posted
Well, this being the same TOS Enterprise that pulled some freaky "warp pivots" in "Elaan of Troyius" (I think), she hardly needs an aft torpedo launcher.
She does, however, have aft phasers. You hear about them all the time in that background chatter usually heard while repairs are afoot. The phrase is most easily heard during "Balance of Terror", as I recall.
-------------------- . . . ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
posted
Timo: the above quote doesn't require six exits. Do you have other evidence that limits the count to at least six?
Registered: Sep 2001
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Anduril
Ex-Member
posted
Ooo, I thought balance of terror gave us the "amidships" or "midships" reference. I'm going to go back and listen to that damage report again this afternoon.
As far as aft phasers go the only thing I've ever see on that was a fan made diagram that shows the aft phasers coming out of the back where the lights are below the shuttle deck. It almost looks like they have them coming out of the two vertical lights. If anybody is interested I can dig the image up off of one of my cd's.
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posted
The best theory I've seen regarding the ST II torpedo bays is that bays 1 and 3 are the upper portions that we see through the holes above the launch rails, while 2 and 4 are the ones on the actual launch deck.
--Jonah
-------------------- "That's what I like about these high school girls, I keep getting older, they stay the same age."
--David "Woody" Wooderson, Dazed and Confused
Registered: Feb 2001
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posted
This would be the ideal explanation, yes - it would get a little cramped in there, but sets that are larger from the inside than from the outside are nothing new in Trek. We'd have to allow for some parallel corridors outboard of both bays, too, so that we could explain the portholes on the exterior walls and lack thereof on the interior walls...
There remain some other problems, too. Both #2 and #4 were shown to have an airlock/docking port (painfully clearly labeled) to port, and lacking a corresponding feature to starboard. We could assume a slight asymmetry here, of course - the starboard airlock could have been just around the corner, and there could have been an extra pressure-door between the bays 2 and 4 (somewhat confusingly labeled as "airlock"; or perhaps the signage only showed that this door led to the airlock?).
In theory, bay 2 would be the one through which Kirk boarded the ship, namely the port one. Khan would later devastate this bay. Bay 4 would be the one Spock was buried from. The signage showing bay 4 being devastated by Khan would just have to be ignored.
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I'm of the opinion that the whole thing is messed up. In ST2, Kirk is told to dock at the port torp bay airlock, but stock footage had him dock at the port secondary hull airlock. We see Kirk board right behind and enter Torp Bay 2, which is correct for dialog, but incorrect for space footage. Later we see Torp Bay 2 being destroyed by Reliant. No problems here. Later we see a torp being loaded in Torp Bay 4 when we know only two launchers exists. Plus it's fired from the starbaord launcher. When Spock's funeral is held, we see it being held in Torp Bay 2, but it was destroyed. When we see the Spock's torpedo fired, it's from the starboard launcher, which is correct given we know the port laucher has been destroyed, but is wrong given that the starboard bay is Bay 1 and the funeral was in Bay 2.
[ May 06, 2002, 10:00: Message edited by: Dat ]
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Registered: Feb 2000
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posted
I must disagree about that docking bit. The footage is cut short so that we cannot really tell where the pod actually docks - and Probert had apparently foreseen this sort of a situation, because he built the two docking locations with identical detail! Both the port that leads to the cargo area and the one that leads to the torp bay have the exact same kind of porthole arrangement next to them. So no real problem there.
As for the bit about launching torps from the wrong tube... well, we can always give Shane Johnson some credit and accept the idea of transverse rails that connect the two tubes. Given the abysmally slow functioning of the manually operated loading system, it would be no wonder if the designers wanted two loading bays to feed the actual launchers, and a method for sharing torps between the tubes so that both loading bays could be coupled to feed one tube.
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