JJ Enterprise Tech Specs
- Thread starter Nimitz CO
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The classic Enterpirse is not 947 feet. The classic Enterprise is four modules, one of which is a flat disk about 450 feet in diameter and the other of which is a cylinder about 450 feet long. Altogether it has probably less habitable volume than a Nimitz class aircraft carrier, with the added complications of being, you know, a space ship and not a naval vessel.
Actually, they are done out of the need to fit twenty four shuttlecraft into a space craft designed for interstellar travel and exploration. But more to the point: the original ship did NOT have enough internal room for both crew and supplies and equipment. You'd need to fit five years worth of provisions for 400 people into a space the size of a football stadium, and the x-factor in that is ENTIRELY the efficiency of the ship's recycling capabilities. It would be a tight fit but it might JUST work if the ship is a cruise liner that only needs two shuttlecraft, no workshops, a sparsity of lab space and most of its engineering spaces crammed into broom closets in crew quarters.
The classic Enterprise is explicitly 947' feet. Period. End of story. The show said so. The behind the scenes material said so. Gene signed off on it. Done. Finito. Over. Nine-hundred and forty seven feet in length.
Live the mantra.
And, you're still wrong, newtype. Assuming only raw storage with today's technology and no recycling, the amount of supplies needed would take up about 2/3 of the saucer. This has already been calculated a few times.
Dr Cox has a few words for you...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrjwaqZfjIY
Live the mantra.
And, you're still wrong, newtype. Assuming only raw storage with today's technology and no recycling, the amount of supplies needed would take up about 2/3 of the saucer. This has already been calculated a few times.
Dr Cox has a few words for you...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrjwaqZfjIY
Perhaps so, but given the orginal intent, size of the windows and airlocks, and comparative size of other contemporary Trek ships comparted to those from the 24th century I think I'll stick with a 300 meter length in my mind. Inconsistencies like this have popped up before. I've found the appropriate response to any detail that goes against the way things should rationally be is to plug your ears, shut your eyes, and chant "LALALALALALALALA!" as loud as possible.
After all, the only thing that REALLY wrecks the 300 meter length is the shuttlebay/craft and possibly the engineering interiors, in a few shots. *shrugs* No big deal.
You don't get it? Do I need to draw you a picture?
This is a rectangle
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|______________________________|It is thirty underscores long.
This is a ship
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-------______|It is also 30 underscores long.
The ship, as you can see, is not quite as large as the rectangle despite the fact that they have the same length. The saucer section--the habitable volume of the ship--is relatively small. The engineering section--where presumably the cargo bays and fabrication facilities are located--is also small. Really, the entire internal space of the Enterprise could fit comfortably inside of a pair of public high schools. That's "friggin huge" in the same sense that your local WalMart is huge; it's adequate for a ship that might go for six to eight months without stopping for supplies and maintenance, but I just don't see it lasting a whole five years independently and frankly never have. Obviously, neither did the writers of TOS considering how frequently the ship stopped at a starbase.
And the crew would spend the first eight months their mission sleeping on top of stacks of cargo containers until they eat their way to the deck. Assuming that the only thing the ship stores is FOOD and doesn't carry any scientific equipment, machine shops, experimental modules or fuel tanks.
The overall point: it would be a tight squeeze that only becomes feasible with a fantastic amount of technological magic. A larger vessel makes a certain amount of sense for a ship that is supposed to be versatile enough to go anywhere and do anything any time without worrying about provisions or material expenses.
trevanian
Rear Admiral
I'm sure it is, which is why the TOS ship doesn't have to haul around the equivalent of a warehouse in its internal stores. Of course, it can't do this reliably enough to travel any place more than six months away from the nearest starbase, so no big deal; hell, it even has enough room leftover to store things other than supplies for the crew.
OTOH, if you're designing a ship that's going to do something other than photograph star charts and survey half-mile sections of unexplored planets with twelve-man teams, that ship probably should be a tad bigger than that. I imagine the redesigned Enterprise was probably designed to do more "grunt work" than the original, obviously requiring a hell of a lot more shuttles, more scientific equipment, more probes, a larger fabrication facility with a wider range of capabilities. Technology or not, it's unlikely you could squeeze that kind of capability into a pair of 150 meter modules.
Alpha, we do very similar things now, without all that extra technology. Take a look at the larger submarines (particularly Russian ones) and what they house for crew, and how long they stay submerged, etc. Get back to me after that. Trust me, 400 crew, 5 years, in that big and luxurious of a ship... easily done. (And, again, that's only patrol time, and not how long they're isolated anyway).
The only real issue is how big the crew quarters are in TOS (due to the reuse of sets).. but if you assume the crew quarters are more like those in TWOK and TUC, then you're back to being very reasonable again. (Heck, TUC had six-bunkers, though pretty nice ones, considering.)
The only real issue is how big the crew quarters are in TOS (due to the reuse of sets).. but if you assume the crew quarters are more like those in TWOK and TUC, then you're back to being very reasonable again. (Heck, TUC had six-bunkers, though pretty nice ones, considering.)
Sort of begging the question: what makes you think it couldn't? We don't exactly know what the Hasselblad's digital equivalent is, but it's massively illogical and strictly prejudicial to assume that ANY digital camera would fail to outperform it.
Yep. The Oscars have the record with a crew of (IIRC) 160 for a duration of 8 months. And the Ohios, with similar performance, have some of the best cuisine in the navy.
And these are ships that are designed to do nothing whatsoever except cruise around and wait for orders to blow something up. They're not very versatile, they don't enter situations where they have to build/rebuilid devices, structures, base camps, survey stations, piers, harbors, UAVs, aircraft, etc.
Sure. Just not for a ship that size... or, if at that size, not for a full five years. Enterprise is a starship, not a missile boat; it isn't cruising around waiting for a target package, it's supposed to be exploring new worlds. I don't think beaming twelve guys to a randomly chosen spot on a planet you just discovered constitutes exploration; survey, maybe, but not exploration. To do that, you're going to need a MASSIVE infrastructure onboard your ship, something the original Enterprise just wasn't big enough to contain.
True. They're only isolated for a few weeks to up to two months or so.
While they don't do the job of cruisers, they actually DO perform a variety of missions, particularly for sonar analysis, underwater research, search and rescue, communications coordination, etc. Their primary role, of course, is sub-surface warfare, but the Navy has 'em doing a lot worse than that.
Again, we're only talking 400 people here. They do not need an internal area the size of a small city (of which the NuEnterprise is) in order to function. The Enterprise-D was rediculous in size for its crew of 1000, and wasn't quite as big. (To say nothing of the Lexington and other ships which were shown to be several times BIGGER again).
You want it to be bigger for no other reason than to justify the new movie, despite the very fact that Abrams very pointedly considered such questions and discussions beneath him and even fired some technical advisors for doing their job.
Seriously, do some research on what current ships really can do, with their crews, with today's technology, at their current sizes. You'll easily discover that the TOS Enterprise was already pretty substantial a ship (remember, it was a bunch of WWII vets that designed her, and served on such vessels, and brought that knowledge to the design of the ship), much less what theororhetical tech can do 15 generations from now.
Vance, you can get a knife blade with an edge one molecule thick just by chipping it out of a piece of glass. That doesn't mean a glass knife can outperform any steel knife in the world. Like the Enterprise, it depends on what you need it to do; a Hasselblad could probably outperform my crappy 80 dollar digital camera I got on sale from Best Buy, but it can't bluetooth those pictures to my computer so I can six those pictures up, store them on a flash drive or transmit them to fifty family members in twelve states.
And especially since this is a discussion that stemmed from VFX issues, the fact remains that the digital version yields a PRODUCT that is at least comparable to the analog version, with the difference being the digital version yields those results faster and more efficiently than the analog system. The FX shots in Star Trek could be done in half the time as conventional modeling and are capable of some shots that the older systems couldn't easily pull off. At the very least you can say that it's been extremely rare until very recently to see starships performing roll maneuvers instead of being limited entirely to pitch and yaw; you won't see a lot of that with models and photography.
Pffrt, yeah right.
Blow analog pictures up and you'll get grain. That's not molecular resolution, it's noise; it does not contain useful information.
darkwing_duck1
Vice Admiral
But only for about 90 days at a time. After that, the crew starts having "problems". Too many people crammed too close together having to LITERALLY sleep in each others' beds, only having storage for personals equal to a desk drawer or so, etc.
The first site linked to is using the 2500' (762m) size from the Interactive tour. The IT lists crew size as 1100 standard, and the mass as ~445,000mt.
Pffrt, yeah right.
Blow analog pictures up and you'll get grain. That's not molecular resolution, it's noise; it does not contain useful information.
Which is a side-effect of the film development process (and transferral of negatives), but not the film itself or the camera, for that matter. Honestly, do a little reasearch, guys, before you expose your ignorance to the rest of the world!
darkwing_duck1
Vice Admiral
As long as you can't zoom in indefinitely, analog pictures still have a maximum resolution. As such you can't claim molecular resolution, since that would imply that you can zoom in and get details up to molecular level, which is obviously untrue; at that level, all you get is the structure of the material it's been developed on.Pffrt, yeah right.
Blow analog pictures up and you'll get grain. That's not molecular resolution, it's noise; it does not contain useful information.
Which is a side-effect of the film development process (and transferral of negatives), but not the film itself or the camera, for that matter. Honestly, do a little reasearch, guys, before you expose your ignorance to the rest of the world!
So, digital photography isn't inferior (or superior) to analog; it's just different, with different strengths, different weaknesses and different applications. Just as CGI is different then using real models.
However, these days, people expect things you can't (easily or cheaply) do with models; as such, CGI is in high demand while using models is not. Same reason digital camera's are in high demand, while analog cameras are not.
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