a Klingon held the warp core hostage with a phaser in TNG...maybe it would lead to a stand-off, but any fanatical person might just say welp, I guess we'll all blow up then!
It's an INCREDIBLY simple solution and frankly I don't get why people are wracking their brains about it.
On a similar note:
The *Gateway Arch* at the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, was originally planned as just a monument. A viewing room at the top was considered, but the Arch's triangular cross-section and its overall shape being an inverted weighted catenary curve of 630 feet in both height and width, would have only allowed for stairs. Many engineers thought it was impossible to install elevators; the one-of-a-kind design of a tram system was conceived in just two weeks by a man named Dick Bowser, who never received a college degree. The tram system has been in use since 1967.
a fittingly legendary name for the inventor of such a design
Most well known as the cousin to Gay Bowser
He never received a collage degree because they were laughing too much to hand it over.
I always thought of the lifts as more like a pneumatic tube style setup. Given the control of gravity in the ship they could easily shift into diagonal, vertical, or horizontal. All that really matters is that at the end it orients to the destination. The entrances could be punchouts that allow for loading and the initial click simply the reorientation to the lift line.
They could simply go horizontally as well. Given the size of a Galaxy's saucer using a turbo lift for a cross saucer trip makes sense.
Getting to the secondary hull of an Oberth flat requires the cabin of the turbo lift to tilt on its trip.
@@mikespangler98 Maybe the Oberth class uses the 2D-Space technology to flatten the turbolifts like that one episode in the Orville :)
Functionally in episodes we have seen lifts jam, in next gen they had to pop the top of one and climb to a geofrey tube.. which also implies lifts usually run parallel to Geoffrey tubes
they are maglev I think. Fun note an RL elevator company has shown a functional elevator using this tech and it does work like a turbolift able to go vertical and horizontal.
There is some two dimensional thinking going on here!
The "grav plating" idea that there's some magic artifical gravity generation going on in the decking inside the turbo lift means that the lift capsule didn't need to obey the idea that the lifts move strictly vertically like the elevator in a building.
Imagine the turbolift capsule could take a curving path as it traveled the tube shift. It could travel in any configuration so it appears from the outside to being any orientation like flipping over on its side and the occupants inside would experience no change in its internal gravity always going down to its internal floor.
It could do loops like a roller coaster car but sealed inside with the doors closed its occupants wouldn't experience any change in inertia. Inside the turbo lift the gravity is local.
In fact the lift could be completely "upside down" in relation to viewing it from outside yet the occupants wouldn't be aware of that inside.
This frees up the shaft to run any way you please instead of going in strictly vertical or horizontal directions as it travels as shown in the animations.
The overall width of the dorsal is still a problem, but again what we see as shafts rising vertically between decks isn't necessarily restricted to being horizontal as well as vertical in the blueprints.
The parts of the sets we see have to go vertically as that's the only practical way to build them in a sound stage, but who's to say with magnetic constriction inside the matter antimatter tubing once the they disappear up in the ceiling don't start curving like bending pipes like plumbing tubing? A tubolift shaft could be bang up against the mix tubing as it twists past it as the magnetic containment must keep any heat or radiation contained inside the "glass" we see in Engineering right?
So the mix tubing could be bang up against the inside of the dorsal hull on one side and the tube shaft on the other and the structure members and hull plating in the fragile looking neck of the dorsal be the densest and strongest on the entire ship. It would have to be to prevent the thing getting twisted or sheered in half between the primary and secondary hulls as the whole ship moves through space.
The structural integrity field must beef up that strength in relativistic speeds, but once the warp field forms the ship itself is experiencing no inertia changes or the crew would be goo.
Practically the neck could have been lots wider like in the galaxy class and not really affect the look of the model ship, but Jefferies just drew it insanely thin and the model was built that way for looks.
Now you REALLY want a brain-melting problem try fitting all the sets seen in the Discovery in the film "2001" into the round hull of its model!
It's like Doctor Who's TARDIS where it's bigger on the inside due to "transdimensional engineering" so it's enormous interior fits inside a tiny exterior!
The 4th Doctor explained it hilariously to Lela who listens and proclaims "That's silly!" to which The Doctor proudly proclaims "That's Timelord engineering!"
I'd give anything to know the reactions in the actual 23rd century to our 20th century imagings of their time!
As we look at old 1930s-50s scifi serials like say Buck Rogers, they will be rolling on the floor laughing at any of our current TV shows I'm sure.
The transporter is likely to forever be the silliest "tech" ever imagined - but then again maybe it will inspire them to muse that tearing a human apart into its atoms and reassembling them is silly, but come up with a way to simply flip people through an inter-dimensional wormhole to their destination?
The actual 23-25 century technology made so weird we can't even begin to imagine it now.
Look at how bang up until the year 2000 no scifi show or movie anticipated smart phones. No one has them in "Blade Runner" set in 2019. Anything written decades ago in stories set after 2000 anticipated them.
Scifi is just often lousy at predicting future tech...
In my opinion, we have a scale problem. They were never consistent in the overall size of the ships in relation to interior shots. The set designers treated the ships like TARDIS's. (bigger on the inside than the outside) "Look, there's just enough room for a turbolift." "But how.." "It just is!!"
The book "Mr Scott's Guide To The Enterprise" postulated that the turbolift slides into the dorsal on G-deck from the side, then goes down, aft, down, aft and finally down (behind the torpedo room) into the secondary hull. It's a lot of manoeuvres but it does fit!
This, it does indeed do complex maneuvers in the Impulse Engine complex.
@@whitewolf3051 Am very well acquainted with Halfscreen's channel, but thanks anyway! 👍
Still a smooth ride thanks to inertia dampeners.
I gotta say I love the attention you have given to your cutaways, makes it very easy to visualize the interior of the ship. Would love to see you cover other areas of the ship, especially those in the plans not shown on the shows or movies.
Every ship has that small area where the only option is to beam the entire turbo lift to the closest shaft. There's also the one where the turbo lift is shot into space and it utilizes its own thrusters to re-enter the ship at the appropriate shaft.
Or just runs on tracks on the outside of the hull
Not really: Most ships from the Excelsior onwards have a big enough neck to have a turbo lift pass through. And the nacelles were before and also after the NCC 1701 D only reachable by stair shafts. Also, don't forget, that you don't really need an easy access to that nacelles: When they are at warp, the nacelles are a no go zone anyway and when they need to repair something, they can also reach the nacelles by a small space walk! Just get out of the ship near the bottom of the nacelle and walk up that 200m to the entrance area in the nacelle.
@@Quazgar_of_the_North XD that would be incredible
I always tend to assume scaling issues when it comes to things like this. Especially given how big those dorsal windows look against the height of the deck, while we’re shown more traditional size portholes on the sets. If we scale up by 20-50% there’s plenty of room for the turbolift to go around.
Similarly the size of the windows on the Excelsior model would actually be a little too small.
They’re what looks best on the models of course, and I wouldn’t really want to swap the size of the windows on either of them. But the windows alone present a sizing and placement issue of decks and internal machinery, so I don’t think too hard about the rest of the insides. Scaling-up slightly would help fit the torpedo complex inside the bulge at the base of the dorsal too.
I'm also content to believe that the size of the sets are generally larger than they would be in the real world of the fiction. They designed them to be easy to shoot scenes in with both space for cameras and lighting and comfortable blocking of the actors.
It's like your average sitcom living room set vs most actual living spaces, even relatively poor families like the Connors lived in extravagant excess if we take their floor plan as literal.
@@DrewLSsix excellent point! There’s an awful lot of room on those walkways around the warp core.
@@DrewLSsix just like submarines in movies too. Hard to make accurate and still have a practical set for filming.
Let's not forget the filming whoopsie in one of the movies where a shaft appears to run vertically for 60+ decks (according to deck markers) in a ship with less than 30 decks total?
@@Krahazik you mean that scene where Spock has the rocket boots and the turboshaft looks like it could be a lobby to observation deck elevator on the Empire State Building?
was the point of this video to boost algorithm engagement by getting everyone to comment on all the incredibly obvious answers, such as lift orientation and chamber width?
kudos. it worked.
I'm happy to contribute as well
I think this gets solved if we don’t assume the vertical warp core goes all the way to the impulse deflection crystal. If we instead say that the core extends upwards towards an “impulse engineering complex” (one that has the deflection crystal in line with, but not necessarily directly connected to, the upper end of the warp core), then we can suppose that the turbolift shaft simply passes horizontally between the top of the core and the deflection crystal.
True. We all assume the core goes through the whole neck. But that is even not logical when we remind ourselves that this ship can saucer seperate! Most likely the impulse drive and the saucer section is just connected to the warp core by two high energy connectors where the hull is made steadier, and in between them on Deck F the turbo lift passes through.
There isn't a full end of the warp core on H-deck, instead just a lockdown/venting connector leading to the topside warp crystal.
Hence a full room isn't used for the core leaving room for a turbo lift to pass through it and up to the main saucer.
Exactly this. You can kind of tell when Kirk enters the engineering space in TMP that the intermix shaft tappers as it goes upward from there, likely because the impulse engines don't need as much plasma as the warp drive.
@@captainyossarian388 Agreed, or it could split up against the walls on the way up to feed the individual impulse engines, leaving a gap for the turbolift to go through.
WHAT IS THIS NONSENSE ABOUT WARP CRYSTALS? The impulse engines ran on deuterium.. PRIOD.. No warp related anything. They were NOT powered from Engineering directly
@@ZakhadWOW I feel you're confusing two comments as one. Warp cores operated off of dilithium or lithium crystals (depending on class/age of ship), and impulse engines did indeed operate off deuterium. However the original person noting warp core crystals said nothing about impulse, the follow up comment did.
That said the general model of a warp core is that antimatter is sent into an intermix chamber and deuterium is injected in as well to which it created a plasma energy put into a matrix made of the relative warp crystal (dilithium or lithium) which then basically became your warp plasma (the energy for warp) and electro-plasma (the energy powering the ship).
Impulse drives otherwise were self-sustained with their own fusion reactor though correct (at least I assume that's what you meant by "not powered from engineering directly"), however they were still tied to engineering sorta, in that use of the impulse drives created a byproduct of electro-plasma also (which is why at least in some episodes of different star trek series', even if the warp core was 'shut down' or ejected, etc, the ship still had power likely fed by a general use of impulse drives).
@@ZakhadWOW They always call that dome the "warp crystal", although it's not. It's just a glowing part of the impulse engineering facility.
The elevator in TOS moved both up & down, as well as horizontal and/or diagonal, similar to how both the Eiffel Tower and the Luxor Hotel in Vegas elevators work. In a few episodes when Kirk was in the lift, you could see in the back which direction they were traveling that was lite up to show which direction they were going.
I found a set of blueprints that seems to answer these questions fairly well (assuming the scaling is right, of course). It's something called the NCC-1701A Deck Plans by "Strategic Designs," created around the time of Undiscovered Country.
In their design, a horizontal turboshaft runs aft down the saucer centerline on G deck, to a point just forward of the impulse engineering room. From there a vertical shaft goes straight down through the next eight decks, bisecting the two torpedo launch bays along the way, near the front of the hull, as you surmised. This shaft terminates on O deck next to Main Engineering. On O-deck (in the engineering hull), there is finally enough room for a horizontal turbolift tube to traverse around the intermix chamber core in a "semicircular" path, before continuing to head aft, running parallel to the horizontal part of main engineering, on its way to servicing the rest of the engineering hull.
Your second issue concerned Kirk's path between the torpedo launch bay and the bridge. According to the blueprints, the door in the torpedo launch bay you mentioned leads to a service ladder shaft that runs just aft of the intermix chamber from M deck (torpedo launch bay) to H deck.
The pathing gets a little tricky to figure out here, but it looks like the intermix chamber is just wide enough on J deck to support a catwalk all the way around the core, plus some doors between the intermix chamber and compartments fore and aft. Just forward of the intermix chamber, on J, there's a tiny observation lounge that has access to the turbolift system. So if I'm reading it right, they had to climb up three levels on ladders, enter the intermix chamber, and then take a short walk around the core, into the observation lounge, and into the turbolifts.
Nah, you're reading those wrong. That's a Jefferies tube. The turbolift shaft runs behind the intermix chamber, and just above the photon bay runs horizontal to go behind the photon bay and down into the secondary hull.
@@Jarsia Well, the way that you can tell on that deck plan, usually, is whether it has some medium-sized empty white circles in the passage. Other than a few exceptions here and there, those represent vertical turbolift shafts - the symbol legend shows this. And then, turbolift doors are usually the shaded circles that have one slightly flattened edge where they meet a walkable passageway.
I do see a Jeffries tube in the aft part of O-deck (labeled "JT") that looks like it can be accessed by a turbolift door.
Now the plans aren't perfect - I spotted a place in the saucer where it looks like they were missing vertical shafts. But their idea for a half loop around the warp core seems feasible.
@@jimwesteven2023 I do wonder if we're looking at the same versions, as the ones I have are dated to 2009. Got them off cygnus-x1
@@Jarsia The one I was looking at was also from cygnus, but dated to 1992. That brings up a very good point, though. There's no such thing as a definitive blueprint. All of them are works of imagination, and equally valid.
But I just had a thought - the ones I was looking at were for the Enterprise-A, not the refit. So it's not even the same ship, LMAO. It might have the same turbolift layout as the refit or it might not - impossible to know.
The thing I liked about the Ent-A plans there was that they actually have an overhead view instead of the side view schematic. Seeing an overhead helps get a sense of the volume of the space and is more "fun" to look at. Though no more definitive of course.
@@jimwesteven2023 yeah mine also have the deck by deck layout. I tried commenting with a link a few days ago but the comment kept disappearing
A diagonal Jefferies Tube would be hell to go through.
As anyone who's seen THAT episode of Discovery knows, Starfleet used Timelord TARDIS-derived technology to make their Starships bigger on the inside and the Turbolift cars run inside the cavernous interior of the ships.
ugh... I'm trying to forget that.
Please stop reminding us that STD exists.
@@phobos258try a lobotomy, but you seem like you may have had one already.
@@zerrodefexstop bitching about it then.😮
As Lucy lawless so eliquently put whenever somebody called out a flaw in Xena, she would reply:
"A wizard did it." Then again she also proclaimed that "Xena Needs Xex!" so take it all with a grain of salt.
In the motion picture, there's a scene with Kirk in the turbolift just after arriving and surveying the cargo deck.
At the rear of the lift cab, there's a map with a moving light showing the primary lift layouts. Going by that, the vertical shaft is either to the front or sides of the vertical warp core segment.
As on the Discovery from 2001 not everything will fit, and we have to go with it :)
🖖😎👍Very cool and very nicely well done and very well executed and informatively explained in every detail way shape and form possibly provided indeed on the turbo shaft and everything else with in the dorsal inbetween that of the primary hull and secondary hull indeed!.
Kirk didn't leave the torpedo bay and go to the Bridge in TWOK, he went down to Enginering first which makes sense as he would have walked out the door to the warp core area and then down one deck.
But then he would have had to go through a door to access the warp core observation area, and THAT door would have had to be in the center. Having it off to the side means he walks into the starboard torpedo tube...ahhh gotta love those trekonsistancy issues lol.
@@02ujtb00626 Oh your right, I forgot the tube shaft is down the center and then spits off. I suppose he can duck under it!!😄
@@02ujtb00626 Especially back then, I don't think they put too much thought into how spaces would fit within the ship. Kind of like how in most games, the interior space of a ship often does not conform to the exterior model of the ship.
@@02ujtb00626 What about the one person elevator Kirk uses in Star Trek 2 to access the warp core second level scaffolding?
@@SiXiam I'm not sure. I think that just leads to engineering upper support like in Voyager and TNG.
A very good video overall. And to add to the problems presented, with all of the room that the Enterprise's neck needs to devote to a warp core shaft, a torpedo room, whatever rooms that are there that require portals, and a turbo lift shaft that snakes through there somehow...where is there any room for support structures? The saucer section is massive as is the engineering section. That dorsal pylon had to be crazy strong for how thin it was, and even if it was entirely devoted to an inner skeleton that could handle the load, it still looks like it's seriously in danger of bending or snapping if the ship encountered any torsion from even basic maneuvers.
But here we are with just a stack of decks and some shafts running up through much of it, with the usual paper-thin hull plating along the outside.
It's been a long time since I had last seen "Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan", so I don't remember enough details about the movie in order to notice the ship design inconsistencies of the TMP era Constitution class starship refit design configuration. But there are some possible explanations to get around those design inconsistencies.
One: the ship has 2 forward torpedo launch tubes, which means that it either has 2 torpedo launch control rooms for the forward tubes, or has just one room that is bigger than what was depicted on screen. Either way, the launch control room is probably not directly connected to the Turbolift shaft, so there may be a small corridor that is between those 2 sites of the ship.
Two: the ship's "neck" may have 2 Turbolift shafts, one in the front with no deck access between the saucer section and the engineering section, and one in the back with access to all decks in the neck, but with that Turbolift shaft terminating within the saucer near the impulse engines.
Three: the shaft for warp core may be way bigger in diameter than the warp core itself, possibly big enough to accommodate a Turbolift car, probably running on tracks through the warp core shaft instead of a separate Turbolift shaft occupying the open space of the warp core shaft. It would make sense to me that the warp core shaft might be much wider than the warp core itself, because the port-to-starboard width of the neck of the TMP Enterprise always seemed to me to be much wider than the port-to-starboard width of the neck of the TOS Enterprise.
There may be other possible explanations for the design inconsistencies, but those 3 are the only ones that I can think of at this time.
When looking at the older USA Battleships, a lot of small and only designed as emergency escape tunnels in certain parts of the ship were filled with pipes and cables as they were modernized. Not worth it drilling holes through thick armor or lots of decks.
What if the warp core goes through the old turbolift shaft. If turbolift tech has advanced like everything else, maybe the space needed for that has decreased letting room for it to go around the core.
Makes no sense to have on each floor for there to be a big room where you can walk around the core. That space is definitely being used to run a lot of eps, data and what other "future pipes and cables" necessary for the ship to run.
dude, your solution to this is offscreen lift changes. I would assume over the course of the ship there would be at least two turbo lifts in the saucer, and possibly a horizonta one. There would be a turbo lift along the back of the dorsal, and the lower body would have two or three as well. I assume horizontal 'lifts' would be a must for quick transport around the ship, if you can go on an angle why not horizontal. This means he could get a lift upwards, get out, walk five meters to another lift and make it to his destination. Horizontal lifts would also make it possible to the bridge quicker than walking.
This makes the most sense.
@@Melkur1981 While I'm on the subject of occams razor, I never understood why star trek ship designs have gravity (the floor) being always in the same direction when gravity is controlled through Gravity Plates. I would have assumed different gravity for each section. The Saucer can have floors on the x axis sure, but the dorsal section would be two big floors with the 'Foor' the part people walk on running down the middle (on the y axis), so that the big energy transfer cable can be accessed at any point from a single floor with people walking alongside it! The lift here would essentially work like a conveyor belt connecting the top of the ship to the bottom with one side going up () Possibly with a wrap around on either end like a Paternoster lift.. The lower part of the ship I would have the gravity going in a different direction again, on the Z access so create a large number of smaller floors that could be serviced by a single lift rather than have wider floors.
@5:35 "Repeat to yourself, 'It's just a show, so I should sit back and relax...'" 😆
Amen! It’s a good show, it’s a fun show. But it’s a show and not real.
@@doubledrats235 You don't seem to understand the technical underpinnings around Star Trek.
Simple, when the turbolift reaches the intermix shaft, a transporter dematerializes it and it's occupants and rematerializes them on the other side of the shaft :P
Thanks for the breakdown, great video! In regards to the Oberth, lets just assume that that canoe bit at the bottom is a large deuterium tank for long range exploration (and no crew space) and call it a day. Oh, and everyone sleeps at their station...
I always thought that there were smooth Jeffreys tubes in the pylons of the Oberth, where you just jump through a hatch and slide down to Engineering. So much fun. Maybe reverse gravity to slide back up?
Ridiculous, yes, but just look at that thing.
The suggestion had been made on the Trek BBS, several years ago now that the lower hull I'd actually the warp drive or( my idea, a production prototype transwarp drive). This solves many problems in that a transwarp prototype explains why the Excelsior was built, and it eliminates the need for a crew down there. Too much potential for radiation.
Now about the 'warp' engines...
Two possibilities, the first is that they are deployable sensor houses. The second an emergency way home warp drive. It would be much slower than the transwarp prototype, but would get you home faster than impulse power.
As to sensor capabilities the one sensor you really need for a survey ship is a better clock. By knowing the precise time better, a force multiplier is obtained. So 'conventional' sensors would be by the virtue of the better clock that much better. To compare the original LIDAR, with current top of the line versions. They can image the rainforest floor. Versus synthetic apicture radar.
I always imagined the connecting turboshaft ran vertically, as you show,... but all the way past the hull separation into the saucer.
Also - extendable turboshafts would extend down from the dorsal connector when emergency-landed.
also - the saucer would sit on (and crush) the lower sensor dome, upon touchdown, carrying the weight of the saucer when emergency-landed, relegating the 'landing legs' to the job of leveling & stabilizing, not supporting.
Side note: Unfortunately, there is little to no communication (in my experience) between the Concept Designer and Production Designer / Draftspersons / or any other persons who can add random doors & other features (like a 20 foot corridor outside of Engineering) to a set which could never exist.
Fortunately, there was great communication, in that regard, on ST:TNG.
Funnily enough, another poster and I came to a similar conclusion (about jettisoning the lower saucer and just using the legs for stabilisation) a few days ago!
The extendable turboshafts is a useful extra feature though 👍
The Constitution is actually probably the least problematic of the Kirk era Federation ships. Both the Miranda and the Oberth have entire parts of the ship which cannot be accessed from the saucer - fully half of the latter - and the Excelsior is regularly shown to be absolutely massive, leaving entirely the opposite problem of why it needs so much more space…
I think in the MAD Magazine take on The Search for Spock they said that the Excelsior had a mall in it. I'd believe it. It was the Eighties.
My headcanon is the lower part of the Oberth is just a big sensor pod. No fixing the Miranda tho.
The issue with the Oberth is compounded by the fact that its early design envisioned a 180m long vessel before it was canonized as 120m long. The windows are scaled for 180m and do not make sense with a 120m long ship. Back to the issue, I saw some blueprints showing both the Oberth and the Miranda using closed-circuit intership transporters to access their respective outrigger hulls. With the Oberth, it also had a Jeffries tube in each pylon with a single person lift that also allowed access. When looking at TMP era ships, one requires a bit of suspension of disbelief to presume that the building materials are far superior to anything we have now, allowing such narrow connections while maintaining integrity.
@@schwartzritterx5905 well, it's a space ship, and in space, the forces acting on the various structures are massively reduced compared to the gravity well on a planet
The excelsior is easily explained as needing much more space because its a ship that's designed o operate much further from port, and thus needs more supplies and fuel onboard to go longer distances. Likewise Excelsior is also a much more powerful ship than constitution, and having more powerful shields and weapons demands a larger hull to fit in bigger power generation and transmission equipment.
If anything, constitution is far too small for an interstellar spacecraft.
The refit really was a thing of beauty.
I'm a bit puzzled as to what the source(s) are for the intermix chamber running up the dorsal section. And so far up it to boot.
Because if it ran that high, wouldn't it interfere with the emergency saucer separation feature?
Whatever, it would appear from this and other videos it appears the neck section is too thin to accommodate all it was supposed to have.
I'm glad they came up with more logical measurements for TNG and onwards.
I wrote a reply but I think it got filtered. This will be a little shorter but I’ll try to cover the main points.
Andrew Probert used to maintain a blog where he posted a lot of original blueprints and sketches for stuff he worked on. So that includes the TMP Connie, the Galaxy-class, the DeLorean, and AirWolf. He laid out his thought processes and was generally a stickler for trying to ensure there was enough room in the model to accommodate its inner workings.
The blueprints at least include mention of the saucer separation, and show a sort of connector into the “impulse deflection crystals” at that point. It does seem a bit overwrought though.
But on his own blog he criticised himself, wondering why he decided the warp core should connect to the impulse engines at all. His placement forward in the dorsal was a result of connecting to the impulse engines, and he knew he felt like it made sense back then to do double duty on the same power plant, but looking back on it he thinks it should’ve been separate systems. He did carry that insight over into the Galaxy-class at least, which had completely separate impulse reactors.
The blueprints for the secondary hull also don’t make any mention of the lifts, mainly just the engines, shuttle and cargo bays, and the arboretum. I suppose he thought he was blocking-out the major parts and the rest would get squeezed-in, which works with wiring but less-so with elevators!
@@kaitlyn__L The only thing that makes it make sense for me is that for safety, antimatter is stored at the bottom. The intermix is in line to take it to the nacelles. The matter component must be stored by the impulse drive. It could be using the same fuel for the core as for the Impulse fusion drive. Also the EPS power could be sent up separately from the core into the dilithum Deflection Crystals to boost Impulse engines. We know that phasers were tied into the warp drive.
This would explain why the core is crazy long compared to other federation ships. The Miranda just does not need that length between it's duel fuel sources.
The Refit Enterprise really seems to just be a ship that has been as modernized as humanly possible because the ambitious Excelsior project took longer than expected to be completed and they needed ships capable of combating the Klingons. They got as powerful as a ship they could on that old platform.
You're thinking in two dimensions.
Turbolifts can go diagonal, and sideways, as well as up-and-down.
Two questions: 1A, why would the warp core be up front when the necelles are in the rear? 1B, since the beginning when Mitchell died, it was stated the impulse engines have their own fuel pods. 2: If the Enterprise were real, it was be the size of a heli carrier. Even though there no weight in space, any bloody connecting dorsal would have to be wider then 4.8 meters or the stress of full impulse and high speed turns would shred it.
Same issues with those pylons holding the warp nacelles in place. The whole ship is like an ice sculpture of a swan: so elegant, so beautiful, but ridiculously fragile.
You're forgetting the "Structural Integrity Field" as well as the "Inertial Dampers"
AKA: Wizards magic. They already made in universe excuses to justify the pretty designs.
@@mzaite Oh, I try to forget those things. I try.
Totally agree. I never imagined that the core would be in the ships neck. That's ridiculous.
I don't care what the charts might say. It's in the lower body.
First, ask yourself how there's gravity on board the Enterprise and how people don't get planted on the walls during maneuvers. Then ask yourself why inertia would have any more effect on the structural parts of the ship than it does on the crew.
Franz Josef’s Design had a full deck plan for the Enterprise that detailed where the turbo shafts ran throughout the ship
Correct. It didn't accommodate a vertical warp power shaft in the neck because that didn't appear until TMP.
@@raincoast_bear exactly.
I've done extensive starship designing via AutoCad in the past and my measurements make the interconnecting dorsal 8 meters or about 25 ft not including the photorp complex. Plenty of room then. Also, this makes room for the guest quarters on these decks.
i've also always thought that the Enterprise was larger than established measurements. For example, there is space between decks for power conduits, lwater and sewer and jefffreies tubes. Additionally, the sizes of the landing bay, cargo by and Rec One in TMP certainly speak to a much larger ship. Originally, A. Probert wanted the refit to be 2,000 feet long (later these designs were partially retooled for the D).
Making the 1701 440 meters in SNW is arguably one of the few retcons that works.
Also, somethign to note: In the episode Mudd's Women, Scotty, when talking to Kirk about getting dilithium crystals, says that nearly a million gross tons of vessel was then operating on 1 crystal.
Good points.
I'm so glad you ended on "it's not real, so it doesn't have to make sense." It's amazing to me how well thought out most of the design and technology is in Star Trek, even though it doesn't have to be. If actual engineers had designed an actual ship, they would have figured out ways to fix these problems, like making the dorsal thicker, etc. These were designers making sets and props for movies and tv. It's ok that every single piece doesn't fit perfectly.
A really great video and I just love the ending, popping a cork and just enjoying the fiction for what it is. The ship looks beautiful and we all know that if it was real the dorsal would either be thicker or not be there at all. Thanks for keeping this wonderful fictional ship and world in perspective!
bottoms up!
A wise person once said, "if you're wondering how he eats and breathes, and other science facts, (la,la,la!) Just repeat to yourself it's just a show, I really should relax..."
I can't believe they put the warp core there. That's crazy. I always assumed it was further back in the ship and that top blue plate was a sensor dome or fusion reactor for the impulse drives.
I have the Scotty manual. Elevator tube is on the back side, by the Jefferies tube..Shane Johnsons Mr Scott's guide to the Enterprise..problem solved.👈🤠👍🎶
Having been on set at the Paramount lot for one of the movies, I can assure you that very little attention to how these would have gone into the mechanics of how any of these items practically worked.
Thats why people are so impressed with the Star Citizen spaceship models. They have to be fully planned out how they work and what the layout is. So no doors vanishing into the wall without having space for it etc.
Being on the Paramount lot does not give you exposure to any of the pre-production & design process that you are commenting on. But sure, most workers on set don’t need to know this stuff. Not really relevant.
@@vast634 Big difference between building a full model in a computer and designing physical sets for a movie.
@@vast634Store Citizen 😅
The answer I think is simple. The turbolift doesn't need to pass through the vertical intermix chamber. There are (2) turbolifts, one on each side. So you would simply exit at the intermix chamber, walk to the other side, enter turbolift and continue.
The same way Voyager 's hangar could accommodate multiple shuttles, the Delta Flyer, Neelix' shuttle, and still have a parking space for Alice; and how a runabout could fit in Enterprise-D's hangar; and how (according to the Picard production designer) La Sirena could be stowed in a Titan-A/Enterprise-G hangar:
It's TV and movies. If they say it works, it works.
Most of the hangar space issues make no sense but the enterprise d's main shuttlebay took up parts of three decks of the saucer section and used a good chunk of the saucer section on those decks
Damn you, I can’t unsee this 🤣🤣👍
Amazing detailed work this!👌👌
That relaxation helped me massively 😉😉😁
This is the brand of nerdy pedantic nonsense I love ❤
I just love this stuff!!! Please do more sections on the refit like this. The illustrative graphics are perfect!! Enjoyed every second and then stopped to freezeframe many shots. One thing to note about the Oberth Class: if the designers had just put a connecting dorsal on it like what you are talking about here, 90% of the enigma would have been solved.
The deck plans from Strategic Designs actually show the turboshaft being behind the intermix chamber. It enters the saucer section at the back, and then goes around the intermix chamber inside the saucer section.
The Jefferies' tube ladder, however, goes down the front and directly between the torpedo launchers where you have the turboshaft shown.
I think a lot of problems like this was solved with the A. A had D's style core and engineering layout in the 6th movie. You only saw the blue constricting coils as a reflection during the brief engineering shot with Scotty when leaving space dock. I have the cutaway poster of A, but it sadly doesn't show this core change upgrade.
this is the way I always viewed the Refit/A myself
Great video! I hadn't considered the notion that the turboshaft could span diagonally. I suppose if we want to rationalize a little bit, I could imagine Kirk left the torpedo bay to cross the balcony around the warp core shaft to a turbolift access on the other side.
There's a set of deck plans made by the guy who does Cydonia 6 for both the original and refit Constitution / Enterprise that are just epic, especially because they make locations line up brilliantly pre and post refit in a way that makes sense pretty well. On his designs the turboshaft is in the aft portion of the dorsal, doing only a brief stairstep and basically swinging into the impulse engine complex near the saucer rim (avoiding the concave). He doesn't sell that particular blueprint anymore, sadly.
I absolutely recommend his Intrepid / Voyager though, and can also vouch personally for the B'rel deck plan. He manages to make /everything/ we see on screen fit (and in Voyager's case, a few beta canon locales as well). He also has a Defiant and Oberth, I don't have those but I have to assume they are the same top quality work.
I'm unclear on the sources for the vertical intermix being quite so tall and being under impulse. ?
Andrew Probert’s blueprints.
@@kaitlyn__L We ca probability ignore it and say the vertical intermix chamber stops two decks above main engineering. The saving grace is we never see how far up it goes, we see Kirk one level above engineering and it rises in front of him to the ceiling so it might terminate some where up around there.
Not so sure about the movies, but I know in tos the turbo lift would move both sideways and up and down as indicated by the flashing light on the wall, it would shift from vertical to lateral on some occasions, whenever Kirk and Spock would take it from the bridge down to engineering or wherever, so they could have time for their little 1-on-1 elevator conversations.
As for the refit, I think we just have to pretend that we don't notice these little things, and just admire how good she looks from the outside.
When it comes down to it I repeat to myself, it's just a show. I should really just relax.
Yeah, but he has a point!
Were you wondering how he eats or sleeps, and other science facts?
Hey fellow MSTie!
ua-cam.com/video/4Ugebzq3juE/v-deo.html
When it comes down to it, saying things like this doesn't mean anything. Everyone knows it's just a show and that it doesn't have to make sense. That has nothing to do with what is being talked about here.
What if there were two turbolifts used? a person would need to use the saucer lift to reach the neck, walk past the chamber to the engineering lift to reach the rest of the ship. That makes more sense and solves many problems. The one issue is that you don't have a single continuous lift, but a split system.
The necks have always been a bit of a sore point for me ever since i started recreating ships in 1:1 scale in a game called Space Engineers. It's nowhere near as detailled or accurate as 3D renders like yours but you get a feeling of the space in there and the necks... even on the Galaxy Class you can't put much in there. I've been wondering for a while why they even have windows. The neck section of a Galaxy is already absurdly small towards the front but what on earth could be in the CONNIE neck? D:
The Galaxy dorsal is somewhat triangular in section,... small lounges or other spaces up front, expanding to very large areas at he back.
Junkball Media estimated the neck was about eight feet across.
@@misterlyle. At what point? The plan sections bulge slightly-
@@AndrewProbert Thank you for your reply! Junkball is a channel on this platform with a video that discusses this topic: "USS Enterprise's Neck Width." The host has a humorous style that I enjoy; I watched the video a while back but just reviewed the video. His analysis shows the original Enterprise's neck viewed from the front or rear would be 3.85 meters, or 12.6 feet. My previous comment was based on memory, so eight feet may have been my own estimate of what the interior space might be.
Another excellent vid. Many thanx 👍👍
What I’ve always wanted to know is why there is an awesome transporter room, with a raised platform, glowing discs above and below where each passenger stands, a control desk facing the platform so the operator can observe the results of their actions and the glow and hum of heavy machinery that enables the “beaming” process or… OR you can just stand anywhere in the ship and be transported to anywhere else within or without the ship, within the machine’s range. So what are all the glowing disks and raised platforms etc for?
I know they aren't canon but, iirc, the original "Star Trek Blueprints" had the turbolift shaft stair-stepping through the dorsal. There wasn't a refit-style warp core in the way at that time, though.
Thanks for the video! It wouldn't be a TRUE Trekker video if you hadn't thrown a little shade at the Oberth class. 🤣
I do some sci-fi modelling occasionally as a hobby. Took me countless hours to create a spaceship, about the size of a modern destroyer. Ship systems, airlocks, armor plating, cockpit layout, crew accommodation .....
I feel like most sci-fi designs go for the "good enough for the big screen approach", but they fall apart when you really think about it. You're not supposed to think about it and most people probably won't.
Why does this remind me of Galaxy Quest when the fan asks Tim Allen some random question about how x could happen in episode Y while z happened in episode M only to be told, "It's just a TV show!"
The Turbolifts dont only run vertical but also horizonal AND diagonal 🙂
I've always said the scaling of the TOS and TMP Enterprise was off due to the needs of things like a shuttle hangar, the torpedo bay, and things required for life support like water recycling, solid waste recycling, a fusion-powered propulsion system (Impulse Engines). The Kelvin-Timeline Enterprise (or as some call it, the JJPrize) got the scaling RIGHT...maybe not the looks right, but the scaling right. The Galaxy-sized vessel, therefore, should have been the size of the USS Vengeance (Star Trek Into Darkness).
There are hundreds of sites online that show the deck plans of Enterprise A, and show that the saucer section and engineering section have 2 different turbolifts. The top of the Engineering section Turbolift is close to the bottom of the Saucer section Turbolift. Simple answer is you cannot go directly from the bottom of engineering to the bridge in one turbolift, but have to hop out of the engineering one, cross a short hall, and get in the saucer turbolift.
I love how in strange new worlds, the decks all look like 15ft vaulted ceilings
I actually built a to-scale deck by deck model of the Enterprise refit in Minecraft, and to answer the torpedo room question, I had the intermix chamber run between the launcher tubes. In the official diagrams, the gantries for engineering actually do not start until the deck below the torpedo launcher. I ran the turbolift shaft in front of engineering and swung it to the side once it had reached main engineering. This is how it reaches the cargo/shuttle bays. It's a tight fit but there is just enough room. The torpedo room itself is accessed by a small lift from a few decks the deck above main Engineering. This is what I followed in the official blue prints.
The turbolifts aren't just up-and-down things, they're interior smart-shuttles with multiple pods in each system. There are a couple places on the ships where both systems go to and the systems can exchange pods but each system is independently powered and operated by computer. They literally go all over the place as well as up and down and they can even hold atmosphere for about 3 days if the shafts are breached. What will really blow your mind is that some of the ports on the sides of the ships are _turbolift ports_ for when secured to a dock and most the ships can be equipped to operate the habitable pods OR cargo pods through these ports and around the ship. They never really went into it but that's cannon.
The intermix chamber service area could have narrowed around the torpedo bay (and likely been reinforced, preventing Reliant's phasers from severing it), in which case, the door Kirk exited by could have led to a hallway or room allowing him to go around the chamber and to the turbolift. The real question then is whether he had to step over part of the torpedo launch track, since the torpedo bay clearly feeds into a double launcher. Not at all impossible, given that STVI shows Bones and Spock in that part of the bay as they upgrade a torpedo on the fly.
The real problem, as you say, is that the shaft goes right through the Engineering lobby and there's no room for it to move over to the left or right before that. We can almost make it fit by assuming that the lobby isn't precisely forward of Engineering, but is off-center towards Starboard. That doesn't quite fit what we see on-screen, but it makes a little sense of Kirk walking down a long hallway to get to the lobby in TMP, which might be able to barely fit to the starboard of Engineering. Okay, not really, but it makes more sense than any other scenario I can think of.
All this because the TMP designers wanted to show off a huge, mostly-empty, warehouse-style shuttle bay in TMP and have a vertical shaft connecting Engineering with the impulse engines.
I think that the thought put into this video represents about 1000x the amount of time the interior and exterior set designers and model makers coordinated on the design.
they never put this amount of thought into the design. realistic renders of the ships only began with discovery, which were necessitated by the VFX models that let them do shots pushing in from space into windows onto set. versions of this were faked on TNG onward but on disco they built full models of the ship, including hallways, and then did it for constitution class ships for enterprise, which required retconing the class to be larger because the canonical size of the ship did not work with the windows you see, the implied corridors within, for the 3d renders needed for vfx. love your videos.
To the Narrator: Best explanation and visual example for the reason why this movie and others like it fall so neatly into the category of Science Fiction.
"In our next episode; how many Angels can dance on the head of a pin?" 😂
Whats kinda funny is that in retrospect, the Constitutions (I and II) are now a minority in Starfleet's ship design history when it comes to the thin neck. All ships after it opted for much thicker necks, or just omitted the neck in general.
While putting the torpedo deck on top of the engineering hull, made a lot of sense, having the reactor and the plasma conduit run around the whole ship caused a lot of problems. Then when considering the incredible energy consumption of transporters, phasers, and deflector screens, the plumbing would have to be considerable on any account.
That makes for a problem with the neck on the Klingon battle cruiser. It's just too thin to support the plumbing for shields and disruptors, let alone Photon torpedoes! Both ships could use some love from some engineers, who aren't on the clock. Of course, they're going to have to take significant liberties, that a lot of fans aren't going to like, such as sweeping changes to the weapon systems.
Would solve a lot of problems (including Torpedo room weirdness) if the intermix chamber stopped at the top of the secondary hull. I know the warp core and impulse systems are supposed to be connected in this era of starship design, but it just makes more sense to me that way imo.
Why are we assuming such a huge opening around the vertical core all the way up? It could very easily been encased in a closed shaft throughout most of the length with enough rm for maintenance access only. Much like boiler ductwork. That would free up a great deal on space around the core.
Imo
St6 also showed the torpedo tubes... The loading mechanism. McCoy and Spock are doing surgery on the torpedo as it loads. The tubes must be hugging the warp core in that section
So it’s just not me that’s kept awake at night by these type of thoughts.
This all may be the best justification for the retcon in both the Kelvin and the Disco/SNW Enterprise. The ship is simply bigger than we thought it was and there's turbolift shaft on both sides of the warp core
Kind of but kind of not. The story goes that the JJ Enterprise was going to be the same size as TOS Ent, but they realized after they went to design and build their sets that nothing would fit properly. So they doubled the official length without changing the exterior model. That's why the windows are still in scale with the OG Ent, despite being the equivalent of two decks tall according to the rescaled dimensions. Just another production goof. The new specs probably just carried forward into the new TV series.
@@ironsides982 this isn't unprecedented. The Millennium Falcon and Galileo shuttle are 2 more examples of interior sets being twice as big as the exterior. I had the Enterprise RPG map from the old FASA days that was scaled for a thousand foot ship. It was too small. 4 people couldn't squeeze into a turbolift car. In Star Trek:The Motion Picture, that was the shuttle bay they were in when they watched the feed from the station being destroyed by V'Ger. I won't mention STV when the rocketed up the turbolift. That was just sloppy continuity. That was too tall even for the JJ-Prise
@@hollywoodguy70 Right, I remember hearing (cant remember where) that Shatner thought that the current number of desks sounded too low for whatever reason. They just numbered the decks up to whatever sounded good for those shots in the turbolift shaft. I suppose when you're depicting that kind of speed, 20 or so decks didn't read too well. The speed combined wit the number of shot depicting them in motion would have put them well past deck 20-whatever, so they quadrupled the deck count. Not that they needed that scene except to make the journey from the brig (on the bottom of the ship for some reason) seem more dangerous and exciting. LOL we all know ST:V had alot of issues.
Charlie Bucket in the Great Glass Wonkavator: "It's candy. It doesn't have to make sense."
Strategic Designs blueprints do a good job answering this pretty convincingly. 2 turbolift shafts go straight down from the bridge for the first 5 decks before branching out on deck 6. One of those horizontal branches snakes toward the port, aft quarter of the saucer, then drops down to deck 7, and follows the edge of the saucer around to the back, sliding just behind the intermix chamber shaft and just under the impulse engineering compartment. It then goes down 3 decks to deck 10, runs horizontal toward the aft, goes down another 3 decks to bypass the photon launcher room and the torpedo magazine above it, and then snakes down into the engineering hull.
I agree with your conclusion. At a certain point in just about any sci-fi series, the MST3K Law kicks in: Repeat to yourself, "It's just a show. I should really just relax." 🎶
I seem to remember some drawing that showed the lift from the torpedo room going down below engineering then forward to meet the main shaft between the saucer and secondary hull, which ran between the torpedo tubes to a point. The same drawing noted that during torpedo operation the lift shaft was closed and the torpedo tubes bisected the lift. So there could be no lift between engineering and the saucer during combat operations, which is why those small man lifts that ram the inside of the vertical intermix shaft existed, to provide movement via engineering between the saucer and secondary hull.
I just want to say how amazing the 3D models are that you use, really good!
Possible that the one turbo lift ended (from the torpedo bay). Exit the turbo lift. Walk around the vertical intermix chamber, Then enter another turbo lift on the opposite side of the vertical intermix chamber.
We have the assumption that the turbolift is like an elevator car, a box large enough for some 4-8 people to stand and chat comfortably. Because that's what we see being used on all the Enterprises.
Why not coffin-sized turbolifts for a single standing occupant? Or cockpit-sized turbolifts for a single seated occupant? These smaller turbolifts could easily fit within an Oberth's slender hull pylons.
Guy here can't think diagonally
24th century tech would probably be so far above our heads, it'd seem like magic
Movie designers could have easily solved this by just making the neck wider and if anyone complained they could reply "c'mon you can't even fit a car length wise on that neck.
As far as I'm aware, there never was an emergency saucer separation on the Kirk era of the Enterprise, this was only a feature on the TNG Enterprise, which was actually used on a couple of occasions thinking back.
According to the canon manuals, there has always been the ability to seperate the saucer in an emergency, even in TOS, but it's not reversible. Like an ejection seat, using it means trashing the vehicle. TNG made it into a gimmick.
Its things like this why i love the enterprise E and F. Starfleet designs eventually did away with the neck and just attached the saucer straight onto the engineering section whilst heavily steamlining the design
When the lift reached the top of the interconnecting dorsal fin, it moved either left or right then straight forward avoiding Impulse Engineering. The Primary Hull cuts into the fin at that point allowing the lift once it arrives at the top of the fin to move either left or right then straight or on around the primary hull. Also remember there is a lift in the Warp Drive Engineering Room that runs from somewhere in Impulse Engineering to the floor of the main Intermix chamber. The Lift is open so one might want to hang onto the railing of the Lift as it travels down into Warp Drive Engineering.
The TMP refit is a problem. That vertical shaft stretching up to the impulse engines make it impossible for turbo lifts to run stem to stern uninterrupted. And we see that in TWOK when Spock has to pass through a hatch on his way to engineering to hot wire the warp drive.
The Enterprise-A, on the other hand, has a different engine layout, thanks to reuse of the TNG engine room. That gives us enough wiggle room to imagine a different arrangement of the internals and remedy this problem.
Spock had to use the Jeffries tubes to get to engineering because the turbo lifts were inoperative below C deck. He told Kirk this after returning from the Genesis cave. They climbed up the tube from the transporter deck and presumably boarded a lift on C deck to get to the bridge.
You're basically the hard-core EC Henry, and I love it!
Who's to say that the turbo shaft couldn't go up into the saucer section at little then semi-circle around the crystal section, and then back down 🤔... Okay, enough brain drain for tonight 😵💫. That hurt 🤕...
I like to think right at the top of the intermix chamber right below the impulse complex the chamber was closed so the lift can ether go left or right around the core-itself, just having the top section of that open chamber would fix this issue quite quickly, straight path along then around the core then behind a bit of a turbo shaft box around the core at the very top of the chamber.
the scaling issue of fitting everything in is a common issue, its why you load into the ships in Mass Effect for example. The Normandy you see exteriorly is way too small to fit what is inside it, Same with the Tempest in Andromeda.
The ever in development game Star Citizen has had ships gain a lot of scale in its earlier years when they realized the interiors would not fit into the hulls they originally modeled for trailers and such. Because in that game you do not load anywhere which means ship interiors have to fit into their exteriors.
Star Citizen is one of the few games where (due to the nature of the game) they had to fit the interior spaces to the hull of the ship.
Don't get me started on how the Millennium Falcon can be classified as a freighter when it seems to have no internal cargo space
5:01 it seems quite obvious that there is an integrated transporter which beams the turbo lift pod from the rear of the intermix chamber to the front and vice versa.
@hunter-in-the-shadows My comment was a bit tongue-in-cheek. In the end it's a TV show and the real explanation is simply that none of the showmakers ever thought of this bit of continuity error ... it takes some dedicated fans to spot this. :)
I always assumed there was more than one turbo lift, and to save screen time we just weren't shown the interchange.
I built this ship in minecraft with about 300 mods to make it fully working in everyway, I managed to get the turbolifts working just fine. I got the deck plans online and everything worked out almost 100% perfectly to scale within minecraft.
The "neck" concept only exists because Roddenberry wanted the saucer to detach. This was 1965 (the show's early development) and flying saucers were the "standard" in science-fiction. Roddenberry envisioned many episodes set on planets, and the saucer was how the crew was to get down to the planet. Thus - the saucer / neck design. But as they started writing scripts, they quickly realized the saucer landings would consume way too much time in a 48 minute episode. It simply wasn't going to work for a weekly series. So they invented the transporter.
This is why the Excelsior had such a thick "neck".