Starship Size Argument™ thread

Well, the Excelsior which looks far larger than the Enterprise fit through those same doors. Unless they beamed it outside the Spacedock.

 

And that's the key to it all - they did a job. Only the job counts - the people who did it are meaningless. They may say things, they may write things, but those aren't part of the movie. The movie is a product that begins when the Kelvin enters the view and ends when the projector goes silent. And even out of that, the actual entertaining illusion only includes the bits that aren't credits, subtitles or commercials (the one Nokia marketing bit notwithstanding).

These mighty makers do a job, and then they leave, get promoted, drink themselves to death, or change their minds. Happily, none of that changes the job they already did. Only future jobs may change the previous job with their additional pseudo-facts, in the super-serialized format of Star Trek (and then only if one wants to believe in such serialization rather than, say, think of Shatner's Kirk as independent of Pine's).

Really, this whole thread is about laughing out of the court the people who insist on something being X just because they say so.

Timo Saloniemi

 

No, I want to see how your window-and-pixel method works out.

 

IOW, he wants to "trap" you into putting your money where your mouth is by offering some evidence for your assertions.

 

Hell, FASA made it sound like SpaceDock was as large as the Indian sub-continent, and they were supposed to have been tied-in with official studio sources at the time. I think it was an article in their "Stardate" magazine, although I can't remember which one. It had a pretty nice side view w/ different colors representing the different sections of the station.

 

Just to add my two cents into the conservation.
I just don't like the nuEnterprise "super-size". The overall classic Enterprise visual cues suggest a much smaller size (close to the original). Whereas the Next-Gen Enterprise, gave you a sense of real huge scale, based on the visual cues.

For me personally, and from an engineering standpoint, the TMP Enterprise had the best representation of the ship, size and scale. Plus that move showed that it all depends on how the ship is filmed. It showed that you still fit fairly large sets into the ship, and still get a real sense of huge scale.

 

According to FASA's Star Trek III Sourcebook Update, the spacedock is 3800m across, a length of 4700m, a staff of 50,000, 100,000 residents and a transient population of approximately 20,000. It weighs 110,000,000 metric tonnes.

But of course that too big, it makes no sense. Form doesn't follow function. The windows and doors are too big. That's for shuttles, not for starships. They don't know what they're doing. That saucer isn't really any bigger than the one on the Enterprise.


Now let's scale the Whale Probe!

 

I never got a sense of how big the ENT-D was most of the time because of the way it was filmed. In most shots it looked like a little model.

-Chris

 

This is why there will never be deck plans of the new Enterprise. If the size is 725 meters but the ships windows and doors show it to be half that size, how do you make a blueprint? Since the ship was rescaled to make the hanger deck look large enough, it now doesn't work. If you look at a side view of the ship, the shuttle bay door looks to be no more than 25 feet tall when comparing it to the docking port door on the side which is probably no more than 8 feet tall. To cram 2 shuttles on two seperate levels and leave enough clearances for entry and egress, you'd need a bay closer to 40 feet tall.

If you tried to blueprint the ship as is, and scale the decks off of the bridge, what you end up with is a shuttle bay thats only about two decks high. So unless their running micro shuttles and only carrying children, it will never work on paper.

 

Wrong. See HERE for how it all fits together, bridge, windows, shuttlebay and all.

 

Is it me, or do the slanted open shuttlebay doors look a little wonky? It doesn't even look like they can open all the way like that. Whatever happened to the tried-and-true clamshell articulated doors?

 

Converting meters into miles,

3800 meters converts to 2.36 miles
4700 meters converts to 2.92 miles

 

Don't forget starbase 74, still the largest construct of the federation ? I look forward to a really huge JJdock in a future movie

 

I am a little bit concerned about Borg cubes. They would either be way too small to be a threat – they would be only slightly bigger than the Vengeance. Vengeance is so huge and sinister that Borg cubes won't look as ominous now.

Or... They would have to make them even more gigantic. Now that, unlike Carol Marcus' accent, would be a strange consequence of Nero and friends coming to say “hi”, I must say. Not that I would mind, it would be a pleasure seeing Kirk's ship feel like an ant in the hands of an enormous Borg cube that's playing with it, but it would certainly push some wrong continuity buttons.

I guess an easy cop out would be to send multiple cubes. But I liked Borg's invincibility and relentlessness when they were going alone. So oversized cube for me please, hot and no cream.

 

The Borg could always simply dock 27 of the TNG standard Cubes together whenever necessary, and STXIII might represent such a necessity...

Timo Saloniemi

 

A stock borg cube is still noticably larger than the Vengeance.

The problem isn't the size of their ships, its just the 'we are invincible god like and we want to eatz you' concept of the borg is a bit stale and worked on a on-going slow paced TV series rather than a movie.

 

When did Spock try to save Romulus? Because Voyager already returned from the Delta Quadrant with 'trans-phasic torpedo' technology as well as that special shielding that Spock prime would be aware of.

The Borg are already defeated by Spock Prime's future knowledge.

 

I don't feel like getting out a ruler right now (). But for inquiring minds, I do remember reading somewhere in production notes of TVH that the probe was supposed to be somewhere around five miles long. So, about the size of the Narada.

Wasn't V'ger 82 AU in diameter, or about twice the distance from the sun to Pluto? I'd guess an Abrams-sized V'ger would take up the entire Alpha Quadrant.

 

I can't even believe people are still arguing the size of the new Enterprise. They established the size as the super ubber dumb size it is, so I don't know what there is to fight against anymore.

Sure you can argue some scenes say this, and some show that, but in the end, the creators decided on a size and that's what it is. The Enterprise was super sized because drama and excitement is beholden to big, bold, splashy and bangy. And there's nothing wrong with that because people respond to different things during different times.

One day the Enterprise may be rebooted again- or whatever we'll call rebooting. People may or may not fight and resist or defend no matter what. The Enterprise may get even larger or smaller or turn into a yellow submarine. Kirk may become a chick (god help us all if that happens). Uhura may actually one day become a relevant and interesting character (not bloody likely).

My point is, evidence, smevidence. Just enjoy the damned movie if you like it and stop trying to compare new trek to old- they don't need to be compared as long as you enjoy the movie.

 

Exactly. What happens if you have to evacuate 5000 colonists and Enterprise is the only ship in the quadrant?