Mark

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"Why build one, when you can have two at twice the price?"

- Carl Sagan, "Contact"

Int he widescreen version of the film you can clearly see the rec deck has eight squarish windows in two rows of four. I also seem to recall you can also faintly see a painting of part of the spacedock and a portion of a pylon and nacelle outisde.

On the outside of the ship you can see those eight squarish windows on the back edge of the saucer to the starboard of the impulse engine (notably when the travel pod passes down between the engines).

These eight windows are the ONLY squarish ones on the ship.

The officer's lounge set re-used part of the rec-deck outer wall, and has the same windows. But since the rec deck takes those windows, there's no place for the lounge.

And Psi'a Meese...how do you know me???

--Jonah

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"It's obvious I'm dealing with a moron..."

--Col. Edwards, ROBOTECH

Let's face it, it's a continuity error, plain and simple. The rec deck set windows were purposefully mirrored on the model, and the officer's lounge set reused a part of rec deck wall and no analogous windows were fitted to the miniature. As Andy Probert says, it was a budgetary decision because they didn't want to spend the money to build the "real" Rec Room (seen as a miniature when Spock's shuttle arrives).

Andy's suggestion at the time of the production was to rip out the wall with the windows and put a bluescreen there, then matte the miniature set there so it would be like Kirk and Co. were chatting in a back area of the deck, but no one wanted to do that and do reshoots. It's possible Foundation could have done the same digitally (much as ILM ripped out walls in the Special Edition of The Empire Strikes Back), but instead they recognized that the only matching windows to the set were where the Rec Deck is and moved the view from the set to this spot (hence the angle on the engine).

The easiest answer or all would be that these aren't windows at all, but viewscreens. I'm sure that idea could have been easily gotten across and this whole issue would be settled.

What, and ripped them out again once they go sucked into V'ger so Decker and the Ilia-Probe could go back to the Rec-Deck and stand in front of those same windows? LOL

>I'd just like to see more of V'Ger.
>That is one alien ship i've never been able to
>wrap my brain around....

Your wish is my command! I scanned one of Syd's Mead's sketches for the model and it can be found at...
http://home.pacbell.net/mauricem/vger.gif

This image appears in the Star Trek Phase II book, but is incorrectly labeled an "early" concept...but it's very near final. Some small details changed at the very back, but it's essentially correct in shape to the final.

It's not clear in the film, but the Enterprise initially approached V'ger from behind, passes along it, and then is sucked into the "maw" at the front end (an ingenious mechanism that's actually very simple but looks more complex than it is).

My wish is that they'd actually SHOW V'ger in the DE version...there's a storyboard showing V'ger eclipsing the sun, and such a shot would allow a hint of the overall shape without having to show it in great detail. Imagine seeing THAT in the sky!

Timo ... nonononono. I'm sorry, but that shot cannot be made from the aft dorsal. If it were, you'd be looking at the "matter-acquisition-sink," (or whatever), on the inside of the starboard nacelle. The angle is all wrong. It has to be right where the rec-deck windows are or that other place sticking out of nowhere that someone else mentioned.

But it IS one of the windows fromthe Rec Deck set.

>Mr. Scott's Guide has a floorplan of the officer's
>lounge which has two small lounge areas with viewers
>about the size in the picture.

Actually, what that book did was copy and slightly modify Andy Probert's floorplan of how to tie the live action set into the miniature set. Andy's idea was to reshoot the shots of the characters in front of the windows but replace the wall with a bluescreen and then matte in the miniature lounge beyond. The book's version just leaves the wall in. So, if you presume the windows are "screens" then that room could be just about anywhere in the ship.

Neutron

Assuming we're rescaling the schematics of the Enterprise so that the decks are 9-10 feet in height with 1 foot deckspace between, then one of the STANDARD windows, (i.e., the round/ovalesque portholes), would probably be, (I'm most definitely estimating here), 3 or 4 feet from top to bottom. The rec-deck windows if scaled accordingly would be between 5 or 5.5 or 6 feet from top to bottom.

The window seen in that screenshot didn't appear to be 5 or 6 feet from top to bottom. However, please note that I understand the decklines/windows don't line up on the Enterprise, so my suppositions may be incorrect or invalidated.

I do know that the floorplan in Scott's Guide was modified. I've seen both versions. It just seemed to make more sense that they were in the officer's lounge and I thought that was what the assumption was. There could definitely be more lounge areas elsewhere aboard in the primary hull, (I hope there are), but the officer's lounge is, well, for the officers. I highly doubt that they would have gone anywhere in the secondary hull to have their little chat. (Besides, why would they PUT a lounge in the secondary hull? That whole area seems a bit restricted on space.)

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I took another look at that pic, and it actually looks to be about five feet high even though the width would be wrong, as it should be half again the width in the screenshot. Still, if the height is right, I humbly digress and apologize for my overzealous nitpicking.