Could somebody PLEASE tell me what the official length of TOS ENTERPRISE IS! I've heard & read everything I could and I get differant answers! some say 847 feet to 947 feet to even 1000 feet!?? So does anybody know for sure!?
Many fans have rationalized other lengths for the ship, the most popular of which seems to be 1080 feet, but the as-official-as-it-can-be-for-not-having-been-mentioned-in-an-episode length of the ship is 947 feet, about 288.6 meters.
We have had several threads on this topic. If the search engine is working, you should be able to find them.
I don't know why there'd be different opinions. Every reference I've ever seen, from The Making of Star Trek on, has said that the original ship was 947 feet long. The figure of 1000 feet (304.8 meters) is for the TMP refit Enterprise, according to the official blueprints.
There are different opinions because of some difficulty fitting certain things in, but certainly the "official" length given in the Encyclopedia and so forth for the TOS Enterprise is 947 feet. Fans like to question and reinterpret stuff, but we can feel confident that's the number that would have made it to the screen if its length had ever been quoted directly. Of course, now it's been redesigned, so the new length figure will be much cooler. Like a hot rod. And the old length figure will continue to exist due to quantum mechanics.
Considering the cavalier way the new folks seem to be (mis)handling this rethink of TREK, vectoring explanations and number systems are probably not far off. Do ye not know the story of the Disney inch as opposed to a real inch? Back around SNOW WHITE or so, somebody measured off an inch badly and that became the measuring standard there for decades, even though if you extended it out over a meter, it would probably only add up to a yard. The 1000' ft for TMP is kinda arbitrary, since it is based mostly on the size of the miniature being 8 ft and the notion that they worked at 1" = 10 feet scale, so 100" equals 1000 ft. But i think if you measure the rec dec windows and such, you'd probably see a bit o' discrepancy there too.
Indeed, when I spoke with Shane Johnson, he recalled that he computed the length of the TMP ship to be 990.7 feet. I don't recall how he arrived at that figure.
Well, actually there was a definite scale for the Phase II Enterprise, and the TMP Enterprise is a modification of that design (rather than the TOS Enterprise design). So based on Jefferies' scale the TMP Enterprise is about 986 feet long by my calculations (assuming that the Kimble drawings are accurate to the model). Click to enlarge Because the models components can be assembled in ways that look the same as the plans but have a different final length, the final model might be slightly longer than the plans. Plus it would be better if I had full length versions of Probert's plans to work with and accurate measurements of the model. As it is, I have good info only on Probert's primary hull and secondary hull, and almost no information on the actual TMP model. But it does show that it wasn't scaled in a haphazard way while being designed.
Our info is pretty much complementary, which may show why our results are so different. Nobody is quite sure about the p2 ent model size, though it seems it was probably about 5.5 ft long based on pics. Somebody can do math and figure out if there was a legit scale relationship for that size and the figure you have for the Jeffries design, I guess. But Abel's people, taylor in particular, wanted the scale I mentioned, so that led to the somewhat arbitrary 1000ft based on the actual miniature.
Well, the large scale Jefferies' Phase II plans were designed to be built at a one-to-one scale with the drawings. If the maximum length of the page of the un-restored scans is 36 inches, then the Phase II Enterprise would have been (if built as planned) about 5 feet 4 inches (best estimate is actually about 5 feet 3.75 inches) in length (for a ship that was to be about 952 feet long). How long was the finished model? We don't know as it wasn't finished. But when assembled (using two port warp nacelles) and hardly holding itself up under it's own weight, someone might have measured it. I doubt the later form it took would help as they replaced the nacelle supports and that would have effected the overall length somewhat. Still, it isn't like there isn't information that can be gleaned from this stuff if one really wants to find it out. It would be nice if the edges of the scan of the original plans weren't so irregular, which was one of the things I was going to work out before returning to doing plans of the Phase II Enterprise as I wanted to make sure that they would be to scale with building a replica of how the model would have been built (rather than to scale with the fictional ship it was to play on film). After all, in the end I'm more interested in documenting the real models than representing the fictional starships (which others often do much better anyways). How does any of that relate to how the producers decided what they wanted? I'm not much of a Trek movies aficionado so I really don't know.
I ask this question because of the scale issue with the 1/1000 R2 NX-O1 & 1701. There is only a two inch differance in legnth (nx-9 inch, 1701 11 inch) and I wanted to know if that was acurate or not?
It is already underway in another thread, since we decided the length probably vectors, right along with the sillyass nacellecaps and the nipplesucking deflector dish. For all we know, the bridge lifts up out of the dish like VINCENT's head in THE BLACK HOLE, so they can get elevated views of the front of the saucer (to see if there is an enemy ship beneath and before them.)
Okay can we please drop the ''how big is the jjprise'' stuff? I'm trying to get a question that's been buging the hell outa me for quite some time now! please let's get back to the topic at hand!?
Well, if my (very quick) math is any indicator, the 1701 is slightly too small - it should be about 11.56 inches long to represent a 289 meter ship, assuming the NX-01 is 225 meters long. I achieved this conclusion by dividing each length by the inch measure to give the number of meters per inch. 11 inch = 289 meters 289/11 = 26.272727272727272... 9 inch = 225 meters 225/9 = 25 The fact that the 1701 mpi number for the 1701 is higher than the NX means that that model is smaller than it should be. Multiplying those 11 inches by 25 (if we assume that to be the correct mpi number) we get a ship of 275 meters - or 902.23 feet. I suppose the more accurate way would be to multiply the inch measures by a factor of 1000 and divide by 12 to get how many feet long each full-size version would be. So: 11*1000 = 11,000, divided by 12 gives us 916.6666(inf) feet, or 279.4 meters. 9*1000 = 9,000, divided by 12 gives us 750 feet and 228.6 meters. So in that regard neither ship's scaling appears to be exactly accurate (varying of course completely on how accurately you measured them ) but the 1701 is definitely slightly too short to be scaled correctly to the 225 meter NX if the 1701 is accepted to be 289 meters long.
Looks like your math is pretty good as my 1/1000th 1701 model is just about 11.5 inches long. The problem comes with people rounding down on something this small.
Thanks. Coming from you, that means a little extra. And yeah, I was afraid of source inaccuracies even when I was doing it. I don't have my 1:1000th 1701 here and didn't want to go dig out my NX to measure it, so I just used miraclefan's numbers sans verification. However, I did dig out the NX and it appears to be 8 7/8 inches long. 225/8.875= 25.352112676056338028169014084507 () so 289/25.352112676056338028169014084507=11.399 inches for the 1701 to be 'right' To verify, 8.875*1000=8875, divided by 12 = 739.5833 feet or 225.425 meters for the NX. So that seems pretty right for the scaling of the NX at 1:1000.
It figuers I'd get a good answer from ''Praetor'' and I'm sorry for all the hassle, but with this ''mini-diorama'' I'm doing, I just needed to know what was the most accurate length of these ships to put down on the base of my diorama!