Spoilers The Strange New Worlds Starship Thread™

[publiusr]

I surmised it's probably T'Pring's personal cruiser. Or else it belongs to the Zebrians....Zebraites?
View attachment 28181

That brassy looks evokes the Limerick Rake from IRON WOLF.

Looks even more like a Tholian ship from the rear...

That's a Chig craft from SPACE; ABOVE AND BEYOND, right?
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/this-...the-war-description-from--590534569861272516/

On this overlay:

Here's a scruffy mess of an image for you:

Could you put the 09' Enterprise there too?

 

[fireproof78]

Why are they so obsessed with retconning the Enterprise's size?

Probably because there was never an official size.

 

[Ray Hardgrit]

Could you put the 09' Enterprise there too?

 

[Kaelef]

Why are they so obsessed with retconning the Enterprise's size?

Lots of reasons. A couple of the most obvious:

Matt Jefferies never imagined fans would obsessively try to reverse-engineer full floor plans for the Enterprise when he designed it in the 1960's. His priorities where first and foremost to create something that would look interesting and memorable on TV screens, and secondly something that would be reasonably easy to build a model for. Everything else - including the overall size of the ship - was at best a reasonable, good-enough guess.

The show's budget was no doubt a significant factor in the relatively small interior sets. This had a lucky side-effect of assigning them some "realism" for those who imagined the Enterprise as something akin to a mid-20th-centry warship in space. I suspect this was another case of a tight budget actually being a blessing in disguise, similar to the well-known case of the invention of the transporters.

Many model builders have noted that you can't really put even those small sets as presented in TOS in the Enterprise unless you increase the size of the ship by about 42%. So you've already got to mess with un/official cannon (947 feet) even if you're keeping things the same but trying to be more realistic. See here for a recent discussion and example:
https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/new...1-foot-version-full-interior-3d-model.311118/

With that out of the way: Why was the Enterprise D made so much bigger? Surely, starship technology could've advanced greatly without the need to increase the overall size of the ship - or at least not the individual rooms/sets. And yet that's what we get: every set is larger; from the bridge to individual quarters. The answer is simply that they had a bigger budget and wanted to design bigger, more impressive sets for the now much savvier audiences. And they had hindsight to fall back on: they knew fans would study every inch of this thing, and they wanted things to match up. So... bigger, fancier sets = bigger ship.

That same desire/need for bigger, fancier, more-impressive-to-modern-audiences sets obviously holds true today. Only the most die-hard fans would seriously consider going back to the tiny, plain sets of the 1960's. So, if you're going to have to have sets at least around the size of what they did for TNG (if not bigger and fancier), then you're going to have to have a ship to match that.

Ergo... bigger Enterprise.

Blame it on the unimaginably wild success and longevity of a TV show no one seriously expected to still matter after the 1960's.

All that said: I do think they went too far with the up-sizing in the Kelvin universe. That was just... unnecessary... (And also, Discovery's bridge being largely empty space really bugs me.)

 

[Vale]

Why are they so obsessed with retconning the Enterprise's size? Maybe if they didn't make sets that look like they'd be too big for the Enterprise-D they wouldn't have to pretend that the Enterprise 1701 was always about 100 meters bigger then Voyager (making it as big as secondary sources say the Nebula class is).

It's nowhere near as big as the Nebula-class. It's as long as the Nebula-class, sure, but the Nebula-class is much wider, much taller, and still comfortably the second largest starship class by volume that Starfleet has ever produced – approximately 4,443,000m³. Even with its increased size, the SNW Constitution-class is still on the order of 755,000m³ – larger than an Intrepid-class but smaller than an Excelsior-class.

 

[Tuskin38]

Why are they so obsessed with retconning the Enterprise's size?

It's not a retcon, the Enterprise's size in TOS was never canon.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Was hoping it would be the USS Constitution... but I guess we'll have to wait a little longer to find out. It's killin' meeeee! and who the heck do we have to bug on Twitter to get background info on SNW like Dave Blass was for Picard. Dave was/is a BOSS!

The closest is Timothy Peel, he does UI graphics for SNW and posts awesome HD shots of blurry computer screens and the like. But he's quite far from having a showrunner spamming the internet.

 

[DEWLine]

Timothy Peel has been very kind to us and I hope we do not end up abusing his kindness.
Not sure that he'd have access to the information we seek re: other ships docked at Starbase 1 during this episode in any case...

 

[publiusr]

Thank you for that.

You could make the ultimate Enterprise by tracing out the outermost line of whatever layer juts out the farthest.

 

[Vale]

It's not a retcon, the Enterprise's size in TOS was never canon.

This graphic appeared onscreen in TOS: "The Enterprise Incident":

While you can argue that the text would never have been legible on the TVs of the 1960s, it does show that the production team did have a specific size in mind since this is not boiler plate "Lorem Treksum" text like we often see on other background labels and displays.

 

[ExtremeSail]

Thank you for that.

You could make the ultimate Enterprise by tracing out the outermost line of whatever layer juts out the farthest.

The front of the nacelles look particularly nice.

 

[Vale]

Someone needs to invent an AI program that can extrapolate an idealised medium between multiple images.

And if someone already has, someone here needs to link us to it immediately.

 

[Albertese]

....

That's a Chig craft from SPACE; ABOVE AND BEYOND, right?
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/this-...the-war-description-from--590534569861272516/

....

I, too, immediately thought of the Chig ships.
--Alex

 

[kirk55555]

Lots of reasons. A couple of the most obvious:

Matt Jefferies never imagined fans would obsessively try to reverse-engineer full floor plans for the Enterprise when he designed it in the 1960's. His priorities where first and foremost to create something that would look interesting and memorable on TV screens, and secondly something that would be reasonably easy to build a model for. Everything else - including the overall size of the ship - was at best a reasonable, good-enough guess.

The show's budget was no doubt a significant factor in the relatively small interior sets. This had a lucky side-effect of assigning them some "realism" for those who imagined the Enterprise as something akin to a mid-20th-centry warship in space. I suspect this was another case of a tight budget actually being a blessing in disguise, similar to the well-known case of the invention of the transporters.

Many model builders have noted that you can't really put even those small sets as presented in TOS in the Enterprise unless you increase the size of the ship by about 42%. So you've already got to mess with un/official cannon (947 feet) even if you're keeping things the same but trying to be more realistic. See here for a recent discussion and example:
https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/new...1-foot-version-full-interior-3d-model.311118/

With that out of the way: Why was the Enterprise D made so much bigger? Surely, starship technology could've advanced greatly without the need to increase the overall size of the ship - or at least not the individual rooms/sets. And yet that's what we get: every set is larger; from the bridge to individual quarters. The answer is simply that they had a bigger budget and wanted to design bigger, more impressive sets for the now much savvier audiences. And they had hindsight to fall back on: they knew fans would study every inch of this thing, and they wanted things to match up. So... bigger, fancier sets = bigger ship.

That same desire/need for bigger, fancier, more-impressive-to-modern-audiences sets obviously holds true today. Only the most die-hard fans would seriously consider going back to the tiny, plain sets of the 1960's. So, if you're going to have to have sets at least around the size of what they did for TNG (if not bigger and fancier), then you're going to have to have a ship to match that.

Ergo... bigger Enterprise.

Blame it on the unimaginably wild success and longevity of a TV show no one seriously expected to still matter after the 1960's.

All that said: I do think they went too far with the up-sizing in the Kelvin universe. That was just... unnecessary... (And also, Discovery's bridge being largely empty space really bugs me.)

I get the real world reasons, although I disagree with some of them, but all I have to say on the matter now is:

Deep Space Nine and Enterprise kept the Constitution Class the same, and TNG implied it did too by recreating the old bridge. They kept the original ship design, interior and exterior, canon. You'd literally have to declare TOS and all the TOS movies non canon anyway to justify why the ships are so different, and thats not even taking into account things like the ridiculous R2-D2 like repair droids the Enterprise had in DSC.

To be clear, I think that SNW is mostly a great show, I even like the design of the SNW Enterprise and most of its sets, but even just on a base technical level it cannot be canon with TOS, and we've known that for a long time. Its not like the Star Trek universe even matches our world at this point, unless I've forgotten about the eugenics wars just as badly as Voyager and Picard Season 2 did, so I think its stupid to keep updating the tech to match 21st century stuff. The 1701 Enterprise could travel faster then light, but still needed to have tapes and printouts for its computer. Its perfectly fine to keep that stuff, it really wouldn't be a problem if they stopped making prequel shows.

The show is still generally a really good show, so I'll just take it as it is while occasionally complaining about the excess of the production design in a show that basically just pretends to be canon with TOS.

 

[fireproof78]

You'd literally have to declare TOS and all the TOS movies non canon any

Non-continuity. It's all canon.

And I haven't treated TOS as in continuity for a while now.

 

[Ray Hardgrit]

Someone needs to invent an AI program that can extrapolate an idealised medium between multiple images.

You mean like an average of all four designs?

 

[NCC-73515]

You mean like an average of all four designs?

better than some of the individual ones

 

[publiusr]

You mean like an average of all four designs?

Perfect…maybe give it the SNW sharp bevel leading edge.

 

[Vale]

You mean like an average of all four designs?

Wow What are you using to make it? Also, are there alternate views (top/front/etc) available?

 

[DaveyNY]

Matt Jefferies never imagined fans would obsessively try to reverse-engineer full floor plans for the Enterprise when he designed it in the 1960's.

Ignore me.
Another senior moment, I confused the names and history in my head.

I'd argue that that is a false statement, because by 1973 he certainly was imagining it on his own when he himself did actually create a deck by deck blueprint design and offered it to Roddenberry to sell through Lincoln Enterprises.
(He supposedly had the idea originally when first designing the Enterprise for TOS)

Though the "Blueprints" wouldn't actually be published till 1975, after a somewhat prolonged discussion between Paramount and Roddenberry about who exactly owned the merchandising rights to Star Trek.
Roddenberry lost and the Blueprints were eventually published through Paramount's Ballantine Book division in an exclusive deal with Joseph.

(Paramount eventually pointed out to Gene that he lost any "legal" claim to Star Trek when he walked away from his third season contract with NBC/Desilu)