First, how could the Enterprise go to warp at the end of the movie with the horizontal intermix shaft blocked? When Khan first fires on the Enterprise, a huge isolation door slides down which blocks the intermix flow. That door was still in place when Spock goes down to engineering to fix the ship.
Second, how could that door seal off the aft portion of engineering anyway? It just slides down out of the ceiling and right through the horizontal intermix shaft. There's no sound of crunching metal or anything at all, so it seems as if there was just a big gap in the shaft. Wouldn't that pose a substantial safety risk?
Third, what exactly is Spock doing in that little room? What that's pedestal in the middle of the room that he tinkers with? If it's part of the warp drive system, how does it connect to the intermix shaft?
2. There could have been iris-type blocks built into each intermix shaft segment, that would stop the flow of plasma to and fro. The isolation door would be there more to block the escape of radiation/coolant/what have you from the compartment, than to worry about the intermix shaft.
Besides, one should be more worried about where that big door came from in the firs place - Engineering is set on the uppermost deck of the secondary hull. There's nothing but outer space above the deck!
3. Wasn't that the dilithium control room? I thought he was re-aligning the crystals such that they could get the power to go to warp. You could argue that the intermix plasma was routed through the pedestal and then to the intermix shaft, or more likely that the crystals were moved from the shaft to the pedestal by some mechanism, where they could then be aligned manually.
Makr
SPOCK leaves his chair
(TECH)
SPOCK dies
But the didnt have the whiz kid tech advisors yet so they hadnt planned out the warp drive. Being in a complicated engineering room and dying made sense back then because we didnt know how warp drive worked, which was never explained until 9 years later when the TNG Tech Manual was published
From the original script, it is referred as the 'reactor room':
237 INT. ENTERPRISE ENGINE ROOM 237
Spock rushes in. Bones ministers to Scotty, b.g. Spock sizes up the situation, starts for the radiation room, Bones intercepts him.
BONES
Are you out of your Vulcan mind?
No human can tolerate the
radiation that's in there!
SPOCK
As you are so fond of observing,
Doctor, I am not human.
BONES
You're not going in there - !
SPOCK
Perhaps you're right. What is
Mister Scott's condition?
BONES
Well, I don't think that he...
He gives Bones the Vulcan nerve pinch. Bones goes down.
SPOCK
I'm sorry, Doctor. I have no time
to discuss this logically -
CLOSE ON Spock's hand on side of McCoy's face, eyes closed.
SPOCK
(continuing)
Remember.
Spock presses the access button and enters the reactor room, a separated area behind radiation-proof glass and metal, RED FLASHING LIGHTS and an iridescent blue glow within.
(A bit later)
REVERSE ANGLE as Spock works inside with radiation, lifts top of radiation container, releasing power as it bursts up into his face.
SCOTTY
No! God, don't, Spock!
242 WITHIN 242
WE CAN SEE the silent urging of Bones and Scotty.
Spock is oblivious. Amid the fire-blue arcs, he moves to the control panel. Between his hands and the controls, power arcs insanely. Spock is an inferno, a radiation hell, fighting now with all his strength to control it.
Slowly, the damping rods move out. Spock moves to a manual control, begins to turn it.
In any case, what caused the damage to the reactor systems? If you look at the exterior, the hull is scorched but not cut into. This is different from the later battle in the nebula, when we clearly see the hull being cut into along the portside torpedo bay. Moreover, during the interior shots of the engine room in the first encounter, there's no sign of a loss of pressure; ergo, no hull breach. I can't say much for Starfleet ship design if one salvo from an enemy vessel completely knocks out your main power plant.
And don't tell me that it was because the shields were down. Remember, in "The Ultimate Computer" M-5 cut loose with full phaser power on the unshielded Lexington, and she didn't immediately go belly up.
I think that a coolant leak made the Enterprise engine room uninhabitable (that was supposedly the source of Peter's injuries) The problem with the engines stemmed from the intermix shaft being cut off and a resultant flood of energy and radiation.
I'll try to find a picture, but I swear that the isolation door is still in place when Spock visits engineering for his selfless act of heroism. However, Mark raises an excellent point: where the hell did that door come from? It just sorta materialized out of space.
I'm not sure about a big ol' hull breach, but something did happen to adversely affect the environmental conditions in engineering. As the door begins sliding down, we see the chaos of the trainees running to a wall unit and pulling out plastic tubes. Another couple of cutaways later we see Scotty on the intercom talking to Kirk and he's wearing a respirator. I remember the novelization said that Peter Pressman died of coolant inhalation, but I'm don't think we saw any of that in the sequence. We did see smoke and other stuff from the interior hull were the phaser blasts hit.
I can buy the idea of there being an emergency sleeve or something at the junction of the horizontal intermix shaft where the door slides through it. I can imagine that the computer signaled the sleeve to retract into the junction point to allow the door to drop. Plasma containment could have been maintained by a force field until the door dropped. The ship does have force fields as evidenced by the cargo/shuttle deck scene at the beginning of The Motion Picture. However, even the thinnest gap between the halves of the intermix junction and the door could be a major problem.
[ September 25, 2001: Message edited by: CaptainMike ]
quote:
Originally posted by Siegfried:
However, Mark raises an excellent point: where the hell did that door come from? It just sorta materialized out of space.
There's no reason why engineering has to be on the upper level of the secondary hull. Sure, that was the plan, but that door causes problems. The ceiling is much too curved to "fit" the top of the hull, anyway, so it really doesn't matter where we want to stick it, as long as there's room for the horizontal shaft. Damn, that almost sounds pornographic.
As I think about, that really is a bit of bad engineering to put the horizontal intermix shaft on the top deck of the secondary hull. There just is no protection at that location from weapons fire or the like.
and who designed it? lets ask Probert maybe...
The horizontal shaft might even have been designed to burn through the flexible curtain once the curtain was in place. The irises would be closed for a couple of seconds only, not long enough for the plasma on the other side to stop glowing, even if it cooled a little.
Timo Saloniemi
Somewhere in my closet I still have the cutaway poster that Paramount licensed back when TMP first came out. The same artist who drew this (David Kimble) also drew the blueprint package, so we can assume its as reasonably accurate as anything else out there. The illustration clearly shows that engineering is on the top level of the secondary hull.
quote:
Originally posted by CaptainMike:
I think that the ST:TMP designers were really specific for where they designed rooms to be within the ship.. there probably isnt leeway for saying, 'oh it must be lower' Shane Johnson's cutaway from 'Mr Scotts Guide to the Enterprise' was supposedly taken from the MSD in the turbolift.. i cant find mine, but we should check that..and who designed it? lets ask Probert maybe...
No need to ask Mr. Probert. Luckily, some years ago when I was visiting his home Andy handed me a stack of photocopies of stuff from TMP. One of which is a sketch that shows how the engine room, cargo deck and hangar bay fit into the ship, complete with the warp core drawn in, and the ceiling heights indicated. This drawing shows a similar height space above the engine room in the secondary hull.
I'll scan the drawing if someone here will post it.
There was an incident in which a tech used tried to use his cell-phone in the Relay Room of a nuclear power plant here in New York and managed to set of EVERY alarm in the control room. (The signal from the cell-phone confused the relays)
The reactor control system reacted to the scrambled relays by preforming an emergancy shut-down. Aside from the tech loosing his job 
nothing else happend.
As for that thing Spock was working on... I never could think up a good reason for that thing... Been driving me nuts since the first time I saw it... 