Starship Size Argument™ thread

[Mytran]

That clip (@ 1 second) also neatly demonstrates the windows which, while large, are clearly not floor to ceiling (on the right) yet appear to be so thanks to reflection and light spillage (on the left).

IOW, there never were any 2.5 metre high viewports

This also corroborates an earlier post in this thread, which talked about the rescaling being done via shrinking the detailing on the ship rather than just enlarging the superstructure.

FWIW, I have never been a fan of taking "official" ship sizes on face value. TV shows are notorious for building sets that are impossible to fit inside their exteriors, or miniature work that is designed to "look cool" first and foremost - and why not? This is entertainment, after all!

For example, taking the few known quantities of the TOS-E (the flight deck, the shuttlecraft, the Bridge) I've come up with a length of around 1,250'.
Likewise, we see so much of the Delta flyer in Voyager that we cannot ignore it's size and the fact that it does fly in and out of the aft shuttlebay; hence the USS Voyager must be larger than stated (which also allows for the presence of the smaller shuttlebay seen in Counterpoint).

The ginormous Nu-Enterprise does require some further explanation as to how it fits into Starfleet lineage (assuming it's even the same original timeline as TOS) but fans have been doing mental gymnastics for years to explain far worse inconsistencies.
As it stands, we have numerous and repeated viewings of scenes which clearly demonstrate a very large vessel - the viewscreen window, the shuttlebay, the central atrium, the engineering brewery, the other engineering set, the viewport scene from STB (above) to name just a few.

Would I have preferred a smaller Nu-Enterprise? Absolutely. But in a way, this behemoth does reflect the "dial it up to 11" approach that the recent movies have taken, both with characters and storylines.

And it's going to get destroyed soon anyway ;-)

 

[Tyr]

The 725m figure is the one used in designing the interiors for all three films, it's the one used in all officially licensed products (from the note at the end of the art book, to the Popular Mechanics cutaway and Star Trek Online) and the one that'll be used for Star Trek 4 and all future media as well.

Well, no. The Revell model kit is 1/500th scale with a length of 58.8cm. So the Enterprise would be about 294m long. This kit is officially licensed and is based on the data that Paramount provided. So, your statement that all officially licensed products are using the 725m length is invalid.

 

[F. King Daniel]

@SpaceLama
Why can't frontline ships have grown to Kelvin proportions by the 2230's, and then shrunk down to TOS proportions by the 2260's? We've seen the technology's evolved a little differently (I speculate that the USS Vengeance is run by a successful version of M-5, the "tactical computer brain" behind the captain's chair in the concept art) we know the guy running Starfleet is different with different motivations, we know one universe was shaped by the Narada's appearence and attack on the Kelvin (an event likened to 9/11 by the writers, in describing the scope of the fallout), which didn't happen in the other. We know Prime similarly started scaling up ships (again, given the USS Kelvin) after the Enterprise's five-year mission and encounters with the Doomsday Machine and other threats.

I personally like the idea that some of the Kelvin-derived ships might still have been in service during TOS and the classic movies, perhaps no longer as front line vessels but still performing vital tasks (akin to the USS Lantree in Next Gen's era) In Search for Spock, we not only meet the USS Excelsior, but the massive shape of one of the Planet of the Titans concept Enterprise models is visible in spacedock. Fan manuals dubbed it the "Arial-class shuttlecarrier" but who knows what it's true purpose was? Factor in the concept art for the interior of that Ralph McQuarrie Enterprise and you have a Starfleet which may have more interesting designs than most fans would ever expect.

Add to all that, Star Trek novels dating back to the 80's featuring mile-long Defender-class Starfleet ships, crewed by elephant-sized nonhumanoids, or Dreadnoughts with three nacelles and 18-deck hexagonal saucers, or the 70-deck hospital ship USS Recovery.

Part of the fun in Trek, at least for me, is seein the evidence in front of me and trying to figure out how it might all fit together. It's fiction, so I give it a lot of leeway. If we treated Trek as a whole as rigidly as you're treating it's technology, it falls apart. If TOS and Voyager can coexist despite the speed/distance/time calculations of the latter rendering many of the most famous adventures of the former impossible, why can't they have simply built ships bigger in the 2230's than the 2260's?

 

[F. King Daniel]

Well, no. The Revell model kit is 1/500th scale with a length of 58.8cm. So the Enterprise would be about 294m long. This kit is officially licensed and is based on the data that Paramount provided. So, your statement that all officially licensed products are using the 725m length is invalid.

My mistake. But does a model kit (released only in Germany?) outweigh everything else cited, especially when none of the interiors seen would fit into a sub-300 meter hull?

 

[SpaceLama]

@King Daniel Beyond - Thanks, that's exactly the kind of speculation I was looking for. I remember in one of the Rihannsu novels, there were huge starships of the kind you describe. I'm used to the Okuda Encyclopedia and Pocket Books, since that is what I grew up with, but I guess Orci/Kurtzman were always more open to the older material, as seen in their love for Spock's World, etc.

 

[Gonzo]

That clip (@ 1 second) also neatly demonstrates the windows which, while large, are clearly not floor to ceiling (on the right) yet appear to be so thanks to reflection and light spillage (on the left).

IOW, there never were any 2.5 metre high viewports

This also corroborates an earlier post in this thread, which talked about the rescaling being done via shrinking the detailing on the ship rather than just enlarging the superstructure.

FWIW, I have never been a fan of taking "official" ship sizes on face value. TV shows are notorious for building sets that are impossible to fit inside their exteriors, or miniature work that is designed to "look cool" first and foremost - and why not? This is entertainment, after all!

For example, taking the few known quantities of the TOS-E (the flight deck, the shuttlecraft, the Bridge) I've come up with a length of around 1,250'.
Likewise, we see so much of the Delta flyer in Voyager that we cannot ignore it's size and the fact that it does fly in and out of the aft shuttlebay; hence the USS Voyager must be larger than stated (which also allows for the presence of the smaller shuttlebay seen in Counterpoint).

The ginormous Nu-Enterprise does require some further explanation as to how it fits into Starfleet lineage (assuming it's even the same original timeline as TOS) but fans have been doing mental gymnastics for years to explain far worse inconsistencies.
As it stands, we have numerous and repeated viewings of scenes which clearly demonstrate a very large vessel - the viewscreen window, the shuttlebay, the central atrium, the engineering brewery, the other engineering set, the viewport scene from STB (above) to name just a few.

Would I have preferred a smaller Nu-Enterprise? Absolutely. But in a way, this behemoth does reflect the "dial it up to 11" approach that the recent movies have taken, both with characters and storylines.

And it's going to get destroyed soon anyway ;-)

You do realise that the next ship is going to be even bigger.

Personally I would be fine with a modified Vengeance as the Enterprise A, get rid of all the angular lines and smooth the outer shell.

Then it will need some kind of markings in metres along the length and width to confirm without a shadow of a doubt just how big it is.

With all the new technology on board the Vengeance I can't see them just ignoring it, it would be a waste if you ask me.

 

[Kemaiku]

The Enterprise A or Excelsior, whatever they go for, is going to be another 2263 NuConnie from this movie, or as people say even bigger than that again.

They're not sticking us with something like the Aegis for movies, those are series ships.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Your long-winded response not-withstanding, that's exactly what they did (and your post actually confirms it).

My post where I explained in detail that this is literally the exact OPPOSITE of what they did... confirms it?

They modeled the new Enterprise after the ORIGINAL design -- scale, window spacing, etc...

No they didn't. They modeled the new Enterprise after concept drawings by Ryan Church, who had come up with SEVERAL versions of the new design, some of which were radically different from the original and some were remarkably similar. JJ Abrams approved the final concept design because it seemed more similar to the original than some of Church's other designs but had a nice "hotrod" look that seemed like a cool update to the old ship. ILM took it from there.

Church's concept drawings didn't include the fine details you're describing; that, again, was ILM's decision. In finishing out the details they borrowed heavily from the TMP and TOS designs -- a gold deflector dish, red warp nacelles -- details which were gradually abandoned or modified either because they didn't look right or because better ideas replaced them. The windows on the saucer section were a DIRECT homage to the TMP ship because they looked awesome (and still do). The attempt to replace those windows with a more TNG-inspired design didn't look as well, so they put the TMP windows back on the ship and re-textured the interior instead.

That is a FAR cry from "hit the rescale button" as you describe it.

So, whether you claim they rescaled after or rescaled before

Before WHAT? The model wasn't even CLOSE to being finished or fully detailed when they rescaled it; that version of the ship bears only a cursory resemblance to the finished product. Most of its exterior details were had to be redone anyway, so it's not like they just arbitrarily inflated the ship just to fit the shuttlebay.

The ship is rescaled from the original without attention to what a bigger ship would actually look like from the outside

Which I just EXHAUSTIVELY explained to you is entirely false. Rescaling it meant redetailing it, and more to the point, some of the exterior details didn't make any sense in a ship that size and the rescale solved more than a few of those problems (the bridge set, for example, had always intended to have a viewscreen window, but that feature was absent on the CG model; they would have had to redesign the bridge module to accomodate Church's bridge set, but the change in scale solved this problem nicely).

You yourself have admitted this in your post.

Yes. For whatever reason, James Clynne's interior concepts included details that were WAY too vast for a 360 meter ship. This is either because Clyne didn't have any specific size in mind for the Enterprise or, more likely, he didn't know what kind of exterior Church had in mind and didn't really care.

Either way, ILM liked the grandness of Clyne's concepts, and they modified the ship accordingly. Every relevant detail of the ship that can be seen on the exterior was added AFTER the rescale; had the size change happened later in production -- as you are implying -- it would have been a very different matter.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I always found it neat that this is the salt shaker Kirk plays with after Pike leaves the bar in ST'09. Complete with the antenna above the bridge.

Actually Kirk was playing with a (broken) Kelvin salt shaker, not a Saladin.

 

[Kemaiku]

Actually Kirk was playing with a (broken) Kelvin salt shaker, not a Saladin.

Yeah, the shuttlebay broke off the top of it. Rather like the real thing did when it hit the Narada.

(Too soon?)

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I've just been going over the size arguments again and still just cannot justify a big Enterprise.

Why does it need to be "justified?" That's the size they made it. "It is." That's all the justification it needs.

Why is the Enterprise-D 650 meters long? Because the producers wanted it to be. What more justification is there?

I don't mean that there isn't evidence for it, I mean that there is too much reason to choose to ignore that evidence.

There is no reason -- EVER -- to ignore evidence. That's not what people do who are interested in the truth.

You can discount evidence by finding better information, you can reevaluate evidence in a different context, you can even reinterpret the meaning of evidence. But IGNORING evidence means you are selectively removing information that doesn't agree with what you would choose to believe, which means you are basically lying to yourself about what is true.

It would just cause far fewer contradictions

It causes no contradictions NOW, so that's a non-issue. "Differences" are not "contradictions."

Bernd's entire objection to the larger size boils down entirely to his not wanting the ship to be that different from the original. But as Kirk himself put it eloquently, "Charlie, there's a million things you can have and a million things you CAN'T have." Just because you WANT something doesn't mean you deserve it; Bernd may not want the ship to be different from what he thinks it should be, but it IS. The only thing he can do about it is to close his eyes, stick his fingers in his ears and say "lalalalalala I can't hear you!" and pretend it's really not so different after all.

It's very damn persuasive.

It's the whining of a petulant child who doesn't like change and thinks the entire world should conform to his expectations. Your decision to quote that whining diatribe in its entirety does not make it less ridiculous.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

New members, or even new fans, have no idea if there was any consensus

Then let me make it clear for you: THERE IS A CONSENSUS. The vast majority of fans see and acknowledge the larger scale. Bernd Schneider is one of a very small but very vocal minority who, as you so accurately put it, ignore all the evidence and give greater weight to their personal prejudices.

"it was decided 6 years ago, and you are tiring me" is rude

It's also, quite simply, a fact. Bernd's ramblings have been shot to pieces a thousand times on this site; you quoting them as if this is the first time we've heard them before is more than a little presumptuous, don't you think?

 

[INACTIVEUSS Einstein]

This is an internet forum. Might I suggest it's not entirely unexpected people might raise old topics.

 

[Tuskin38]

Well, no. The Revell model kit is 1/500th scale with a length of 58.8cm. So the Enterprise would be about 294m long. This kit is officially licensed and is based on the data that Paramount provided. So, your statement that all officially licensed products are using the 725m length is invalid.

Star Trek Online, a licensed Star Trek product, was told to use the 725 Meter length.

 

[Kemaiku]

And model kits often get it wrong.

 

[Tyr]

Star Trek Online, a licensed Star Trek product, was told to use the 725 Meter length.

And Revell got their measurements from Paramount. So what? The kit is also a licensed product. King Daniel said that all licensed products were using the 725m length and I gave him an example that he's wrong.

And model kits often get it wrong.

Again, they were given the data that they based their product on from Paramount. They even advertised the kit with this info. Read my reply to Tusken38, I just proved King Daniel wrong. I know that there are often model kits that are a bit creative in their scale. But at the end of the day its still a licensed product...

 

[Kemaiku]

And yet all the officially liscened games, including Star Trek PS3 (which was worked on by the same people who designed the new Enterprise in the first place) use the 725 meter measurement. There was direct handling on both, whereas the model kit was outsourced to another company and I'm sure they did their best.

But that measurement (sub 300m) is smaller even than the TOS Enterprise, which cannot be right at all.

 

[Tuskin38]

No, Tyr was just saying that not all products are using the 725 meter length, since someone else said they all do.

 

[BillJ]

No, Tyr was just saying that not all products are using the 725 meter length, since someone else said they all do.

Or Revell simply got the scale wrong.

 

[valkyrie013]

Still talking about the size? Hmm..
My "Personal" opinion, and I honestly don't care about anybody else s, since.. It doesn't matter a whole lot.. I'm just adding my 2 cents!
I believe in the 345m length, and that the "Shuttle bay" is just like all most all the other shuttle bays in Star trek! There Magic! Like Voyagers and Defiants! Ha!! That length just sits well with me since I personally don't like the 725 or whatever measurement since its just to darn big for that era.. again, personal opinion, and I don't judge anybody for believing any differently.