C-57D Revealed!

Many have been entranced by the peerless masterpiece Forbidden Planet & have tried to work out the deck plans for the C-57D, so this is my version. There are ideas in the writers’, directors’ & production designers’ minds, there are interior sets, exterior sets & hero miniatures, but there is also the real spacecraft as it would exist in the imaginary universe the film is aiming to depict. It is this real spacecraft that I seek to design, so I apply the following rules: 1 The inside must fit into the outside with room for unseen but vital areas such as engines, fuel tanks & ablutions. 2 The outside must look right, but if necessary it is allowed to be bigger than apparent in the movie. After all, it is only a movie. 4 It must look as if it was designed by an engineer, observing engineering principles of symmetry & relationship between form & function. 5 It must be possible to recreate all the best scenes from the film. The original C-57D was designed by the two main production desgners on Forbidden Planet, Cedric Gibbons & Arthur Lonergan, with probable uncredited input from the original story writer Irving Block & the screen play writer Mentor Huebner. Judging by the similarities between the C-57D & the Jupiter 2 there must have also been some influence from the special effects man Robert Kinoshita who was to become the art director on Lost In Space 9 years later in 1965. In the early 23rd century humans have not been travelling in deep space for very long, & huge all-singing-all-dancing mega-spaceships such as the Enterprise don’t exist yet. In many ways the C-57D is more reminiscent of a cramped old 18th century sailing ship than the 20th century warships that were actually around when the film was made. Deck plans have been published before (I bought a set years ago) but I think they cram too much extra stuff in. The main deck seen in the film seems to include nearly everything necessary for working, eating & sleeping (except for the galley, ablutions & officers’ quarters that could be behind the screens) so it seems reasonable to me that the lower decks contain nothing but engineering, service & life-support equipment & cargo. The cargo areas must be pretty large to fit in enough provisions for 19 men for 3 years, a 500 foot long laser fence, all those field artillery pieces, huge tubs of plaster-of-Paris & that hulking great tractor. Only the slightest glimpse is caught of this deck in the movie, a single door at the top of the landing stairs. The original plans for the actual film set have a five-fold symmetry but to me this is just the equivalent of the missing fourth wall in any other film-set (ditto the open ceiling above the captain’s table). A flying saucer with three landing legs must have internal six-fold symmetry & hence six main interior walls & buttresses. That’s how an engineer would do it - I know because I am one. This means that there are six bays inside the dome, the four open plan ones that we can see into & two that are screened off (of which we see the outside of only one in the movie). These 6 bays are 1 Radio room with captain’s table & viewscreen. 2 Screened off ablutions for the 16 crewmen. 3 Bunk room for the 16 crewmen, including personal lockers & heavy duty loading hatch. 4 Decelleration stations for 19 men. 5 Mess table (seats 9) with galley concealed behind. 6 Screened off staterooms & ablutions for the 3 officers. It is extremely cosy, 19 men (or 14 men, Anne Francis 1 robot) living cheek by jowl in a 16 metre diameter area for 18 months at a time. Cleaner, but no more spacious than 19-man sailing ships in the 18th century. The ship uses steps to get down to ground level upon landing, so I used staircases instead of lifts for access between the main & service decks. These are not shown in the film so I put them behind the wall at the back of the radio room (you only see FROM this direction in the movie) & next to the galley behind the mess room. The original exterior set showed a disc about 50ft in diameter, but to fit everything in to the satisfaction of an engineer (me) this had to be increased to 155 ft, creating far more height between the disc & the ground when landed, but I still think it looks okay. I’d rather have one of these than a Millenium Falcon. Less maintenance. ******************* Music is 4 tracks by Desmond Leslie, flying saucer expert, electronic music pioneer & first man ever to start a fist fight during a live BBC broadcast (he punched Bernard Levin for insulting the work of his partner, fellow electronic music pioneer and original Dr Who theme tune creator Miss Delia Derbyshire), taken from his album Music Of The Future, released in 1960. Invention Of The Weapon. Music Of The Voids Of Outerspace - Asteroid Belt. Mercury, Fleet Messenger Of The Gods. The War Horns Of Mars.