That's ludicrous. If that were the case, this lighting technique would be used all over the ship. I find it hard to believe that they'd sunlight just the shuttlebay and not habitated crew sections.
And how do we know that artifical sunlight isn't used in other areas of the ship where people congregate such as the gym, rec room. miniforest, swimming pool while working areas use more 'industrial' light. And it should be remembered that today's submarines employ colors designed to soothe like green. But the real issue remains, could all SF ships have double their original dimensions with the eightfold volume increase without throwing out every model either real or CGI out and replacing them or could it be done as a modification. Meannwhile, the First Federation and the Borg will have the monopoly on Really big ships.
But we have very good reason from the described plot of the movie to believe that this is not the shuttlebay of a starship! That is, the plot involves Cadets Kirk and McCoy shuttling up to a starship from Academy grounds, and this scene seems to show the starting point of that journey, not the endpoint. Note the instructor there giving the roll call, and distributing personnel to different shuttles no doubt headed to different ships. That hangar must be down in San Francisco... Also, doubling the size of the known ships without changing their shape isn't an option, due to the visibility of things like window rows and doorways. Inserting subtly or completely different ships could be done, but to what aim? The ships are too big to begin with, with so much interior room that the camera can never visit it all - and in the case of the E-D far too much of it to explain how more than two people out of a crew of mere thousand can be seen in the same shot. Timo Saloniemi
I'm with the view that this isn't the Enterprise shuttlebay but a ground-based hanger. The structure looks like a real hangar. Also, I don't recall if shuttles flew inside a shuttlebay with people standing there..wouldn't the shuttlebay get decompressed to allow the doors to open?
And those are cadets in that scene, not crewmen. If the scene descriptions are right, that hangar is on the ground, and the shuttles are departing to different ships for the cadet's first mission. EDIT: As a bunch of people already said...
The only beef I have with the apparent dimensions of the original Enterprise is the depiction of the apparently gigantic rec room in TMP. It appears to be about three stories tall, the size of a basketball court, and apparently only contains some square futons and a few video games. Quite the waste of space for a ship of that size.
I was over at navweaps.com and they quoted the largest supertanker as being 1500 feet long and 225 feet wide. It would appear that Starfleet is operating smaller ships than can be built here on Earth with present technology.
Let the First Federation and the Borg and those other chumps have their superships. Death does come in a thousand cuts, does it not?
So there is no bar to larger Starfleet ships, at least technically. The number of decks is doubled, the distant one travels from one side of the rim to the other is doubled. But the main problem is the established shapes of certain areas which might have to be changed. If so, change them how? And into what form? A bridge with doubled dimensions becomes more expansive and has a much higher ceiling. Could we live with that?
So now that you can't justify the ballooning on visual evidence, you're back to: "Because they can." Then again, why not? I can see Starfleet going with such vacuous reasoning.
"This Rec Deck interior was three, perhaps four times the size of the Enterprise's former recreation area, before the redesign - and this without including the exercise rooms and new sports areas adjoining it. There were many (none of them deep-space veterans) who thought this new design a wasteful preoccupation with games and sociability. But those whose space experience was numbered in years knew that the function served here was as necessary to a starship as its engines. Here the most vital of the ship's mechanisms was kept in peak operating efficiency through music, song, games, debate, exercise, competition, friendship, romance, sex - the list was as endless as human ingenuity itself. Companionship and community were as basic to life support as oxygen and food. To those who might spend years of their life in this vessel, this place was their village square, their park, library, café, family table, their mall, meeting hall, and much more." - Star Trek: The Motion Picture by Gene Roddenberry (Simon & Schuster, 1979). TGT
One thing that I love about TMP is the care that went into the designs of the film. To an extent unrivaled before or since, an effort was made to make the Enterprise seem as much as possible like a "real" starship.
...Although for a large part, the different components of that ship were designed separately, and often to cross-purposes, so that the task of integrating them into something resembling a ship-shaped object, let alone a working starship, was immense. As for the size of the rec room, TOS already makes mention of rec facilities up to "Rec Room 6", and indicates that Rec Room 3 is at least three stories tall. TAS shows a giant virtual reality bay as being part of the rec facilities - perhaps replacing most of the previous facilities, or at least the big Room 3. Perhaps this cavern is later replaced by the TMP facility - or perhaps the asymmetrically placed TMP rec hall is paired with a holodeck on the port side of the saucer, a windowless facility? Timo Saloniemi
When the Enterprise was concieved by Matt Jefferies, she was comparable in size to an aircraft carrier of that period but now many years have passed and the ship undergoing many changes as technogy advanced. As evidence by the supertanker, Enterprise and Starfeet dimensions are small and it comes down to my correcting that with appropiate adjustment to hullform for a ship double sized in every dimension and so does anyone at all support that action or am I just a loner out here?
Correcting implies fault. And just because tankers and cargo ships get bigger, it doesn't follow that all ships get bigger. You proceed from a false assumption.
Indeed, shouldn't we actually be shrinking the Trek ships a lot? They are way too big, they waste resources, they don't fit into tight spaces, they get lousy mileage... Surely one could pack 430 crew into a ship just 500 feet long, rather than the wasteful 1,000? Today's technology allows us to miniaturize many things; future technology should logically lead to even greater miniaturization. Timo Saloniemi
Aircraft carriers are the same size now as they were when Jefferies created the Enterprise. They're heavier, but dimensionally, the Nimitzes are about 1,000 feet long, and so was the CVN-65 Enterprise. Why would you bring up the size of freighters and tankers compared to carriers? They don't exactly have the same mission profiles.
Supertankers have an entirely different purpose. Why are we discussing them at all? The miniCooper is a great example of engineering. I therefore conclude that the new Enterprise should be no bigger than todays mid-sized SUVs.