Slicing up the Enterprise - Cutaway Models and Diagrams

Dragon Model's latest Project Cutaway model has just been released by Diamond Select Toys, as part of their Star Trek range-  It's the TOS USS Enterprise, with transparent panels giving us a look inside saucer, neck, engineering section and a nacelle.

You can see more images of the model in my previous report. DST posted this photo, showing the packaging for this model, which even partially assembled looks pretty impressive:

This isn't the first time we've been able to peek inside the Enterprise however, continue after the jump for a look back at other models and diagrams that reveal the Enterprise's innards:

Preceding this new pre-painted model was an AMT USS Enterprise cutaway model kit, which was released in 1996. Taking a different approach to the cutaway, the model kit version has removable sections, so can be displayed as a full ship, and then pulled apart to look inside. Here's the box art, with a nice cutaway illustration, and two example builds, made by Paul Stowe and Mace:

Long before models however, Star Trek products have been pulling back the hull of the Enterprise. Almost at the dawn of the series, in Gold Key Comic's sixth issue, When Planets Collide, from 1969, we got a typically inaccurate look inside the Enterprise. In this one panel cross-section we are informed the Enterprise has a crew of hundreds, while showing us an interior which only has a handful of rooms:

It wasn't long before less impressionistic diagrams appeared however, in the form of Franz Joseph's 1975 set of blueprints of the Enterprise in Star Trek Blueprints. The collection of thirteen sheets of blueprints include exterior orthographic views, sections through parts of the ship, and deck by deck plans. Here is the cross-section through the whole ship:

Joseph revealed closer details of the Enterprise later in 1975 in his book, the Star Fleet Technical Manual, which also detailed other ships in the fleet, starbases, uniforms, equipment  and the make-up of the Federation.

A less purely technical look inside the Enterprise returned in 1995 with SciPubTech's cutaway diagram poster. The TOS Enterprise was the second in a series which included ships from across the franchise.

Also out in the nineties was the part-work magazine, the Star Trek: Fact Files, the three-hundred-and-four part collection included detailed articles on every aspect of Star Trek, including numerous pages on the Enterprise. While there were no complete cross-sections in the files, it did include numerous detailed diagrams of parts of the ship, such as this image of sickbay:

The classic Constitution class returned to the screen  in 2005, with the appearance of the USS Defiant in the Enterprise mirror universe two-parter, In a Mirror, Darkly. To help the Terran crew navigate the future ship, Doug Drexler prepared a new cross section diagram:

Finally the most recent published look inside the Enterprise comes from the USS Enterprise Haynes Manual, which details all the starships Enterprise, using cut-away images and computer generated recreations of the sets. The cutaway diagram of the Enterprise also features on the cover of the book:

This diagram has also been put to good use on other products, available as T-shirt, wallet, or as a huge wall sticker.