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Post by Atrahasis on Apr 3, 2005 11:41:29 GMT -5
Btw, doesn't T'Pol's TOS blue uniform seem a little "off" in color and a wee bit too wrinkly? It looks like it's made of something cheap and not the spacey wrinkle-free fabric they would presumably be using. Length seems about right. But it needs more polyester or something in there. How did the TOS men control themselves around those uniforms? Wouldn't that have been a tactical liability or something like that? It just doesn't seem to be a smart way to go, unless you're working on the assumption that it's better for the crewmembers to get easy access to sex whenever they want it (those miniskirts would facilitate that). But then you'd have more of a sexual playground than a starship. Hey, with the women walking around in those, the men WOULD be looking at asses all day, and we all know it. All I'm saying is, those miniskirts are not very professional and they create a sexually charged atmosphere. You'd think the women of the 23rd century would have smartened up and protested about them or something. Oh but wait....all the women on board are slim and beautiful and the men are fit and healthy. I wonder if in such a setting there could be anythig that can really be called sexual harrassment?
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Post by aridas sofia on Apr 3, 2005 12:05:05 GMT -5
The idea in the 60s was that a woman being sexual was displaying independence. The notion that she was doing it at the expense of being labeled a sexual object came as a reaction to what went on in the 60s, later in the 70s.
In the FRS I made it clear that women would wear the pants suits from "Charlie X" on landing parties and whenever doing anything requiring the least bit of physicality. I'm very glad that the fellows doing the Exeter film are following this same line of reasoning. But I still think that on the bridge, among records officers and yeomen -- in short anywhere where we might see a miniskirt today -- you might see one on a starship. Not that they have sex all the time (though I think that would be a very common diversion in deep space). Just that if they have futuristically, perfectly beautiful bodies they might be inclined to show them off.
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Post by Atrahasis on Apr 3, 2005 12:20:08 GMT -5
You know, now that I think of it, a starship on a 5-year mission would be one of the BEST sexual environments imaginable. Basically a contained environment with no STD's, everyone stays and is kept healthy, there's a wide selection of mates who are going to be on the youngish side, and there is always the holodeck for a change of scenery...and the women going around in miniskirts is icing on the cake! I wonder if they mention that on the recruitment posters? It's basically a way of focussing human sexual energy into space exploration...no wonder the humans have conquered space in that era.
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Post by USS Mariner on Apr 3, 2005 15:37:23 GMT -5
That may have been done on purpose though, because even on cutaway diagrams done by fans they feel compelled to include the "rim" of the saucer to complete the profile sillhouette of the ship. The Paramount diagram shows greeblies to be there, so it still doesn't conflict with the actual deck layout. What I find ridiculous is people placing the bridge in what is essentially deck 2, all for the sake of straightening the bridge out so that it faces directly forward, and that because they can't bring themselves to believe that the inertial systems of the ship would find it hard to compensate for an angled room. <--- If that isn't faulty logic, I don't know what is. Atra, the reasoning behind that is because the "Cage" had a tall bridge dome, and that was literally cut in half for TOS. Submerging the bridge a little for it faces the way Jeffries wanted it to (NOWHERE did he ever put the turbolift in the centerline, EVER,) seems logical, since the only reason that the bridge dome was turned to centerline was because this would allow them to film the Enterprise from the right side and could easily make it look like the left without needing to rotate the bridge every fucking time. Besides, why have the ship adujust the gravity and interial systems just so that turbolift can run up the centerline? That's absurd.
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Post by Atrahasis on Apr 3, 2005 16:47:42 GMT -5
I'm aware of the taller bridge for the first incarnation of the ship, but no matter how short it got in the second incarnation you don't need to submerge it into deck 2 so that deck 2 is only 3 feet tall. Doing that makes assumptions about what the internal arrangement of the bridge was exactly, and you know what happens when people assume.
You simply don't need to "straighten out" the bridge, because logically the inertial dampeners would work for rooms around the saucer which are angled at all sorts of funny angles. From this we derive that it simply does not matter if a room faces forward or not to keep the crew from being spattered all over the walls.
But people who want to straighten out the bridge use this as an excuse to do it...but it's obviously baloney once you think about it.
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Post by Atrahasis on Apr 4, 2005 4:01:18 GMT -5
Excuse me if it sounded like I was coming down hard on the bridge alignment issue....but in the end if people feel a need to explore that possibility, I say go for it.
That said, I don't think it'll be much use though once the internal diagram from "Mirror" is shown!
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Post by aridas sofia on Apr 4, 2005 6:14:21 GMT -5
I agree about the bridge alignment fetish being inane, but to be perfectly accurate, what Mariner is saying is true. Jefferies tucked that bridge down into deck two, well-recessed, based on his cutaway. I've played with different ideas about how to capitalize on that and came up with, for example, a bridge that could slip downward into a lower position when the ship was going into battle. That might deal with a lot of problems, the alignment issue being the least of them.
The only thing I don't like about it is that it is so "mechanical" and lacking in the kind of "magic" I associate with this technology.
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Post by Atrahasis on Apr 4, 2005 10:11:47 GMT -5
Jeffries seems to have had a lot of his own wonderful ideas about how the ship should be....some of which were ultimately discarded or not used, by of course the producers...the weapons issue being the main controversy I'm aware of, and I guess the bridge is another.
In the end, I have to come down on the side of the producers when deciding which detail is right or wrong, because Jeffries was just someone hired to do a convincing portrayal of a ship that Gene wanted, moreover a starting portrayal at that. We credit Jeffries as "the designer" but the meaning of that word becomes diluted over time because of the number of people involved with the Enterprise over the course of a big project like a TV series, from the producer directing Jeffries on how to design the ship, to the people who built the actual filming model...and the fact is that they all had input.
Consider Andy Probert and the way he designed the TMP ship....the basic gist of it was Jeffries' Phase II design, and no doubt under the direction of Gene. And for Trek III he designed a rough Excelsior which had really low detail when you examined the model up close...it wasn't until Trek VI that many scale-related details and maybe even the size of the ship were changed, with or without Probert's approval (I'm convinced it was without).
These guys we refer to as the designers "start the ship off", but over time the details are finalized by everyone else, the final decisions belonging to the producers. Again, that explains why so many details were changed for just the TOS model alone. Even the TMP model was changed over the 2 years of stalled production for the Phase II series.
Imagine after the basic model is built, when Gene wanted this or that changed, did he check with Jeffries first for approval? Did he even need to? The answer is probably not.
That said, exploring how Jeffries may or may not have wanted things is an interesting exercise, but we have to consider it in the proper perspective, which in my personal case is assigning more credit to the producers in deciding what is canon or not.
That's basically why the "deck 2 bridge theory" doesn't sit right with me, because it was never portrayed like that by Paramount, and a sunken bridge with no deck 1 seems atypical for a Starfleet ship. Also of course because there is associated with it the half-baked assumption that it would be easier on the intertial systems if it were facing straight, which logically and scientifically I can see right away isn't necessarily the case.
I wonder if most of the proponents of that theory can even give me the formula to calculate inertia or have even worked out how the shipboard system may work. Again, probably not.
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Post by USS Mariner on Apr 4, 2005 14:03:14 GMT -5
I wonder if most of the proponents of that theory can even give me the formula to calculate inertia or have even worked out how the shipboard system may work. Again, probably not. Atra, I know that! It just seems dumb to have only one component of the ship facing 30 odd degrees port when everything else is facing normally forward. It just doesn't make any sense, and they gain nothing from doing that. Besides, when we first descend on the Enterprise during The Cage, the bridge inside the bridge dome (which isn't clear, and there's no way to tell if they're actually in that dome or sitting beneath it from the angle) is facing forward, when already the model has the little cylinder in the centerline. And as for "sinking" the bridge, that may simply be because the overhead sensors are so large. That's why the dome changed between the Cage and TOS; those sensors were replaced with smaller, newer models.
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Post by Atrahasis on Apr 4, 2005 16:27:54 GMT -5
The angled bridge seems more acceptable though when you consider the rooms all around the saucer....the vast majority of them are all angled as well...the vast majority. You don't get a sense of this from a side cutaway, but if people stopped and thought 3-D for a sec they'd realize the angled room thing is what makes up the entire saucer. So the inertia dampeners not working properly for an angled room argument is just bunk. The only argument against the angled room is a purely design-based one, and that is a matter of taste and not necessarily science or logic. That opening sequence in "The Cage" was obviously theatrical license being exercised to convey the sense of where the people on the bridge are relative to the rest of the ship. But even if it were supposed to be an actual view...May I ask who led you to believe that the scene conveyed the sense of a straight bridge? Because if all the "straight bridge" theorists have to go on is this scene from "The Cage" and their own matter of taste regarding room arrangement and their ideas (or non-ideas) about inertia, then they need to go back and first check their facts...as well as reflect on their assumptions.
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Post by Atrahasis on Apr 4, 2005 17:22:36 GMT -5
Also, might I point out that in a ship that basically nullifies inertia you wouldn't feel the ship move unless it pivoted really hard and suddenly, and only then I doubt you would feel much because the ship pivoted at Warp 2 in "Elaan" and it was nothing to them. AT WARP 2!
There were times when they got jostled around after getting hit by something, but under regular travel conditions they probably don't feel anything.
So if steering your ship "by feeling" like the old nautical way is simply not done on a 23-rd century 947 foot starship, it doesn't really matter if the bridge is angled or not.
I think a lot of the proponents of the angled bridge theory must imagine the ship as an old nautical vessel to some extent. That's a kind of projection or simplification into terms we can more easily relate to, a kind of analogous thinking, which can be useful at times, but it can also lead you into a mess of illogic if you're not careful...because the nature of an analogy is that it is not perfect. For example, a child trying to understand the structure of the atom may make an analogy to our solar system...but of course that's not how the atom is like at all. The idea, though it may help him to sort out in his mind the differences between a proton and an electron, for purposes of real science you obviously need to switch to a more accurate representation and do some deeper thinking and visualization.
We need to broaden our horizons and think 23rd century when we deal with all of these things, which means abandoning old assumptions and notions.
Yes, I know....I can be quite didactic, can't I?
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CptSavage
Commodore
I'll take The Rapist for $200
Posts: 341
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Post by CptSavage on Apr 4, 2005 20:04:54 GMT -5
You know. I love technobable and discussions of this sort as much as the next guy, but sometimes I sit down and look at something that makes me think "Wow."
This it one of those things.
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Post by USS Mariner on Apr 4, 2005 22:14:05 GMT -5
The angled bridge seems more acceptable though when you consider the rooms all around the saucer....the vast majority of them are all angled as well...the vast majority. You don't get a sense of this from a side cutaway, but if people stopped and thought 3-D for a sec they'd realize the angled room thing is what makes up the entire saucer. So the inertia dampeners not working properly for an angled room argument is just bunk. The only argument against the angled room is a purely design-based one, and that is a matter of taste and not necessarily science or logic. That opening sequence in "The Cage" was obviously theatrical license being exercised to convey the sense of where the people on the bridge are relative to the rest of the ship. But even if it were supposed to be an actual view...May I ask who led you to believe that the scene conveyed the sense of a straight bridge? Because if all the "straight bridge" theorists have to go on is this scene from "The Cage" and their own matter of taste regarding room arrangement and their ideas (or non-ideas) about inertia, then they need to go back and first check their facts...as well as reflect on their assumptions. Well, that proves something... Oh wait, the turbolift door and the exterior tube don't match as well as you said. It's even more close if you use a color picture of the entire damn scene. Infact, let's try two to be sure. www.ydg.com/trek5/the_cage/00-cage_019.jpgwww.ydg.com/trek5/the_cage/00-cage_021.jpgIn reality, it's more like 20 degrees, and that's only because they merely wanted to show where the bridge was like you said. The angle of the ship and the angle of the bridge have nothing to do with each other because they were done at separate times. Try using glasses like me before jumping on me. Unlike Columbia, I dont' like it on bottom! As for the arrangement of rooms in the saucer, well, I knew that after I typed, but I don't think that's actually my point. My point is, there's no need to crank the bridge like that, even for non-exsistant inertial reasons. I fully acknowledge that fact, Atra. I am no dumbass simpleton to ignore something like that. My reasoning is that, they didn't need to crank the bridge because that would confuse the audience who didn't know about such concepts yet. Even today, the bridges are always forward facing because the viewers, for better or worse, asscociate the viewscreen with a windsheild. Yes, it isn't necessary nor entirely logical, but that's the truth. Thanks for demeaning my point so quickly with "unbiased" assumptions. Next time we get into an argument like this, just outright say that you don't give a shit what evidence anyone else points out, minor errors included. I cited the Cage scene three years after watching it on the Sci-Fi channel. You were right to point out that it wasn't exactly as I described, but hastily using that clip and trying to cover it up with graphics to prove your point is frankly despicable. I repsect your age and wisdom. I will not tollerate being trampled over loudly with "enlightenment." It pains me to say it, but your acting with the same foresight and careful thought as the right-wing hardliners you try and distance yourself from. If you can acknoledge any of what I've said, then we can continue. If not, then forget the bridge entirely. I'm off to bed.
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Post by aridas sofia on Apr 4, 2005 23:29:16 GMT -5
This will be a little difficult to explain, so please bear with me. First off, I disagree with the idea that Jefferies was not almost single-handedly responsible for the artistic style that was on TOS. Sure, on the important stuff he had major approval input from GR et al. But my distinct and strong sense after all these years is that he had a lot of free reign. The schedule demanded it.
Also, Andy Probert wasn't involved with anything after TMP until the first season of TNG, and he left after that show's first season. He also had exceptional free reign (on TNG), according to what I've heard from him and what I've read.
So what? you might ask. Well, as far as the original 1701 goes, there is a great deal of evidence that the 500+ foot version of the ship (which immediately preceded the model as built for "The Cage" and was altered/scaled up for that pilot) had the bridge in what we now call the B/C deck. The bridge dome exterior represented the interior upper alcove of the bridge ceiling. You can probably see where I'm going with this. There's been a lot of talk over the years that Jefferies was handed the skewed bridge at the last minute, but if all the measurements are accurate and what I've written is in fact true, he had accounted for a skewed bridge must earlier in the process. He could have altered the position of the turbolift tube exterior when the scale was changed because that would have been the first time that alcove was introduced to the model. But he didn't. The 2X larger skewed bridge would have been very adequately hidden within the B/C deck on the 500 foot ship. But on the final model, the turbolift shaft would break out of the dome if it was to make it to the bridge level.
What's all this mean? Well, on the one hand it means he was comfortable with a skewed bridge. It also means he was comfortable with a "tucked" bridge, as well as an oblong B/C-shaped bridge exterior. The one thing he seems adamantly against was an off-center turbolift tube exterior.
FWIW
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Post by Atrahasis on Apr 5, 2005 10:22:28 GMT -5
I have to disagree with your 20 degrees quote, because although it's hard to tell exactly, it looks to be between 30 and 45 degrees. But it was you who used this picture specifically to try and illustrate and support your point that the bridge was depicted as straight! I just took the liberty to examine it to see if that was true, and frankly it is not. I'm not calling you or anybody else a dumbass, rather I'm pointing out that the desire to have the bridge straight is based more on personal taste rather than science or logic or what the producers made it to be. People are motivated by all sorts of things, and most of the time they can't distinguish what it is that is really driving them. But if they try to use verifiable things like scenes from the show or their own perception of what Treknology is to support their point, I reserve the right to call them on it. In this case, their strongest point is their own taste, which I'm not entirely dismissing as worthless, but I do reserve the right to tell them that's what it is. Again, this is your trying to relate the 23rd century starship to present-day nautical ships and design, an innaccurate analogy to be sure. I never claimed I was unbiased, but I do claim that I have a powerful argument. If people want to counter what I say, I invite them to do so, with facts and logic rather than with taste and inapplicable analogies. I'm sorry, but that's just the way the argument has to go if we're to reach any kind of acceptable conclusion or synthesis. I do give a shit, otherwise I wouldn't have gone to the trouble of creating diagrams to examine their points. I invite anyone to use my own diagrams and modify them their own way if it'll help to point out my folly. Mariner bud, I can't believe you're accusing my honest attempt at examining what you said with pictures and graphics as an attempt at deception and then calling me names for doing that. That's just unbvelieable, and quite frankly you should know me better than that by now! How long have I been posting this or that diagrams when I had a point to make? It's what I do, because it's a great way of communicating and pursuing the truth. Mariner bud, the difference between the hard right wingers and myself is that I always try to check what other people say and always check my own assumptions as well, because the truth is important to me. Whereas the biggest folly of the right-wing administration is that they neither checked their facts or assumptions and they let their emotions take over and thus we have the mess in Iraq today. "Biggest intelligence failure in history" and "groupthinking" are the words that pretty much depict their mentality. The world is full of folly, but the question is: Will you stand up to it when you see it? I reserve the right to do so, and so should you. But you've got to always check and recheck facts and your own assumptions and really try to be honest with yourself and discover why you think or do things the way you do, and then weigh that and see just how relevant or influential it should be in the overall picture, and ask yourself if you're being totally logical or just imposing your own taste?
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