I thought Iād give you all a little (hah!) update of what has been going on in the background of the mapping blog recently. I havenāt finished anything in a long while and I always feel a little weird throwing WIPs on here without the commentary I feel they deserve (thatās what twitter is for š). But Iām trying to get better about that.
So, here is a ton of my work literally in progress. I hope you enjoy looking at a whole lot of very similar deck plans š
I have an idea for a new mapping project for periods when I donāt have the time or energy to write long things. But it requires me having a usable map of the upper and lower deck of La Sirena.
My first idea was āeh, Iām going to take the set plans we got from the blu-rays and just clean them up a little, make sure all the markings are in the right place, add a few things that are missing, and re-do the labels. That wonāt take too long, surely?ā
āYeah, thatās serviceable!ā
But then I started working on the lower deck. Looking at the original plans, the first one is too warped and out of focus to use as a basis, but thereās a bunch of stuff missing in the second one (most obviously, the front of the mess with the stairs to the bridge).
āSo. If I want to have a map of the lower deck in its entirety, I need to add the front of the ship and a bunch of stairs, make adjustments to the glass-plates - not to mention clean up the graininess from rescaling it to fit with the upper deck...... Okay, fine, Iām just going to retrace the entire lower deck, make it as clean, and as screen-accurate as I can get it, and add all the missing stairs and things.ā
It helped that I already had a redrawn version of sickbay, because Iāve been adding furniture to that, too:
(Still missing a few things, like the shelves on the support beams, not to mention labels for the furniture. But itās getting there!)
"Using that and the old plans, it wonāt be too hard getting the entire lower deck redrawn, right?ā
āYeah, thatās good. Thatās a good update!ā
But to get there, I had to do a ton of work on the two sets of stairs to the upper deck to get them accurate. And itās silly to only do half the stairs, so obviously I did the top half as well. But that, in turn, necessitated getting the railing around the stairs in the back and around the drop to the lower deck in the front right, so I knew how and where the stairs attached.
āAnd while Iām at it, might as well do the railing around the panorama windows as well.ā
āAlso, I got some things wrong about the holodeck in my first redraw. For one, Iām fairly sure there arenāt actually any support beams sticking up straight through the middle of it, so those need to go. And I can get it cleaner, too.
āAlso also: I already have outlines of the captainās quarters and Raffiās quarters, because I did versions of those with furniture!ā
(Raffiās quarters with a marker for the skylight.)
āAnd I started on doing the same with the bridge. Didnāt get super far, but I have the floor structures down. So might as well add all that to the upper deck as well!ā
āYeah, okay, thatās kinda neat.ā
Then there was a brief interlude where my brain got completely obsessed with the floor plates. I donāt really know what kicked me down that particular rabbit hole. Maybe it was just that the next step for the upper deck would have been deciding whether to do a full retrace, or whether to keep the cleaned-up version of the original plans, add the new things I had drawn, and leave it at that.
It was probably also something about the set plan not being 100% symmetrical (itās off by one pixel if you use a 1 pixel wide centre line) and the width of the beams and spaces between them not being 100% accurate. So I was curios whether I could get the floor plans to fit (and whether my estimation about their size was off, perhaps).
Either way, I spent two days completely obsessing over floor plates, and ended up with this:
(I was kinda tired when I did this and there are some very glaring mistakes that a very kind person on twitter pointed out to me. But itās part of this odyssey, so I felt I should include it š)
āOkay. So I have an idea for the floor plates. Nice. But now I need to figure out a way to make the walls of the upper deck be above the floor plates, without getting interference from the markings on the floor and.... Iām gonna do a full retrace of all the walls and beams on the upper deck after all, arenāt I? WELP!ā
And because my deck plan file already consists of 94 layers and I love it being so modular and able to show and explain a bunch of different things around the ship, might as well make the underlying structure of the upper deck as bare-bones as possible. That way, I can add and move things much more freely.
So, here is the skeleton of the upper deck.
Maybe this is an approximation of what the ship looked like at its inception/before Rios added the Starfleet containers with quarters, holodeck, etc.
(I still need to decide what to do with the back of the ship and access to the engine room, since those sets donāt actually exist and nothing official has been said about it yet...)
After getting to the point pictured above, I spent the second half of my Saturday fixing my floor plate mix ups and adding in some new information. Unless Iāve overlooked something, any plates that still look flipped at this point are screen-accurate.
Clearly, there were some incidents near the bridge and at the back of the captainās quarters that required floor plates to be switched out at some point - and it had to be done quickly, so there was no time to get them all perfect. Or possibly Rios was drunk and/or one of the holos was having a laugh. Any explanations are welcome ;)
(The plan above is not set-accurate, btw. If you look closely, youāll notice that this is the extended version of the upper deck, with Riosās cabin the size we see on screen, not the size built on the set.)
Iām going to have to do a massive write-up of this when the plans are done. Explain things like āscreen-accurate but not set-accurateā (check the pinned masterpost for info about the captainās quarters if youāre interested), point out all the things Iāve done to these plans to get them where they are, note all my observations and measurements, and provide evidence for some of my decisions regarding floor plate placement etc.
But for now, here is what Iāve been up to the last three-ish weeks, in case anyone was wondering ;)
