The Enterprise Dorsal Problem: how did the turbolifts pass through it?

I always appreciated that the AI running the turbolifts always knew how to time its speed, so that the passenger conversations always ended just as the destination was reached.

As we all know, the refit Enterprise has a straight vertical turbolift shaft that runs through 78 of its 21 decks.

I have emailed Andrew Probert, the designer of the refit Enterprise, many times. He said his plan was to have the turbolifts move upwards from the hangardeck, move forward paralleling the engine room. They would then turn in front of engineering and begin traveling upward between the torpedo tubes and just forward of the vertical intermix shaft in the dorsal connector. They would then end up in the saucer section just forward of the impulse deck.

I always thought of the lifts as more like a pneumatic tube style setup. Given the control of gravity in the ship they could easily shift into diagonal, vertical, or horizontal. All that really matters is that at the end it orients to the destination. The entrances could be punchouts that allow for loading and the initial click simply the reorientation to the lift line.

In the turbo lifts in TOS there’s a panel on the wall that when the lift was moving would either show a pattern of lights going from top to bottom, when Kirk and co we’re going to engineering, or bottom to top when they were going to the Bridge, sometimes the lights would go from side to side. I always thought this was showing how the lift was moving during the scene

I'm not gonna lie, throughout the video I was constantly saying to myself that there are probably two turbolift networks. After finishing the video I went and looked at Connie refit MSDs and sure enough, the turbolift in the secondary hull does in fact lead into where the core is (a deck or two below where the impulse engines are) to which another turbolift door sits on the other side (to the front) of the warp core. A pretty simple idea as a person would just have to walk around the warp core to get into the next lift to get into the saucer. Perhaps not the most ideal but definitely an easy solution.

On a similar note: The Gateway Arch at the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, was originally planned as just a monument. A viewing room at the top was considered, but the Arch's triangular cross-section and its overall shape being an inverted weighted catenary curve of 630 feet in both height and width, would have only allowed for stairs. Many engineers thought it was impossible to install elevators; the one-of-a-kind design of a tram system was conceived in just two weeks by a man named Dick Bowser, who never received a college degree. The tram system has been in use since 1967.

The book "Mr Scott's Guide To The Enterprise" postulated that the turbolift slides into the dorsal on G-deck from the side, then goes down, aft, down, aft and finally down (behind the torpedo room) into the secondary hull. It's a lot of manoeuvres but it does fit!

I think this gets solved if we don’t assume the vertical warp core goes all the way to the impulse deflection crystal. If we instead say that the core extends upwards towards an “impulse engineering complex” (one that has the deflection crystal in line with, but not necessarily directly connected to, the upper end of the warp core), then we can suppose that the turbolift shaft simply passes horizontally between the top of the core and the deflection crystal.

I always tend to assume scaling issues when it comes to things like this. Especially given how big those dorsal windows look against the height of the deck, while we’re shown more traditional size portholes on the sets. If we scale up by 20-50% there’s plenty of room for the turbolift to go around. Similarly the size of the windows on the Excelsior model would actually be a little too small. They’re what looks best on the models of course, and I wouldn’t really want to swap the size of the windows on either of them. But the windows alone present a sizing and placement issue of decks and internal machinery, so I don’t think too hard about the rest of the insides. Scaling-up slightly would help fit the torpedo complex inside the bulge at the base of the dorsal too.

Every ship has that small area where the only option is to beam the entire turbo lift to the closest shaft. There's also the one where the turbo lift is shot into space and it utilizes its own thrusters to re-enter the ship at the appropriate shaft.

There isn't a full end of the warp core on H-deck, instead just a lockdown/venting connector leading to the topside warp crystal. Hence a full room isn't used for the core leaving room for a turbo lift to pass through it and up to the main saucer.

I gotta say I love the attention you have given to your cutaways, makes it very easy to visualize the interior of the ship. Would love to see you cover other areas of the ship, especially those in the plans not shown on the shows or movies.

In my opinion, we have a scale problem. They were never consistent in the overall size of the ships in relation to interior shots. The set designers treated the ships like TARDIS's. (bigger on the inside than the outside) "Look, there's just enough room for a turbolift." "But how.." "It just is!!"

was the point of this video to boost algorithm engagement by getting everyone to comment on all the incredibly obvious answers, such as lift orientation and chamber width? kudos. it worked. I'm happy to contribute as well

As anyone who's seen THAT episode of Discovery knows, Starfleet used Timelord TARDIS-derived technology to make their Starships bigger on the inside and the Turbolift cars run inside the cavernous interior of the ships.

Kirk didn't leave the torpedo bay and go to the Bridge in TWOK, he went down to Enginering first which makes sense as he would have walked out the door to the warp core area and then down one deck.

It's been a long time since I had last seen "Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan", so I don't remember enough details about the movie in order to notice the ship design inconsistencies of the TMP era Constitution class starship refit design configuration. But there are some possible explanations to get around those design inconsistencies. One: the ship has 2 forward torpedo launch tubes, which means that it either has 2 torpedo launch control rooms for the forward tubes, or has just one room that is bigger than what was depicted on screen. Either way, the launch control room is probably not directly connected to the Turbolift shaft, so there may be a small corridor that is between those 2 sites of the ship. Two: the ship's "neck" may have 2 Turbolift shafts, one in the front with no deck access between the saucer section and the engineering section, and one in the back with access to all decks in the neck, but with that Turbolift shaft terminating within the saucer near the impulse engines. Three: the shaft for warp core may be way bigger in diameter than the warp core itself, possibly big enough to accommodate a Turbolift car, probably running on tracks through the warp core shaft instead of a separate Turbolift shaft occupying the open space of the warp core shaft. It would make sense to me that the warp core shaft might be much wider than the warp core itself, because the port-to-starboard width of the neck of the TMP Enterprise always seemed to me to be much wider than the port-to-starboard width of the neck of the TOS Enterprise. There may be other possible explanations for the design inconsistencies, but those 3 are the only ones that I can think of at this time.

The Constitution is actually probably the least problematic of the Kirk era Federation ships. Both the Miranda and the Oberth have entire parts of the ship which cannot be accessed from the saucer - fully half of the latter - and the Excelsior is regularly shown to be absolutely massive, leaving entirely the opposite problem of why it needs so much more space…

In the motion picture, there's a scene with Kirk in the turbolift just after arriving and surveying the cargo deck. At the rear of the lift cab, there's a map with a moving light showing the primary lift layouts. Going by that, the vertical shaft is either to the front or sides of the vertical warp core segment. As on the Discovery from 2001 not everything will fit, and we have to go with it :)