ALL SCI-FI

[Maurice]

Decker was envisioned as a Robert Ryan type, so casting Windom was a bit of a head-scratcher.

The original name of the story was "The Planet Eater."

Spinrad killed Decker in every draft of the thing. Blish letting him live in his book adaptation was all him, not from the show.

Early on Commodore Decker's name was Curt. It was never "Brand" as Blish wrote.

The story didn't change much over various drafts. The only major change, other than specifically describing it as robot weapon and adding the whole "doomsday machine" speculation, was adding the whole "it will pass through the most densely populated section of our galaxy" bit to make the thing a bigger and more immediate threat than just to the two starships.

Digging through the story outline and scripts for this reveals a lot of details that are only sketched in the aired episode: like that Spinrad indeed meant neutron star-like "collapsed matter" when he wrote "neutronium." The values you get online much neutron star material weighs are all over the place, ranging from 10 million tons to about 1 billion tons (1 trillion kilograms), and Decker gives a rather detailed account of what happened to his ship step by step.

In short, the Constellation went in to study the thing, figuring they could warp off if necessary, but didn't anticipate the "eater" weaponry, which slammed through their "screens" and knocked out the "screen generators", and without the screens, the antimatter in the warp pods collapsed into neutronium (don't ask how) and in a later draft, was drained of energy, which is why they could not escape on warp drive. After the ship was hammered into a wreck, Decker says the thing ignored them once they powered down everything but life support, but he thinks the transporter being used to beam the crew down to the third planet caught its attention and it came back and took another shot at the ship, stranding him. Then it spent several days blowing the third planet apart while he watched. Grim.

Unlike the finished episode, Decker had been clearer about his intentions with the shuttle. He was hoping to damage its guts. The slowness of the various ships' speeds were something Bob Justman griped about as he repeatedly suggested cutting off the script.

From the original Story Outline:

Spock informs Kirk that the ship has entered the latest solar system in their search pattern, and we learn that it, like the last three, seems to have been totally reduced to rubble and dust. [...] Spock corrects himself and tells Kirk that this solar system has two intact planets.​

As to the "Eater" itself...

[...]a kind of cylindrical "living atomic rocket" at least ten times the size of the Constellation, apparently from beyond the Galaxy, with a big posterior rocket and a great anterior funnel-mouth big enough to swallow a ship with a cluster of atomic blaster beams and tractor beams around the funnel, not a machine, but a living organism with a nuclear metabolism.​


Then from the script received by the Star Trek offices April 5. 1967:

On screen, looming ever-larger as it closes with the Enterprise, we see the Eater: a great funnel of a mouth extended before its huge, almost endless metallic, undulating body, as if to devour the Enterprise, and a trail of what might be rocket exhaust dribbling off behind it.
​
Now we get an idea of its size... eight miles, or about 44 starships long; much bigger than portrayed in the episode...


SPOCK'S VOICE OVER​
Approximately eight miles in length, metallic sheen, and yet I sense that it's a living organism, not a machine....​
[...]

DECKER​
[...]the only way to destroy it is to get inside its guts...right down that monstrous mouth at full emergency speed...smash its internal organs with the momentum of the shuttlecraft....​
[...]

KIRK​
[...]Neutronium is a nuclear dampener, isn't it? That means the thing's guts must be made of something else, something more vulnerable.[...]​

In the May 8, 1967 "final" draft...

DECKER​
[...]a thing ten times the size of a starship and far more powerful[...]​

If he means length, Decker's description of the thing slightly would be maybe 10,000 feet long, or a bit shy of two miles. What we see in the finished episode — if scaled in profile views with the Enterprise — measures to about 14 starships long or ~13,330 feet, so Decker's description would be about 20% smaller than portrayed, and less than a quarter the 8-mile length Spock gave in the previous draft.

But then we get Sulu's and Spock's estimates of its length, which are even smaller than what Decker described. Here's the description of what it looks like and its size:

[Bud Brewster]

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Maurice, that is an excellent analysis of the plot for this episode and the development of the story.

Bravo!
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)