Friday 12 March 2010

Designing the Engineering room

The Engineering room of the refit Enterprise is lodged on Decks 14 and 15, with controls and the horizontal intermix chamber located on the latter. To the port side of Main Engineering is a dilithium reactor room, where Spock died in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The deckplan from David Schmidt’s U.S.S Enterprise NCC-1701A Deck Plans below depicts turbolift access alongside the horizontal intermix shaft to the aft section of the deck, which, according to Shane Johnson’s Mr. Scott’s Guide to the Enterprise, is the location of Landing Bay Control.

For Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Production Designer Harold Michelson was largely responsible for reworking the engineering set to give it a much grander scale. “The engine was a Plexiglas thing,” says Michelson, “and I assumed that it would go all the way back through the ship and up through the two diagonal supports to the nacelles. I did it forced perspective so that I had a five-foot man, a four-foot man, and a three-foot kid standing on the set to create the illusion of depth. We were able to send this energy through that thing and up the tubes, and it worked out very well.”

 

N. Ottens
25 June 2007
Last updated: 28 October 2008

Sources for this article include:
• Johnson, S., Mr. Scott’s Guide to the Enterprise (1987)
• Schmidt, D., U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701A Deck Plans (1992)
• “Production Design,” Star Trek: The Magazine, volume 2, issue 8 (December 2001)
• Screencaptures courtesy of Trekcore.