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Can someone tell me if an "OFFICAL" technical manual exists for the original series? I've got the unoffical or noncanon technical manual written by Franz Joseph.
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The fact is that fans in the earlier days of Star Trek, say, before TNG aired, did not really care about 'canon' as today's fans do. At least, that's my observation. Franz Joseph manual was and is a very respected source, but 'canon', not really.
Hey Sol, don't you think that your sig with that lyric from R.E.M. is a bit out of date? With the year 2001 started, the 20th century *is* already to sleep.
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During the movies and at the very beginning of TNG, it looked like TPTB were going to use FASA as their standard, but that was nipped in the bud not long after. A few FASA ship designs which showed up on the occasional display screen are all that can be considered canon from FASA.
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I see the 20th Century as an upset toddler unwilling to agree to a bedtime. How else to explain the large number of toys it has dragged with it, such as the remnants of the Cold War, professional wrestling, and scooters?
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*ahem* Get the sack of stones ready, folks...
As wonderfully drawn and well-thought-out Franz Joseph's Technical Manual and deck plans were/are, his enthusiasm for Trek was all but nonexistent (he did them as a fun little hobby/favor for his Trekkie daughter and her friends), and his research wherewithal woefully inadequate to the result.
If he had actually watched the rerun episodes and taken notes and/pr had tracked down Matt Jeffries and picked his brain, it might have been closer to what the Enterprise actually was. But all he went by were one or two episodes that stood out (usually from the third season -- bad idea as "Day of the Dove" indicates), slides and photos from Lincoln Enterprises, and the book "The Making of Star Trek", which was a very good source for pulled-out-of-Gene's-ass "information" on the Enterprise.
End result of the deck plans? Shield grid lines on the ventral saucer surface, wrong shape for the bridge and decks 2/3 superstructure, wrong size and placement of main engineering, drastically f***ed-up weapons loadout, well-maeaning but wrong secondary hull room layout... as well as numerous other minor cosmetic errors.
About this time also arose the notion, germinated by "The Making of Star Trek" and given flower in his deck plans, that all warp power generation takes place in the nacelles -- which it never did. Those things you see out the aft screen wall of the engineering set are not impulse fusion generators, they are forced-perspective (constraints of the soundstage wall and all that) intermix reactors -- at least according to Matt Jeffries, whose word I place over that of FJ.
The Technical Manual stands up far better under scrutiny (so long as you gloss over the details of the ship designs, inaccurate for reasons given above). But. The TM has one big and painful legacy that generated a schism surviving to this day. What does NCC mean, and how are the registry numbers assigned?
*sigh*
Matt and Gene were kicking around a couple of ideas that never got fully developed (they didn't have to be). First of all, one thing that is agreed upon is that NCC was never supposed to actually stand for anything -- just as in real-world registries. As for what it SIGNIFIED, that never got nailed down. They played with the idea that it was for Starfleet's Heavy Cruisers, and that other ship types would have different prefixes. However, except for the Aurora (*cough*) in the third season (*cough*), all the other Starfleet ships we saw were Constitution-class. So when Franz Joseph expanded the fleet in the TM, he made NCC a blanket prefix for all of Starfleet. Unfortunately, he also made it an acronym. I have a nice synthesis view that has gone annoyingly unnoticed: that NCC doesn't stand for anything, merely signifies an active-serving Starfleet vessel, but humans being quirky the way we are, we came up with mnemonics like "Naval Construction Contract" and "Navigational Contact Code" to help us remember.
The other thing FJ did was introduce the idea of registries assigned in blocks. But he didn't give a system or guidelines for how this was done, leaving technical fandom to flail about in his wake trying to create sucha system where none had been thought out by the originator. Matt and Gene speculated that the Enterprise's full registry had the following meaning: NCC (Starfleet Heavy Cruiser) 17 (seventeenth cruiser/heavy cruiser design) 01 (first production model built). Had this been developed to its logical conclusion, we would have had different prefixes for the different ship types, and a much easier to track registry system -- at least for a while. I have my own ideas for trying to reconcile THAT whole mess, but I'll leave off for now.
Last thing, before I let all this settle: all the Enterprise schematics seen in TMP, TWoK, and TSfS were from the Enterprise deck plans, and the briefly-glimpsed ship schematics seen in TWoK were the Ptolemy, Hermes, and Saladin classes form the TM. Nothing from FASA was ever used in the movies.
--Jonah
P.S. Despite the outrage from Treknical fans having the foundation-stones of their faith challenged, the SciPubTech TOS Enterprise cutaway poster actually gets a lot closer to what was actually so than FJ did. Sour grapes...
------------------ "It's obvious I'm dealing with a moron..."
Could you please relate the sources for your informaton? Or are these interpretations based upon personal opinion of these publicaions?
Ex: ------------------------------------------------------ ...and the book "The Making of Star Trek", which was a very good source for pulled-out-of-Gene's ass "information" on the Enterprise. ------------------------------------------------------
And this example: ------------------------------------------------------ About this time also arose the notion, germinated by "The Making of Star Trek" and given flower in his deck plans, that all warp power generation takes place in the nacelles -- which it never did. Those things you see out the aft screen wall of the engineering set are not impulse fusion generators, they are forced-perspective (constraints of the soundstage wall and all that) intermix reactors -- at least according to Matt Jeffries, whose word I place over that of FJ. ------------------------------------------------------
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From interviews with Matt Jeffries that I've stumbled across in various places, and from what Mike (Okuda) has told me when we were talking about why he did what he did with the TOS Enterprise in the Encyclopedia and the SciPubTech poster.
--Jonah
------------------ "It's obvious I'm dealing with a moron..."
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I don't think that the Aurora was supposed to be Starfleet proper, either. It was probably a civilian ship that, had it been in the TNG era, would receive a NAR- prefix like the Vico and the Raven.
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People were probably confused originally by the designation "star cruiser" used for the Aurora. Instead of being a cruiser in the sense of USS Long Beach, the ship probably was a cruiser in the sense of M/S Love Boat.
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