JJ Enterprise Tech Specs

Discussion in 'Trek Tech' started by Nimitz CO, Jun 12, 2009.

  1. Birdog

    Birdog Commander Red Shirt

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    I like it but without onscreen evidence....:devil:
     
  2. Ronald Held

    Ronald Held Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Agree, no other ships were seen or mentioned.
     
  3. Praetor

    Praetor Vice Admiral Admiral

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    The fine line between continuity and fanwank.
    I know. I'm reaching. :p
     
  4. JuanBolio

    JuanBolio Admiral Admiral

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    Also works.
     
  5. trevanian

    trevanian Rear Admiral

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    I'm not posting here currently, but this lil 'tidbit should fuel the fire again, since it proves they really didn't have this stuff figured out ahead of time, hence all the backtracking and sidestepping on the size issue. As follows (I found this on a 007 site, but it is a quote from the new CINEFEX.)

    Issue #118 Cinefex, a visual effects magazine, contains an interesting tidbit from ILM Art Director Alex Jaeger on the new Enterprise:
    Quote:
    The reconfigured ship was [initially] a larger vessel than previous manifestations-- approximately 1,200-feet-long compared to the 947-foot ship of the original series. Once we got the ship built and started putting it in environments it [still] felt too small.
    The shuttle bay gave us a clear relative scale -- shuttles initially appeared much bigger than we had imagined -- so we bumped up the Enterprise scale, which gave her a grander feel and allowed us to include more detail.
     
  6. Praetor

    Praetor Vice Admiral Admiral

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  7. Cary L. Brown

    Cary L. Brown Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Which pretty much sums up my feeling about this movie as well...

    Remember... "Bigger iz Kewler."

    Pretty much proves that the guys who did this movie, or at least the guy at the top (and those he listened to, and thus didn't fire or "block out" of the decision-making process) didn't really care about this being "Star Trek." It was supposed to be BETTER than "Star Trek," which apparently "didn't have that feel" they were looking for.

    "A grander feel?" Give me a @#$*ing BREAK... :rolleyes:
     
  8. DiSiLLUSiON

    DiSiLLUSiON Commodore Commodore

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    Does it matter if they bumped it up or not? The final scale used is what matters, I'd think; you don't know in what stage it was bumped up. Could be with it was still a concept and no details were finalized. They did say the new size allowed them to add a lot more details, so it probably didn't have much.

    Besides, logic points out that a 300-somewhat meter ship is horribly impractical. I think the original Enterprise is about 700 meters as well, it makes a whole lot more sense. Perhaps slightly less then 700m, due to the smaller and less finely crafted nacelles.

    A shuttlebay like this:
    http://showcase.netins.net/web/marc...ise_Refit_WIP_1_files/ShuttlebayCeiling-1.jpg
    is a whole lot more practical then what we saw in the series. Not to mention the budget restraints the series had. So the original Enterprise (+ refit) was probably already supposed to be around 700m long.

    By the time of the Ent-D and Voyager, continuous use of transporters might have made using a shuttle all the time out of favor. Add the industrial strength replicators and they don't need all that storage space either. So by that time the vessels don't have to be that large.

    So essentially, the new Enterprise isn't scaled up at all; the old enterprise was scaled down due to budgetary reasons. Works for me.
     
  9. Praetor

    Praetor Vice Admiral Admiral

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    I am willing (*gasp*) to entertain the notion that the TOS ship, the refit, the Excelsior, and about any other ship that used parts of them was "really" a lot bigger than we've come to accept over the past forty years, even over the clearly defined intentions of those ships' creators to pin them down at sizes specifically smaller than this new ship.

    But I still don't feel good about it. :(
     
  10. Cary L. Brown

    Cary L. Brown Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Unlikely... when you consider that the details we see are TMP-type details (ie, they were visually very similar on the TMP ship but at a smaller scale.)

    Increasing scale doesn't have ANYTHING to do with how detailed the model is. In fact, if you're thinking practically... well... think about what a skyscraper, for example, looks like from a distance. It's only when you get up-close that the little details become visible. From a distance, it looks very smooth. (Same thing with any large object... but I'm using the "skyscraper" analogy because most of us have seen this with our own eyes.)
    "Logic" points out nothing of the sort. And I see no reason to think that it's "horribly impractical."

    A ship should be the size it's required to be in order to do its job... no larger, no smaller. It should be the size required to carry the crew, equipment, and payload, within a reasonable mechanical structure.

    So, which of those specific requirements cannot possibly be met by a ship that's essentially the size of a modern aircraft carrier (as the TOS Enterprise is)?

    If you want massive luxury apartments for every crewmember... if you're turning the ship into the freakin' "Flying Condo-Prise"... you may be able to justify that it needs to be a LITTLE larger... no more than 25% increase... but going from 300m to over 1000m? That's just SILLY, showing LITERALLY no further thought behind it than "Doood, Bigger Is Kewler! It iz Teh Awsome!"
    I suspect that the guy who did that design you just showed... which is NOT "the shuttlebay" but is the CARGO DECK (albeit adjoining the "shuttle bay") by the way... and who designed it to fit into a specific size of ship... would argue that point. Andrew's version of the ship was exactly 1000' in length, or just over 300m, as memory serves. If you were to more than double the "refit" size, you'd be ELIMINATING all the logic he put into that design... it might "look kewl" but it would no longer make any practical sense.

    Here is what you just showed a picture of, in relation to the 1000' Enterprise from TMP:

    http://probertdesigns.com/Folder_DESIGN/CargoBay-3.html
    Um... except that this only seems to make sense if you never watched TOS or TNG and are ignoring onscreen evidence to the contrary.

    Shuttles were used at least as often during TNG as they were during TOS. Transporters were used at least as often on TOS as they were on TNG. While the term "replicators" was never used in TOS, there was plenty of circumstantial evidence to support the idea that they were using that, even if potentially in a less refined manner.

    And "storage" is still an issue for the TNG-era ships. Or did you not notice just how often we were shown "cargo bays" in the TNG era, versus how often we were shown them during the TOS era?
    Does it also work for you to revise other things, after the fact, to match "new facts?" Sounds remarkably Orwellian to me.

    "Hmmm... I don't like this historical fact, so I'll come up with my own personal version of history that better matches what I want to believe." Yikes...

    There is absolutely NO logical argument for the TOS Enterprise design having been "scaled down" by the issues of production cost during the original series. None. Nada. Zip. Zero. They could just as easily have designed their MODEL to represent a much larger vessel. But that's not what happened. Matt Jefferies designed a ship that he thought was the right size for what the mission was. In fact (at a time well before the show went on the air, and well before the time that they built the 11' miniature) they UPSIZED the ship... and they revised the design. MJ laid in decks into his design, he established the size... and NONE of that was "driven by Desilu budget constraints."

    If anything, a bigger ship makes for a CHEAPER production, since you can justify fitting any shape or size of room (hell, even the production floor of a freakin BREWERY!!!) into a big enough space. With a more reasonably ship size, on the other hand, you have to actually figure out where things go and why, and make the sets match the model.

    The TOS ship, and the TMP ship, were both roughly 300 meters in length. Not due to "reduced budgets" but due to the designs actually having been THOUGHT THROUGH.

    For the "nuEnterprise," they made it bigger for no other reason than to "be kewler." And they didn't even really bother to adjust the design details... they just scaled the whole freakin' thing up, meaning that the design features which made sense when copied off of the TMP ship suddenly make no sense whatsoever.
     
  11. Captain Robert April

    Captain Robert April Vice Admiral Admiral

    They also did this upsizing during the production of the film and after effects sequences had been completed that established the ship was a helluva lot smaller than 700 freakin' meters!

    Which is why in some shots, it looks like it's roughly the size of the old ship, and in others, it's the Battlestar Enterprise.

    At least Roddenberry upped the size of the original Enterprise before any effects work had been done. What's JJ's excuse?
     
  12. JuanBolio

    JuanBolio Admiral Admiral

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    The secondary hull had TARDIS technology. ;)
     
  13. Praetor

    Praetor Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Same as the excuse for the TMP rec deck and engineering, and TWOK torpedo bays, no doubt.

    Regarding TOS, I still have my personal suspicions that the "dome chopping" between WNMHGB and "The Corbomite Maneuver" were a little bit based on rescaling.
     
  14. Crazy Eddie

    Crazy Eddie Vice Admiral Admiral

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    The nice ting about CGI for visual effects: you can REDO those shots if they don't fit anymore. Which they did.
     
  15. DiSiLLUSiON

    DiSiLLUSiON Commodore Commodore

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    That's exactly why I think ~700m is more logical then ~300m. You'd need massive space for supplies and the like, since TOS doesn't have real replicators that we know of (that's only implied). If you look at the interior decors; how clean the hallways are and such; you can also see the needed space to put all that plumbing, tubing and electronics.

    The shuttle capacity of the TMP enterprise is also under par (if that screenshot is indeed a cargo bay and not an extension of the shuttle bay); you can't move large amounts of people with only a few transporters so, in the event of a planetary emergency or the like, you'd need either lots and lots of transporters or a good shuttle capacity (and the ability to launch multiple at a time).

    That analogy is quite broken; you can't compare a fictional TV show with real-world history. History is what happened. Star Trek never happened, except in the portrayal on screen. Even so, whenever we come across something that has been falsely assumed (and then proven otherwise), people shouldn't be resistant to changing the history books; why keep something that's not true while it has been disproven?

    Matt Jeffries is not some supernatural being, you know. Perhaps he wasn't deliberately making a mistake but simply misinformed about what would be needed on such a voyage through space.
     
  16. Gepard

    Gepard Vice Admiral Admiral

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    No, no. Remember, 700 meters is keweler, therefore stupid. Stop with your logic and things. They make us have uncomfortable tingling feelings in places.
     
  17. trevanian

    trevanian Rear Admiral

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    I don't see your point; if it still LOOKS like 300, then they didn't redo them well

    And what is it about CG that makes it special? They redid tons of model shots of the -E in FC after production couldn't built the full-size deflector to match the miniature's curves, necessitating a reworking (and reshooting) of the already-accomplished fx shots.
     
  18. Crazy Eddie

    Crazy Eddie Vice Admiral Admiral

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    It doesn't look like 300 to me. Actually, it looks like a large computer generated space craft that is bigger than my house but smaller than an asteroid.

    What is it about COMPUTERS that make them special? That it's easier to have these discussions with computers and websites than it is with typewriters and scotch tape should answer your question.
     
  19. Vance

    Vance Vice Admiral In Memoriam

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    Once again, though, you guys really seriously underestimabe the sheer size of the classic Enterprise. 947' is frickin' huge, and you have a ship with far LESS crew than small aircraft carriers of today. We've already done the math on how much a 5-year supplies of basic fuel, food, and water would take for 500 people for 5 years, and the TOS Enterprise has plenty of space for it, given the layout of the ship.

    The 'huge' versions of the NuEnterprise are honestly done out of sheer penis-envy, not out of any sense of being more 'realisitc' or anything. They were making a point not to be bogged down in 'realistic details', after all, and were more than a little condescending to Trek technology fans about it.
     
  20. DiSiLLUSiON

    DiSiLLUSiON Commodore Commodore

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    Oh, right you are. Absolutely. *slaps his own head* Sorry. :lol: