This week our analysis of the NX-01 continues with a look at her engineering room. Starship engineering decks are big and hence their location must be credible. With the possible exception of the hangar bay, main engineering is likely the largest room on board.

Scotty's engineering deck was never specifically located in the first series. The TOS episode "Court Martial" had Finney escaping a Phase One search in the "below decks - engineering," yet that left enough squirm room for fandom's later more optimized location at the back of the saucer. Later series nailed engineering down right away to silence crazy treknologists.

When building a starship it's helpful to begin with engineering since that facilitates the remaining assembly. Hence the NX-01 assembly simulation also begins there. To start the job I gathered photos without much clutter. The Entertainment Tonight piece featured many good shots on both decks of Main Engineering (and just what is the deal with the dunsel upper deck anyway?).

These and other images scaled the final room sufficiently well to construct a 3D computer model. Project files can be found here. In the model the matter/anti-matter feeds are highlighted in the pink-purple warp color. The green crew members are 1.8m tall and are inserted for visual reference. (It might be interesting for future columns to simulate the bridge and other rooms to greater detail onboard the new Enterprise.)

The engineering room of the NX-01 is about 12.5m (40ft) long, 9m (30ft) wide, and 5m (16ft) high. The "warp core" is almost 10m long with a large control panel on a raised platform and many smaller panels below. That all seems big till one realizes that either relatively mammoth 1701 nacelle would enclose the entire two-deck engineering room!

Yet does it fit in "the pod?" It's hard to say without a better side-view but my eye says yes. Recall from last week's column that the NX-01 nacelles are roughly 80m long. Visually "the pod" seems a little less than a quarter of that length - so size alone does not rule it out.

Common sense tells us that the shortest path possible should connect the nacelles and the warp core. The yellow "plasma conduits" to the rear of the room appear to point at a nacelle to either side according to the side view we have. Again that should place engineering aft in "the pod." From what we've seen, Tucker's engineering cannot be at the back of the primary hull but might fit a little closer to the bridge.