Day 5 "Preliminary Drafting"

Today we begin drafting the Engineering section. To begin with and to keep accuracy to a maximum, I used the X-Ray from the Smithsonian that I linked to earlier. We're going to use this to establish our angles first. As stated earlier in the blog, the Enterprise, at its core, is little more than a collection of cones and spheres, with the exception of the primary hull. This does not take away thing from the over all elegance of the design, nor does it reflect negatively on the creators skills, in fact, for such an iconic craft, it speaks to the abilities of Matt Jeffries. I've used basic drafting supplies to get the angle of taper on the engineering, or secondary hull, printed up the X-Ray, used a rule to strengthen the lines and used a French Curve to get the compound curve on the tail section. We'll check this with screen captures, other prints, the directions from the PL kit and so on.


If you wish to do something like this, or follow along, you need some basic drafting materials and tools.

Later we'll establish what the angle is off of the horizontal, establish a center line and rotate the tapered cone into the right position with the center line referenced to the horizontal plane.

Let's look at some screen captures of the original Enterprise, establish the point of view and learn about parallax.

In the screen capture progression you can see that the Enterprise appears to move from right to left past a point of view that is established center left, at least that's the appearance. Actually the camera scanned from left to right and the ship was stationary. Regardless of how the shot was established we can use this information to get a basic profile of the Enterprise. What we will have will not be edge on with relation to the primary hull, but it will be close for the engineering section. One way to use these shots is to take frames, cut them up into bite sized pieces and knit them together. This will not give us a perfectly accurate orthographic profile, but will be useful none the less.