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Discovery Size Argument™ thread

Here are sizes for the Nimitz-class USS Europa (383.3m) and the Vulcan Corvette (142m), courtesy of Eaglemoss.
That's very odd. The pennants on the nacelles are TOS-styled (with the delta arrow instead of the chevron) where, at least on the inside of the nacelle, they were TMP-style (circle behind the arrow, and thinner pinstripes). And it's backwards on the lower nacelle in this image, but someone noticed and it's fixed on the magazine cover.

(Yes, I'm back on my bullshit about hull markings. Nobody cares but me, but I do care.)

I suppose it's possible the ship has both styles, you don't clearly see the out-facing sides of the nacelle in "Binary," and you don't see the inner side here.

Also, wow, dig that old-style "It's TV, no one will be able to tell" texture mapping. The hull paneling not following the angles on the slanted pylons of the Europa or the Vulcan ship should be a quick fix, but there is a lot of texture-streching on the Vulcan ship. I'll have to save these for the next time someone starts pontificating on how critical proper UV-unwrapping is.
 
Also, wow, dig that old-style "It's TV, no one will be able to tell" texture mapping. The hull paneling not following the angles on the slanted pylons of the Europa or the Vulcan ship should be a quick fix, but there is a lot of texture-streching on the Vulcan ship. I'll have to save these for the next time someone starts pontificating on how critical proper UV-unwrapping is.

It's a one-off alien starship design for a single episode. In ye olden' days they wouldn't even have created a new model for that - They would have either slapped new paint on one of their existing models, or have him use a federation shuttle. I give a lot more leeway for stuff like that - time pressure, limited screen time, I'm actually amazed how good it looks for such a bit part.

What I'm more baffled by is why in god's name they created SO. MANY. rushed Federation and especially klingon vessels? They didn't even use the big majority of them after the battle in the pilot. Why not focus on 2 or 3 GOOD ones instead? Why dozens and dozens of rushed and uninspired designs?
 
John Eaves has said he designed 20+ (maybe it was 30) Federation ships for the show.

I don't see how any of the Fedeation designs look 'rushed' or 'uninspired'.

Klingon yes, but not Federation.
 
It's becoming impossible to keep this display accurate.



sfEGBNG
 
It's becoming impossible to keep this display accurate.



sfEGBNG

Looking at that picture - upscaling the TOS era ships makes even more sense.
At those lengths, the Excelsior is ridiculously small compared to her successor, the Enterprise-C, and the Connie's internal volume laughably little bigger than the Nx-01 (and the saucer actually SMALLER!).

The rest of the ship scales seem accurate though. The USS Voyager being comparable in size to the original Connie makes sense for me as well - crew of 150 vs. 400, but 100 years later, and much bigger quarters and living space on the newer ship.
 
Doug Drexler scaled up the ship by about 33% for his cutaway, an undetailed version of which appeared in "In a Mirror, Darkly". Here's his cutaway scaled to 947' with a 6' Mr Spock. Compare him with the redshirts Drexler put in...
Yep. You need to scale up the ship by about the third in order the stuff seen on screen to actually fit in it.
How big would the TOS Connie be if we account for the actual size of the hallways we saw in the show?
About 1500 feet, going by the MSD Doug Drexler make for "In a Mirror Darkly."
Much as I admire Doug Drexler, I've always had some issues with his cutaway of the Enterprise, and one of them is that I think he scaled it up a little too much. Lots and lots of discussion in the Trek Tech subforum around here has left me convinced that the optimal size for the ship (to fit the interiors into the exterior) is actually 1080 feet (329 meters), just a 14% increase from the semi-canonical 289m.

Fun fact, IIRC the designers have said they have the interior of Discovery mapped out for writers to look at for when they want to add a new room or use an existing one, but if the story calls for a room that doesn't fit, they'll still make the one that doesn't fit.
The DSC designers have worked out the interiors, yet haven't shared them with anyone? :eek: Do they not grasp how much fans crave that sort of thing?

Nah, it's just a new visual continuity. Some of the narrative beats might be the same as the original, but the aesthetics have been updated with 2018 production values
I like the way you limit yourself to saying "updated" in that phrase, as opposed to "improved"...

Hence why I was so happy with the Abramsprise when the first of the new films was released, as it was clear that someone had really put some thought into it.
Wow, it's amazing how differently we perceive this. One of the (many, many) things that bugged me about the Abrams films was how clear it was that nobody put a minute's thought into how the interiors of the ship would fit into the exterior. (We all know about the last-minute rescaling, for instance. And seriously... brewery, anyone?) By way of contrast, Matt Jefferies' work on the original is famously intricate and detailed, above and beyond anything that could be seen on screen... and if it's a hair too small in the end (14%), that doesn't detract from how impressive it is compared to most other TV and film productions, then or now.

The Discovery Enterprise is close enough to the TOS version to be really an inconsequential change.
You're kidding, right? I could list all the differences at length, but others around here have already done so. Sure, it's a lot more faithful than the Klingon designs, but that's damning with (very) faint praise.

No, it means it's a make believe TV show, and I'm not going to bang my head senselessly trying to rationalize why it doesn't look identical to previous incarnations. "Close enough" is good enough for me (and this comes from someone who has been a Trek fan essentially since the beginning).
And yet you're participating in a discussion thread that's specifically dedicated to speculating about ship sizes?...

I'm sure you know as well as I do that whether we're talking about interiors vs. exteriors or relative sizes of one ship to another, starship scales have always, repeat ALWAYS, been subject to arbitrary "cheating" based on what looks aesthetically and dramatically satisfying to the show/filmmakers when it comes to any given shot of any given miniature, or the practicalities of building a given set in such a way as to accommodate a given camera setup, or what have you. ... If one is the sort of person who needs to see it all as "real" down to that level of concrete detail, rather than a loose artistic depiction of a written screen/teleplay, then in that pursuit, paradoxes will inevitably arise, and compromises will have to be made, because that's a bar rarely (if ever) entirely cleared by any past Trek production. They all fudged various things, multiple times, to one extent or another. Not a novel phenomenon by any stretch.
I mostly agree with this, although I wouldn't ever use the phrase "loose artistic depiction." Reconciling the discrepancies and fine points is one of the fun parts of fandom, though!...

I do not perceive anything shown thus far on DSC to require significantly more suspension of disbelief and fudging than any number of previous "re-imaginings" and subsequent "fixes," nor as creating any significantly greater contradictions.
...and this, I simply can't agree with. IMHO DSC goes significantly farther than any past production in terms of stretching my suspension of disbelief, and if the show hasn't quite broken it yet, well, it's not for lack of trying.

Does anyone really think DSC will both (1) reach a point where it is precisely contemporary with TOS, and (2) make no further visual concessions toward what is depicted there? I certainly don't.
No, but only because I don't think (1) will ever happen, so any speculation about (2) is basically moot.
 
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It's a one-off alien starship design for a single episode. In ye olden' days they wouldn't even have created a new model for that - They would have either slapped new paint on one of their existing models, or have him use a federation shuttle. I give a lot more leeway for stuff like that - time pressure, limited screen time, I'm actually amazed how good it looks for such a bit part.

Well, yeah, but when the models being commissioned specifically for the Eaglemoss ship-of-the-month club are higher-quality than the ones from the actual show (the actual, wildly expensive and long-delayed show), that seems a bit jacked up to me. I mean, I've seen behind-the-scenes renders of the background ships from Battlestar Galactica, and they were built with a little more TLC. It's been a while since I've seen corners cut like that on semi-hero ships. We got nearly as close to the Europa in the pilot as we did to the Shenzhou, after all.
 
Much as I admire Doug Drexler, I've always had some issues with his cutaway of the Enterprise, and one of them is that I think he scaled it up a little too much. Lots and lots of discussion in the Trek Tech subforum around here has left me convinced that the optimal size for the ship (to fit the interiors into the exterior) is actually 1080 feet (329 meters), just a 14% increase from the semi-canonical 289m.

https://www.trekbbs.com/posts/12451768/
 
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According to some people in the comments, talking about canon/ship scale also makes you an SJW. What.
 
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In a visual reboot, things will be different. I can’t understand how discovery’s ship size effects anything else in Trek we’ve already seen. However, to me, the ships were always undersized. Archers ship is the only one that has an interior that somewhat represents what the actual size of the ship is. Seems like the hallways we see in TOS are taller than the entire saucer section of the 1701. I find it funny that scale can be all over the map for TNG DS9 and VOY, but god forbid discovery or the kelvinverse play around with it.
 
I'm not holding my breath, but...
I'm hoping at some point They have an episode that either mentions or involves the Temporal War from "ENTERPRISE" and that one of the characters actually says that things may not be the same due to all the temporal tampering back then.
Then we can all breath a big sigh of relief and realize that TOS is still out there, but is in a slightly different universe.
Discovery's universe is something just off-center, of the TOS Universe that I grew up with for the last 50+ years.
<shrug>
 
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I generally enjoy their shows but seriously wtf are they talking about regarding in ten years the producers will be shrinking down the size of the Connie and or comparing these ships to the size of future ships ect.
These are the new canonical sizes of the ships. The new Connie is presumably about 500 m same as the Shepard class.
The Connie refit will be about 515-525
The future excelsior 600 plus
And so on and so forth
Don’t understand what’s so difficult to understand. They upscaled the fleet. That’s the new canon
There’s a hundred other garbage things that make me generally dislike Discovery including the California raisin Klingons and Mary Sue Bland Burnham bringing evil Space Hitler into our Universe because she looks like the captain she got murdered (and somehow being recognized as being heroic for it)
upscaling the new canon sizes of the ships isn’t one of the things that pisses me off
 
I generally enjoy their shows but seriously wtf are they talking about regarding in ten years the producers will be shrinking down the size of the Connie and or comparing these ships to the size of future ships ect.
These are the new canonical sizes of the ships. The new Connie is presumably about 500 m same as the Shepard class.
The Connie refit will be about 515-525
The future excelsior 600 plus
And so on and so forth
Don’t understand what’s so difficult to understand. They upscaled the fleet. That’s the new canon
There’s a hundred other garbage things that make me generally dislike Discovery including the California raisin Klingons and Mary Sue Bland Burnham bringing evil Space Hitler into our Universe because she looks like the captain she got murdered (and somehow being recognized as being heroic for it)
upscaling the new canon sizes of the ships isn’t one of the things that pisses me off

These guys STILL make videos complaining about the JJprise that was in 09. They used to have decent content but since they’ve run out of TNG ships to talk about it’s mostly “discovery videos” where they just hate on everything about the show. It’s funny because when they were actually reviewing the episodes as they aired they were both giddy and very into it. Now it’s back to generic hate and I’ve stopped taking them seriously
 
I'm not holding my breath, but...
I'm hoping at some point They have an episode that either mentions or involves the Temporal War from "ENTERPRISE" and that one of the characters actually says that things may not be the same due to all the temporal tampering back then.
Then we can all breath a big sigh of relief and realize that TOS is still out there, but is in a slightly different universe.
Discovery's universe is something just off-center, of the TOS Universe that I grew up with for the last 50+ years.
<shrug>
But don't instances of Daniels or someone explicitly saying that history has been changed (see: "Cold Front", "The Expanse" etc) already do that? It's up to the viewer whether it skewed things toward or away from TOS.
 
These guys STILL make videos complaining about the JJprise that was in 09. They used to have decent content but since they’ve run out of TNG ships to talk about it’s mostly “discovery videos” where they just hate on everything about the show. It’s funny because when they were actually reviewing the episodes as they aired they were both giddy and very into it. Now it’s back to generic hate
Remember they actually make money from these YouTube videos. They'll say whatever will get them the most angry fanboy clicks.
 
I generally enjoy their shows but seriously wtf are they talking about regarding in ten years the producers will be shrinking down the size of the Connie and or comparing these ships to the size of future ships ect.
These are the new canonical sizes of the ships. The new Connie is presumably about 500 m same as the Shepard class.
The Connie refit will be about 515-525
The future excelsior 600 plus
And so on and so forth
Don’t understand what’s so difficult to understand. They upscaled the fleet. That’s the new canon
There’s a hundred other garbage things that make me generally dislike Discovery including the California raisin Klingons and Mary Sue Bland Burnham bringing evil Space Hitler into our Universe because she looks like the captain she got murdered (and somehow being recognized as being heroic for it)
upscaling the new canon sizes of the ships isn’t one of the things that pisses me off
Yeah the Starfleet ships are fine, I am more disappointed about the Klingon appearance and Klingon ship changes, it wasn't broke and there was no need to fix it.

It could have been awesome.

That space battle in the pilot would have been 10 times better if it had been recognisable D5/D7 and Birds of Prey.

Could have done without the Klingon speech overload as well, put me right off that did.
 
These guys STILL make videos complaining about the JJprise that was in 09. They used to have decent content but since they’ve run out of TNG ships to talk about it’s mostly “discovery videos” where they just hate on everything about the show. It’s funny because when they were actually reviewing the episodes as they aired they were both giddy and very into it. Now it’s back to generic hate and I’ve stopped taking them seriously
Ahh the good old days in 09 when the first new film came out.

The Enterprise Size Argument thread was the place to be seen, it was wall to wall diagrams for about 2 years.

When that one blowhard youtube complainer created a facebook page in the hope loads of people would agree with him and nobody did was just a perfect moment for me.

The levels of denial were incredible yet some still demanded that the ship be 300m long, even though you could see it was bloody enormous just by looking at it, never mind the racks of shuttles at the rear or the gigantic saucer.

@King Daniel Beyond enjoyed himself so much it was almost obscene at times.
 
Yeah the Starfleet ships are fine, I am more disappointed about the Klingon appearance and Klingon ship changes, it wasn't broke and there was no need to fix it.

It could have been awesome.

That space battle in the pilot would have been 10 times better if it had been recognisable D5/D7 and Birds of Prey.

Could have done without the Klingon speech overload as well, put me right off that did.
The Klingon dialogue never bothered me, but the ship design did. If they'd have made an updated d7 in a similar vein to the updated Enterprise design, I'd be very happy with that.
 
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