Starship Size Argument™ thread

At 300-400m there's no way anything we see in the movies would fit properly inside the ship. The shuttle's are large, and there are about 20 or more of them in there, with a huge hanger to move about in. That's not counting the coolant and reactant tanks, deflector assembly, etc etc

Most ships in this fleet look worn and rugged, the Enterprise is the only shiny and roomy one there. Starfleet might save up resources to build fewer but much larger capital ships, leaving the rest of the fleet more function based.

But that said, it's been pointed out that they'd all be 400m at least themselves. No tiddlers in this fleet apart from the poor Franklin.

 

Thank you, to both of you. I only saw it in passing and wanted to get more info

I had forgotten about this one. Thank you.

 

Here we go again.

12 decks in the TOS enterprise saucer centre, umm yeah no.

What has always struck me as funny is that you don't really even have to measure the two side by side, you can see that the NuPrise is far larger just by looking at it.

 

That's pushing it if you ask me, more like 6 full size decks.

 

It's simple, repair the Vengeance, paint it white, add even more ball lasers.

Problem solved.

 

I thought the Vengeance was pretty much totalled when it crashed....... But yes That would make an awesome replacement for the Enterprise........ Just paint it white. After all our heroes can't fly around in a black ship now can they?

After all black space ships are for bad guys only.

 

It will never happen but it would be awesome, on saying that I suspect it would trigger an apocalypse on the forums.

I have always thought that a flagship should be bigger and stronger than the rest of the ships in a fleet, Vengeance would be ideal even though it does have a bit of damage.

Personally I would keep it black as black goes with everything.

Ideally leave it black and then paint yellow length markers to show in no uncertain terms that it is indeed bigger than the TOS Enterprise.

 

I love your post. You are going to trigger those fanboys you know.....

Got to watch those trigger words like "size" and "enterprise"

 

Vengeance's design was just ugly though.

I don't mind the new Enterprise being a new ship, a bigger one, or even the Excelsior. But make her a sleek and white one like the current one.

 

I liked the USS Vengeance.

It was a ship designed for war, and Starfleet IMHO needed one or two more of her as front line ships. But not out in the field, kept in reserve if they were to be needed on call.

 

I think the Vengeance modified and refitted would be ideal as an ambassadorial vessel like the Ent D was, no families though more like a central flagship fleet carrier with extra gonads.

Little point having a powerful ship like that just sitting around doing nothing.

Could be used to ferry around dignitaries in safety and would also have the size needed for humanitarian relief operations as well, it's hangars would be huge, a large ship would have so many possible uses.

 

They're pretty definitively NOT a 300m enterprise. For one thing, USS Franklin is depicted at being about 100 meters long; the diagram gives it at a scale a little less than one-seventh Enterprise's length. For another, the bridge, engineering set and shuttlebay would not fit into a 300 meter ship unless the Enterprise was being manned by a crew less than 4 feet tall.

It's a dead issue. The Kelvin Universe Enterprise is over three times the length of the TOS ship.

Uh... no, the Galaxy Class has almost twice the internal volume of the Reboot Enterprise. This ship is only LONGER, not actually larger (and Sovereign only has about 1/3rd the volume, not one-eighth).

They're pretty definitively NOT a 300m enterprise. For one thing, USS Franklin is depicted at being about 100 meters long; the diagram gives it at a scale a little less than one-seventh Enterprise's length. For another, the bridge, engineering set and shuttlebay would not fit into a 300 meter ship unless the Enterprise was being manned by a crew less than 4 feet tall.

It's a dead issue. The Kelvin Universe Enterprise is over three times the length of the TOS ship.

Uh... no, the Galaxy Class has almost twice the internal volume of the Reboot Enterprise. This ship is only LONGER, not actually larger (and Sovereign only has about 1/3rd the volume, not one-eighth).

So have I. So have ALOT of people. And his conclusions on the size of the Reboot Enterprise are Beyond ridiculous (see what I did there?).

He, like alot of people, has positioned himself as a self-styled "orthodoxy" for what is and isn't acceptable in Star Trek fandom. He likes what he likes and resents the fact that the new stuff deviates from his established tastes and just as much resents that anyone else likes the new stuff. With that degree of bias, he's not all that useful of a resource for anything that happened after Nemesis.

 

It doesn't take a lot of work to imagine a Vengeance-class starship redesigned for exploration. The sharp angles and threatening "stealth fighter" panel features become more curved and graceful, the outward bend of the nacelles becomes a gentle swoop, the saucer becomes a flush halo around a bridge ringed on all sides by small shuttlebays (and anyone who leaves the ship on a mission gets to trade dramatic glances and/or a sarcastic salute with the Captain on their way down to the strange new world of the week).

It think it would wind up looking not completely unlike a galaxy-class starship.

 

It would be twice the size, l have no problem with that.

 

Star Fleet NEEDS ships mainly designed for combat and not just a handful, but a fleet of them in case of war with whomever. Understand what Star Fleet is, but to have a fleet of just exploration ships with limited defense abilities invites attack.. IMO. Like the class of Defiant class ships during DS9 ALL should've had blades of armor standard.

LOVE how the Federation won't use them just to use them and get their way like with the Halkans proves that they are morally centered and just society.

 

Having a fleet purely for exploration is all well and good on paper but in reality you must be able to project force, I really liked the Vengeance as it was an understandable response to the loss of Vulcan and I would have had no problem with it becoming the new Enterprise A after a refit and paint job.

Half measures never achieve anything and it would have underlined the difference between the original and new timeline, the Federation has been at war many times in the original timeline and has lost ships and crew by the score but losing an entire planet is something else entirely.

When it gets to the point that you can't trust and rely on the ground beneath your feet all bets are off.

 

I couldn't disagree more. In fact I'm pretty sure their lack of pure combat-oriented starships is the main reason why Starfleet is so effective as a peacekeeping force. As I've pointed out many times on this board, 90% of the shit that threatens the Federation is non-military in nature; from flying neural parasites to planet-eating monsters, from incorporeal serial killers to full fledged pissed-off deities, from omnicidal space probes the size of coffee machines to omnicidal space probes the size of death stars, and so on and so forth. It's significant that Earth itself was threatened with annihilation on two seperate occasions during the TMP movies and neither of those threats had applicable military solutions; a pure combatant like Vengeance would have been the least useful ship in the entire fleet against V'ger or the Whale Probe.

The strength of Starfleet is its capacity to engineer creative solutions to unconventional problems, which becomes even more useful when conventional enemies start getting savvy. It actually isn't all that difficult to out-fight or out-maneuver the Klingons in a straight up engagement, but if the Klingons come up with a new weapon or come at you with some kind of crazy energy-dampening death trap based on lost technology no one's ever seen before, Starfleet science officers can devise a countermeasure in minutes while their Romulan, Klingon, Ferengi or Cardassian counterparts would have to spend six weeks reverse engineering it and going through the normal R&D process.

To quote Norman Schwarzkopf: "The military is a hammer. Not every problem is a nail." Starfleet apparently took this to heart, which is why the entire organization is actually a giant Swiss Army Knife. USS Vengeance was one Starfleet admiral's attempt to convert the swiss army knife into a really fancy broadsword; that's all well and good, but what do you do if all the phillip's head screws on the planet Thessia suddenly go on revolt for better wages? (weirder shit has happened in the Star Trek universe).

DURAS: This is not your world, human. You do not command here.
PICARD: I'm not here to command.
DURAS: Then you must be ready to fight. Something that Starfleet doesn't teach you.
PICARD: You may test that assumption at your convenience.

Starfleet doesn't "project force" nor do they have a need to do so. Their military applications are limited (by law, probably) to defensive operations of Federation borders and to themselves in interstellar space.

Beyond that, a typical exploration ship can take on anyone else's battleships on better than equal terms. Partly this is because Starfleet can draw on the top engineers and scientists from 200 planets and always has access to the best technology anyone has ever seen, but mostly it's because their equipment is sophisticated enough to quickly analyze and locate the one crippling weakness in everyone else's combat systems and exploit the hell out of it. That, plus the fact that their officers are a combination of warrior scientists and phaser-toting daredevils, makes them highly formidable for reasons that have nothing to do with firepower.

It's like if Indiana Jones and Neil DeGrass Tyson teamed up with the Mythbusters to take down ISIS. They wouldn't bother with air strikes, bombing runs, blockades or any of this other nonsnese; they'd probably come up with a way to induce all of their rifles to self-destruct and then send in Doctor Jones to steal the passwords to their bank accounts.

You can kill a man with a scalpel, but you can't perform surgery with a with a battleaxe.

It was an OVERREACTION to the loss of Vulcan, which Kirk made pretty clear in his speech. The film wasn't particularly subtle about that point; both Vengeance and Marcus represented a new direction for Starfleet that was utterly wrong in almost every possible way.

Starfleet had it right the first time, and the Enterprise represents that better than anything else.

 

I've always loved Bernd's site, but he's clearly more than a bit biased when it comes to this particular issue.

 

As soon as he went off the deep end with the "Akiraprise garrr!" crap I stopped listening to the idiot.

 

It's really not fair at all to call him an "idiot." He has obvious biases as to what he will and won't accept and isn't above selectively disregarding onscreen evidence that goes against them, but that's kind of par for the course when it comes to a diverse fandom, and is true of many here as well. His site is still a great resource for many things, so long as you take this into account, and it's not as if he makes it too difficult; he doesn't really attempt to conceal it.