Starship Size Argument™ thread

"Tonnage" is irrelevant for starships that can move at the speed of light on a whim, so that's a non-starter. Also, the only people who ever referred to the Enterprise as a "battle cruiser" were the Klingons, who also referred to the Genesis Device as a "doomsday weapon" and referred to Kirk as "the Genesis Commander." Kruge and his crew were able warriors, but they got a D-minus in "knowing what the hell we're talking about."

To be sure: the designation "heavy cruiser" doesn't tell you much of anything since we don't know what the OTHER designations for the fleet are in context. In the Star Wars universe, for example, "cruiser" is one of the smallest ships in any given fleet and is so designated because it is a high-efficiency starship that can move quickly from one place to another without having to stop and refuel and without needing support from a major shipyard when it gets where it's going. Starfleet may use similar designations, with larger "exploration cruisers" having additional heft by being able to travel long distances and ALSO carry a fleet of shuttlecraft and a massive science payload that would allow the cruiser to quickly map and survey the entire surface of a newly discovered planet (where the smaller cruisers would be limited to point surveys of landing sites maybe half a mile across).

Try to remember that Starfleet's primary construction priority is science and exploration. Their starships are VERY apt combatants, but that's not what Starfleet built them to do and is not their primary reason to exist. A Federation starship is first and foremost an exploration and research vessel that can and will kick your ass up and down the milky way if you don't play nice and let them get on with their important scientific research (as I've said many times: you can kill a man with a scalpel, but you can't perform surgery with a battle axe).[/quote]

No, a "Dreadnaught" would be so defined by having an extremely heavy weapons complement plus a ridiculous amount of armor (or in this case shielding), thus defining a vessel whose primary function is that of a slow moving but virtually indestructible weapons platform. Ironically, the Death Star is probably the ultimate example of this design philosophy: it's not fast, it's not maneuverable, but it doesn't really matter because anything that comes into its firing range is gonna have a bad time.

Starfleet doesn't build ships that can only lumber up to an opponent and pummel it to death. They DO build ships that can analyze the hell out of something, and their largest ships can do this far better and more thoroughly than smaller ones. At the same time, the enormity of the Enterprise's warp nacelles (proportionately larger than any starship we've ever seen) also suggests these big ships are built for speed, which might also explain their hugeness: it HAS to be that big just to house the gargantuan powerplants needed for ultra-fast warp drive.

Neither "battleships" nor "destroyers" canonically exist in Star Trek. But again, the lack of those smaller ships probably implies that a tiny vessel the size of the Constitution class just doesn't have the power available to move that quickly without also blowing itself to smithereens. That's not to say they CAN'T move that fast (TOS Enterprise sometimes did) it's just the "smithereens" part makes that undesirable.

That is quite literally the OPPOSITE of how that works in 3D modeling, but go ahead and keep repeating it as if it makes your point more relevant.

It makes perfect sense to me, considering absolutely NOTHING in the original universe precludes the existence of ships the size of Kelvin or even the Enterprise. All the more so when you consider that if you knew nothing about Star Trek except for the first three reasons of Voyager, the existence of the Enterprise-D would seem like a huge incongruity.

 

The Enterprise is 725 meters. We have had this debate ad nauseum. At the end of the Sledgehammer music video we saw people in those windows on the bow showing the absolute scale of the damn thing. We saw the actual hallways in STID. She's bigger!

 

Yeah, but what's the scale of that giant space Rihanna head compared to the Enterprise, and is it canon? Or would that be an actual head canon?

 

Crazy Eddie,

Destroyers and battleships are canonical.

http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Battleship
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Destroyer
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Destroyer_unit

 

But it's not just the classes of ships, is it? Stardates, Chekhov's age, appearance of technology, warp speed velocity are just off the top of my head.

I've never understood this obsession with windows. The Enterprise is basically a submarine, not some hotel in space. Windows should be few and far between, IMO.

 

So either it's a completely different continuity in which case it doesn't matter at all.

Or it only matters because it doesn't fit into fan made starship linear progression charts.

Neither of which really means anything in the first place as the on-screen evidence, supplemental material, and the words of the GFX folks, all shout from the rooftops that it's over 700 meters.

 

It doesn't matter how 3D modelling "really" works. It is disingenuous to suggest that they didn't originally take a generic diagram of the Enterprise layout and change the scale. All the post-facto justification (including interior scaling, huge shuttle bays, breweries, 16-level saucer atria, small people in viewports, etc...) doesn't change this fact.

 

I think this is the main issue - fans seem fixated on the idea that the ships need to get bigger over time for some reason

 

If it makes people feel better they can think of this reality as being the one we see at the end of First Contact where Zefram gives the newly arrived Vulcans the fingers, they then tell them about the Borg, end result bigger ships and a change in design approach.

The trigger could really be anything, the Narada turning up and smacking both a Klingon and Federation fleet is a good reason too but I have no problem with the seed of change being further back in time.

 

Bigger than Shatner's, smaller than a Celestial. That's all I got.

 

The classifications are canon but as ship classes (Constitution/Miranda etc) got older they were demoted from Heavy Cruiser to Light Cruiser etc.

This is especially the case with certain classes like the Miranda class that served for a very long time and thus would have been demoted multiple times as new more powerful ships classss were designed, built and brought into service, it happened when the Excelsior class was finally officially added to the fleet (after failed speed tests) as it claimed the Heavy Cruiser classification due to its superiority over earlier classes like the Constitution.

P.S

You didn't really expect the deniers to give up did you?

 

And of course "deniers" (I don't deny the Enterprise appears bigger) could claim similar things about "pro-biggies".

Like how everyone goes silent when the intention of the original timeline's production designers are brought up - because we all know that Sternbach, et al, intended the Excelsior/Ambassador/Galaxy to by the premier ships of their age - and these flagship projects to get larger reflecting their genera - and intended for each new "heavy cruiser" to represent a generational leap - from Constition > Excelsior > Ambassador > Galaxy > Sovereign. Trekkies have merely accepted their unofficial intent, not conjured this idea out of nowhere.

Yes - the intent of production designers is non-canon.

But an established visual pattern and intention is integral to a franchise - imagine if in Star Wars, someone suddenly had X-Wings flying with Newtonian physics ala Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica, instead of like WW2 fighters - this would constitute a break in the design aesthetic. People would rightly ask why the hell they suddenly stop flying one way, and start flying another; how manoeuvres that would have saved lives around the Death Star can now suddenly be performed.

So, it was an established visual pattern in Trek - advocate whatever you like, but don't deny that at least.

Voyager was never intended to be a flagship class; so bringing it up in comparison to the Constitution/Excelsior/galaxy/Ambassador is a disingenuous attempt to muddy the waters - it was stated to be a scientific vessel from the get go - it was never at any point considered to be some kind of front-line warship.

Thankfully Pegg's recent comments would end this for good - because the two timelines are not related, if true.

 

Star Trek is built on retcons. Until 2001, Kirk's Enterprise was the first (Sisko even explicitly calls in that in "Trials and Tribble-ations") then Enterprise came along with it's NX-01. Fans were similarly miffed, resisting the idea that their preconceptions had been tampered with. But 15 years later it's pretty widely accepted (at least as much as anything in Trekdom) that Captain Archer commanded a Starship Enterprise a century before Captain Kirk. Similarly, a massive USS Kevin and sister ships 30 years before TOS may be a jolt now, challenging decades of assumptions about starship design but everyone will be over it soon enough. Even now, it's less and less "the Enterprise is 300 meters!" and more "the Enterprise should have been 300 meters!"

 

Actually it's now more like "they are a complete reboot, and have no relation to each other"

One in Gundam Wing, one is Gundam Seed.



It seems the idea of multiple Star Trek re-imaginings running side by side has become a lot more official with Pegg's comments. One of Japan's longest running sci-fi franchises, Gundam, operates the same way. Maybe Bryan Fuller's series will constitute a third universe/setting within the umbrella of Star Trek. Maybe the next will be a race-blind, and gender blind re-cast of Kirk and co?

 

You forget, Into Darkness had models of the Phoenix, Ringship Enterprise, NX-Alpha and Enterprise NX-01 in it. ST'09 referented Archer and his beagle, old Spock referenced a ton of classic episodes and films. Spock and Kirk switched places in engineering saving the Enterprise in a battle with Khan. None of which has any point if it's a "clean" reboot.

 

Ah yeah, I forgot about the NX-01 model - but I didn't forget about Archer's dog, just thought that would be a rebooted Archer.

So.... design lineage is clearly meant to be roughly the same in the 2050s to 2150s era.

But it doesn't rule out a full reboot I guess, just makes it less clean.

....

EDIT: ....seriously, looking at this thread.... what a royal fucking mess this created.... such a familiar story - how a few completely meaningless design choices, that have no impact on the plot - could have averted years of dispute - and how easy research could have prevented them. I'm reminded of the Romulan cloaking device in Enterprise. If they had just never upscaled the ship from ILM's 300m, it would have made no difference, and would have saved all this. In both the case of ENT, and this case, literally any fan could have pointed out the problem. I know some people would like Star Trek to be flippant with continuity like Doctor Who, only keeping broad stylistic elements, but its not the same show.

 

Well, while for the moment I'd tend to accept the onscreen suggestion in ST'09 that it's a split timeline over the recent offscreen suggestion by Pegg that it's a wholly separate affair, I would point out that even in the latter case there's no reason why this reality couldn't have had its own versions of those things parallel to the Prime universe. In fact, it seems reasonable that it would. And I don't think Pegg is suggesting that Nero and Spock Prime didn't come from the same reality as the rest of Trek. He's just saying that in addition to traveling back in time they also crossed over into a parallel dimension, like the Defiant did in "The Tholian Web"/"In A Mirror, Darkly"; at least, that's how I read it.

 

Oddly, according to Rick Sternbach the Ambassador-class was originally meant to be shorter than the Excelsior-class: http://www.trekbbs.com/threads/vessel-dimensions-masses.82068/#post-2605350

Even then the Excelsior's length wavers between 466 and 511 meters, depending on the source: http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Excelsior_class#Size

 

Saved what? People would've moved on to the phasers being different colors, why is there a shield between the transporter operator and pad, why is there two exits on the bridge...

People love to complain. They would've found something else to complain about.

 

Its not the size of your starship, its the motion in your interstellar void.