TOS and TNG are something like 70+ years apart.
Size Of The New Enterprise (large images)
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TOS and TNG are something like 70+ years apart.
Decks aren't skinny flat bits of sheet metal; they have some respectable thickness to allow for conduits, grav generator pucks, etc. I've used 13' on center decks on my ship designs, and they come out just fine.
Deck centers aren't necessarily going to change ship sizes.Rick
www.spacemodelsystems.com
Decks aren't skinny flat bits of sheet metal; they have some respectable thickness to allow for conduits, grav generator pucks, etc. I've used 13' on center decks on my ship designs, and they come out just fine.
Though there are some real life differences.
Look at most office buildings, remove the drop ceiling, and sometimes you'll wind up with up to a 14-15ft floor spacing.
On the flip side, cruise ships generally have an 8ft on center deck spacing for the cabin decks (floor thickness is around 6in)
Personally I've always used a 9.5ft on center deck spacing. 8ft for comfort ceiling height, the remainder 1.5ft for floor/hull thickness & mechanical systems.
Back to the scaling issues:
It almost seems very disingenuous by the the producers & FX team to give us visual cues that strongly suggest the size of the ship, then to come out and say it's something entirely different.
*Unless they're not really too sure themselves.
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More like 100.
When did they say the Constitution ships were delayed for a decade? Did I miss that in the film?
I did a little figuring; see what ya think:
For a 3000' ship:
The saucer width would be 1311'.
The viewscreen would be ~35 feet wide.
The oblong windows in the saucer would be 15.9' x 5.8'.
The portholes in the saucer would be 5.8' in diameter.
The secondary hull docking port would be 15.1' in diameter.
For a 2378' (725 meter) ship:
The saucer width would be 1039'.
The viewscreen would be ~29 feet wide.
The oblong windows in the saucer would be 13.2' x 4.8'.
The portholes in the saucer would be 4.8' in diameter.
The secondary hull docking port would be 12' in diameter.
For a 1597' (487 meters) ship:
The saucer width would be 697'.
The viewscreen would be ~18.5 feet wide.
The oblong windows in the saucer would be 8.5' x 3'.
The portholes in the saucer would be 3' in diameter.
The secondary hull docking port would be 8' in diameter.
For a 987' (301m) ship:
The saucer width would be 431'.
The viewscreen would be ~11.5 feet wide.
The oblong windows in the saucer would be 62" x 23".
The portholes in the saucer would be 23" in diameter.
The secondary hull docking port would be 5' in diameter.
Strangely enough, if one assumes the 301 meter length, the measurements are extremely close to TMP Enterprise.
TMP Enterprise: 304 meters long.
The saucer width would be 465'.
The oblong windows in the saucer would be 57" x 25.5".
The portholes in the saucer would be 25.5" in diameter.
The docking port would be 5.3' in diameter.
The problem with the ship being much more than ~300 meters is that the bridge winds up being massively larger than it is. The viewscreen is about 136 inches (11.3 feet) which corresponds to a 301 meter ship since the viewscreen is really a window on the front of the saucer and it's size is easily compared to the width of the saucer. If the ship were 725 meters as ILM says, then the bridge would need to be sixty or seventy feet wide....it ain't.
It does fit the model. The 725 meter-long model.
I went with the ~13 foot number partly to address the ceiling heights on the sets on stage. Sometimes you could see the ceilings, sometimes there weren't any ceiling pieces and the walls went up and up and up. Thirteen feet seemed a workable number, and we could then play with the unseen floor thickness, which could conceivably bulk up to Jefferies Tube size.
Rick
www.spacemodelsystems.com
You didn't make a point there. 40-50 years, 100 years... "significant passage of time" either way. I accept that the new ship is much bigger - what I'm not buying are the fanon rationalizations that some folks are satisfying themselves with.
I went with the ~13 foot number partly to address the ceiling heights on the sets on stage. Sometimes you could see the ceilings, sometimes there weren't any ceiling pieces and the walls went up and up and up. Thirteen feet seemed a workable number, and we could then play with the unseen floor thickness, which could conceivably bulk up to Jefferies Tube size.
Rick
www.spacemodelsystems.com
I looked at it from a practical spacecraft engineering standpoint (my industry). You wouldn't always need horizontal Jefferies Tubes crisscrossing between decks (would almost become decks within themselves). They would mainly be in areas where vital systems are being run to/from major junction points in the ship. I would see them mainly being vertical between decks, with an occasional horizontal run.
Though I fully understand that working in Hollywood, more often than not engineering practicality is thrown out the window for the sake of a cool looking set & storyline requirements.
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Agreed! And I loved Jefferies tube scenes; the confined clutter always gave Trek episodes a different look when they were used. That's all the justification you need for a dramatic series.
Rick, what were the floors of the Jefferies tubes made out of? Did the actors ever complain about it hurting their knees?
I went with the ~13 foot number partly to address the ceiling heights on the sets on stage. Sometimes you could see the ceilings, sometimes there weren't any ceiling pieces and the walls went up and up and up. Thirteen feet seemed a workable number, and we could then play with the unseen floor thickness, which could conceivably bulk up to Jefferies Tube size.
Rick
www.spacemodelsystems.com
I looked at it from a practical spacecraft engineering standpoint (my industry). You wouldn't always need horizontal Jefferies Tubes crisscrossing between decks (would almost become decks within themselves). They would mainly be in areas where vital systems are being run to/from major junction points in the ship. I would see them mainly being vertical between decks, with an occasional horizontal run.
Though I fully understand that working in Hollywood, more often than not engineering practicality is thrown out the window for the sake of a cool looking set & storyline requirements.
I did sometimes think there were more Jefferies tubes on the Enterprise and other vessels than they needed. I can particularly recall one scene in DS9 when Bashir (well, a Changeling posing as Bashir) was crawling down about ten meters of tube to allegedly change some settings for his medical equipment. My thought was, "what a tremendous waste of space and time."
Having said that, I do hope we see them in key areas of the ship.
Omega_Glory
Commodore
The problem with the ship being much more than ~300 meters is that the bridge winds up being massively larger than it is. The viewscreen is about 136 inches (11.3 feet) which corresponds to a 301 meter ship since the viewscreen is really a window on the front of the saucer and it's size is easily compared to the width of the saucer. If the ship were 725 meters as ILM says, then the bridge would need to be sixty or seventy feet wide....it ain't.
It does fit the model. The 725 meter-long model.
The 725 meter figure yeilds a viewscreen of 28.5 feet....you can see the view screen in the original trailer image of the saucer on the ground. The overall opening is 39.5 feet and the viewscreen/window inside the opening works out to 28.5 feet. That makes the width of the bridge significantly larger than that...like about double, considering how much the bridge extends on each side of the screen.
My living room is 30' by 15'. Standing at one end of it and looking down the wall....there's no way in hell that viewscreen is nearly that long. And it's pretty unbelievable the bridge is 50+ feet wide....my eyes aren't that bad yet.
78
Star Trek IV (the latest movie to have come out when TNG debuted) took place in (well the future stuff, anyway) in 2286. Season 1 of TNG takes place in 2364.
And no doubt there was only one when they left spacedock!
I thought it was pretty clear that the majority of the crew on the Kelvin were tribbles... 500 of them could easily fit inside a shuttle.
Just out of curiosity, what led you to settle on that precise size? Assuming that DiS's deck measurements make sense (and absent better screen shots and more accurate measuring tools, I'm not going to argue... hey, if it convinced Rick Sternbach, it's good enough for me!), your numbers would give a deck height of 2.62 meters/8.59 feet, which is not only pretty small but is an inconveniently non-round figure in either measuring system.
I totally agree with all of you points. The visual cues don't seem to support a 2000ft size ship. The 1500 seems to more in keep with what we saw in screen. I earlier today did an scaling, and came up with 457.5m (1500.86ft), which can still support the sets & their locations that we saw in the movie...
It almost seems very disingenuous by the the producers & FX team to give us visual cues as to the size of the ship, then to come out and say it something entirely different.
Hey, wow, I got a comment answered by Rick Sternbach! Geeky grin.Decks aren't skinny flat bits of sheet metal; they have some respectable thickness to allow for conduits, grav generator pucks, etc. I've used 13' on center decks on my ship designs, and they come out just fine.
FWIW, I don't at all doubt that 13.5" could be a viable deck height, and I love your work on the TNG-era ships. However, I'd be inclined to think that the guiding principles are different in the 24th century, when the economics of space travel have obviously changed and comfort is at more of a premium than efficiency. I've always seen the 23rd century as more analogous to the contemporary navy, in which (just ask anyone who's served) it's more important to pack as much stuff as possible into however many cubic feet you have available.
(Even the TOS sets were implausibly high and wide by that standard, for reasons related more to filming needs than ship engineering, as you yourself acknowledge -- but they still didn't approach 13 feet.)
FWIW, anyway, my suggested 9' does allow for conduits and such -- since the corridors we see YoungKirk running through certainly don't have that high a ceiling. Visually, I'd place the ceiling at between 7' and 8' (at least, until someone with good screen caps and a pixel ruler cares to gainsay me).
What really pointed me in the direction of the suggested scaling was the third set of measurement options suggested by Omega Glory --
--which seem to be the most plausible sizes available, and I looked for a deck-height conversion factor that gave me decently round numbers in that range, landing within spitting distance at 484.
---
Meanwhile, FWIW, one of the film's writers appears neither to know nor to care. From TrekMovie.com:
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This is fun!
Ummm...exactly
484! 484! 484!
I am now beyond rational thought, and I'm just going with the length I like best.
I am now beyond rational thought, and I'm just going with the length I like best.
You didn't make a point there. 40-50 years, 100 years... "significant passage of time" either way. I accept that the new ship is much bigger - what I'm not buying are the fanon rationalizations that some folks are satisfying themselves with.
Well you could have inferred the point....the 1701-D was twice the size of the 1701 in 78 years, and in the 20th century ship sizes have increased to a greater degree in LESS time.
In geological time, 40-50 yrs is nothing, but in technological time...there are extraordinary advances. In the 50s, the coming of jet aircraft made the sizes of aircraft carriers grow by leaps and bounds, who is to say the needs of long distance missions, combined with the powerplant and nacelles necessary to drive the ship didn't lead to a jump in starship size...and it could happen at any time.
RAMA
I totally agree with all of you points. The visual cues don't seem to support a 2000ft size ship. The 1500 seems to more in keep with what we saw in screen. I earlier today did an scaling, and came up with 457.5m (1500.86ft), which can still support the sets & their locations that we saw in the movie.
On visual area that seems to somewhat support my estimate (and yours - lawman) is the neck docking port.
One good example: The escape pod looks to have a maximum diameter of 4ft. When it is jettisoned, it appears to give the neck docking port a similar diameter of the TMP port. Which then using that as a baseline the ship appears to be smaller in size.
It almost seems very disingenuous by the the producers & FX team to give us visual cues as to the size of the ship, then to come out and say it something entirely different.
Just out of curiosity, what led you to settle on that precise size? Assuming that DiS's deck measurements make sense (and absent better screen shots and more accurate measuring tools, I'm not going to argue... hey, if it convinced Rick Sternbach, it's good enough for me!), your numbers would give a deck height of 2.62 meters/8.59 feet, which is not only pretty small but is an inconveniently non-round figure in either measuring system.
I just did an average between the TMP 305m & the 610m iteration that was being discussed - Just to get a workable compromise version that would have more than sufficient interior volume to support everything we've seen on screen.
The deck height would be somewhat variable depending on the how may decks. Which at this point is still widely open to interpretation.
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484! 484! 484!
I am now beyond rational thought, and I'm just going with the length I like best.
-x! -x!!!
484! 484! 484!
I am now beyond rational thought, and I'm just going with the length I like best.
-x! -x!!!
Ah, so it is a Tardis!
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