Starships larger than heavy cruisers?

[F. King Daniel]

The dossier on Startrek.com calls the Kelvin a survey ship. Clearly it'd be bigger-scale surveys than the miniscule Oberth-class is capable of.

If the TOS/TMP Enterprise, the Ambassador class and the STXI Enterprise (according to the "Experience the Enterprise" promotional site) can all be Heavy Cruisers despite huge differences in scale, I guess anything's possible.

Or perhaps in light of STXI's 2233 USS Kelvin and Kelvin kitbash fleet, we should drop the "heavy" from the TOS/TMP Enterprise's "heavy cruiser" designation and assume the ship to be a 23rd century Intrepid-class equivelent rather than that era's largest.

 

[USS Excelsior]

Mining ships like the Narada would be much larger than those starships.

 

[Timo]

Or perhaps in light of STXI's 2233 USS Kelvin and Kelvin kitbash fleet, we should drop the "heavy" from the TOS/TMP Enterprise's "heavy cruiser" designation

Or then Kirk's ship would be a cruiser in the same sense as an old NYPD Dodge Diplomat is, not in the sense USS Long Beach is...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Commodore_Rook]

It is fun to note, the Klingons consider the refit Constitution class as a "Battlecruiser". I loved that little touch in Trek III.

 

[Mister_Atoz]

I like that too, it's akin to some of the later WWII American Heavy Cruisers that were "Heavy" in name only, and were effectively battlecruisers at a time where that word had become naval taboo

 

[Cicero]

I like that too, it's akin to some of the later WWII American Heavy Cruisers that were "Heavy" in name only, and were effectively battlecruisers at a time where that word had become naval taboo

Our oldest post-American Revolution heavy cruiser type, the United States class, which included the USS Constitution, was classed as a 4th Rate by the Royal Navy, the designation equivalent to a battlecruiser in later naval terminology.

The US Navy, historically, classified cruisers in three types:

1. Heavy or 1st Class Frigate (19th Century)/Armored Cruiser (Pre-Dreadnought)/Battlecruiser (1920s)/Large Cruiser (WWII)
2. Medium or 2nd Class Frigate (19th Century)/Heavy Protected Cruiser (Pre-Dreadnought)/Heavy Cruiser (1920s-WWII)
3. Light or 3rd Class Frigate (19th Century)/Light Protected Cruiser (Pre-Dreadnought)/Light Cruiser (1920s-WWII)

These correlated with the British designations of

1. 4th Rate (19th Century)/Armored Cruiser (Pre-Dreadnought)/Battlecruiser (Dreadnought era-WWII)
2. 5th Rate (19th Century)/Heavy Protected Cruiser (Pre-Dreadnought)/Heavy Cruiser (1920s-WWII)
3. 6th Rate (19th Century)/Light Protected Cruiser (Pre-Dreadnought)/Light Cruiser (1920s-WWII)

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

I figure the Klingons think of everything in terms of battle and the Constitution was one of Starfleet's largest class of ships that we know of.

 

[Vance]

^Are you asking what the Excelisors, Ambassadors, Galaxies and the Soverigns designated?

No idea.

They're all either Heavy Cruisers or Exploration Cruisers. Everything just got scaled up along with them. (There's historical precedent for this).

Canonically, the Entente (a Dreadnought/Battleship) appears in schematic and background chatter form in TMP. The ship was then deliberately further obfuscated once the Dreadnought was declared 'non-canon' like the rest of the Technical Manual.

As for NuTrek, it gets iffy since the original design for the Kelvin was just a Saladin/Hermes variant which then got insanely scaled up because someone working in the art department had a severe case of penis envy. You have to scale up everything else as well to make any of the NuTrek ships work. So, the Nu1701 is still... a heavy cruiser.

 

[Cicero]

^ Not necessarily. Within the movie, there's no reason to conclude that the Enterprise is a heavy cruiser (or that the Kelvin is something less than a capital ship).

Dreadnoughts, explorers, battleships, or ships of similar size exist in every period seen in Star Trek except the 29th Century and the 2250s. I see no reason to think that anything else is true in the new universe; the new Enterprise may simply be a dreadnought/explorer/battleship, despite the name having been given to a heavy cruiser in the Prime timeline.

For what it's worth, I prefer the new Enterprise's size. Having spent some time aboard the modern Enterprise, I think its rough volume very unlikely for a starship similar to the one shown in TOS.

 

[Timo]

A short recap of what is known canonically about ships we have seen on screen:

* Constitution is Heavy Cruiser (movie graphics)
* Constitution refit probably is Heavy Cruiser (the same movie graphics, depicting non-refit but representing refit)
* Defiant is Escort ("The Search" dialogue)

That's basically it. We also know of unseen ships that

* Ambassador is Heavy Cruiser ("Conspiracy" dialogue)
* New Orleans is Frigate ("Conspiracy" dialogue)
* Wambundu is Light Cruiser ("Arsenal of Freedom" dialogue) and Medical Transport ("Force of Nature" dialogue)
* Hokule'a is Cruiser ("Datalore" dialogue)

but as said, we never see these ship classes on screen, at least not in a manner that would allow us to canonically combine a design and a ship class designation (the latter two cases), or a class designation and an individual ship (the former two). That is, there's no canon proof that the Enterprise-C would have been an Ambassador class vessel.

Furthermore, we hear that

* Constitution refit is Klingon-identified as Battlecruiser (ST3 dialogue)
* Oberth is possibly identified as Scout (ST3 dialogue)

but Starfleet and Klingons probably disagree, and Kirk may have thought that Chekov mistook the Oberth class vessel for a scout (when in fact Chekov mistook a cloaking scout for an already destroyed Oberth class vessel).

Everything else we think we know of large starship designations comes purely from backstage sources of dubious "reality", or is left hanging, like the mention of Destroyers in DS9. We may also argue whether Science Vessel is official for Oberth or merely a descriptive term used in lieu of an "actual" ship type designation.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Vance]

For what it's worth, I prefer the new Enterprise's size. Having spent some time aboard the modern Enterprise, I think its rough volume very unlikely for a starship similar to the one shown in TOS.

Check the crew compliments for the modern carrier and the starship, then get back to me on that one. The starship Enterprise has about 1/8th the crew of the carrier, and a little bit more internal volume.

The NuEnterprise is nothing more than a penis-joke at its official size, made by people who don't realize how big 1000' long really is and what all could fit in there and quite-literally by people who didn't know that 'feet' and 'meters' were two different lengths.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Or they had a bigger budget, built bigger sets, shot in a gigantic brewery and made the ship big enough to fit it all in, unlike Voyager's magic shuttlebay, the TMP Enterprise's rec deck, the Enterprise-D's ten-forward or even the TOS Enterprise's bridge.

 

[Vance]

Or they had a bigger budget, built bigger sets, shot in a gigantic brewery and made the ship big enough to fit it all in, unlike Voyager's magic shuttlebay, the TMP Enterprise's rec deck, the Enterprise-D's ten-forward or even the TOS Enterprise's bridge.

Do you really want to nit-pick based on set sizes, scales, etc? It's been done to death, but to say that NuTrek anywhere remotely resembles technical accuracy is a joke - one that even JJ Abrams himself made.

 

[Cicero]

Everything else we think we know of large starship designations comes purely from backstage sources of dubious "reality", or is left hanging, like the mention of Destroyers in DS9.

That's not entirely true. Tasha Yar described the parallel Enterprise-D as a "Galaxy-class battleship" in Yesterday's Enterprise, and the "dreadnought Entente" was mentioned in communications chatter in TMP.

Also, the Wambundu and Hokule'a classes are not identified on screen; they originate in the Encyclopedia.

On screen, we've seen or heard ship classes described as follows (parentheses are used for ships whose class has not been identified):

Battleship/Dreadnought:
(Entente)
Galaxy (parallel universe)

Heavy Cruiser:
Constitution
Ambassador

Cruiser:
(Tripoli)

Light Cruiser:
(Drake)

Destroyer:
Saladin
(Centaur)

Frigate:
New Orleans(Renegade)

Escort:
Defiant

For what it's worth, I prefer the new Enterprise's size. Having spent some time aboard the modern Enterprise, I think its rough volume very unlikely for a starship similar to the one shown in TOS.

Check the crew compliments for the modern carrier and the starship, then get back to me on that one. The starship Enterprise has about 1/8th the crew of the carrier, and a little bit more internal volume.

The NuEnterprise is nothing more than a penis-joke at its official size, made by people who don't realize how big 1000' long really is and what all could fit in there and quite-literally by people who didn't know that 'feet' and 'meters' were two different lengths.

I'm aware of the difference in crew complements. The portion of the modern Enterprise's volume that is used for crew living spaces is significantly less than the portion of the TOS Enterprise's volume that is taken up by the ship's nacelles - never mind that the TOS Enterprise does require room for roughly 450 crew persons.

The crew spaces that we see on the TOS Enterprise are themselves noticeably large (Uhura's cabin is larger than anyone's but the captain's aboard the carrier; it was larger than my 18-person compartment), to say nothing of the ship's broad corridors (this passageway would be unusually large aboard the real Enterprise; passageways along these lines are much more common). Even phaser control and the bridge are luxuriously large. The modern Enterprise, vast as it is, is desperate for space.

 

[Birdog]

Everything else we think we know of large starship designations comes purely from backstage sources of dubious "reality", or is left hanging, like the mention of Destroyers in DS9.

That's not entirely true. Tasha Yar described the parallel Enterprise-D as a "Galaxy-class battleship" in Yesterday's Enterprise, and the "dreadnought Entente" was mentioned in communications chatter in TMP.

Also, the Wambundu and Hokule'a classes are not identified on screen; they originate in the Encyclopedia.

On screen, we've seen or heard ship classes described as follows (parentheses are used for ships whose class has not been identified):

Battleship/Dreadnought:
(Entente)
Galaxy (parallel universe)

Heavy Cruiser:
Constitution
Ambassador

Cruiser:
(Tripoli)

Light Cruiser:
(Drake)

Destroyer:
Saladin
(Centaur)

Frigate:
New Orleans(Renegade)

Escort:
Defiant

For what it's worth, I prefer the new Enterprise's size. Having spent some time aboard the modern Enterprise, I think its rough volume very unlikely for a starship similar to the one shown in TOS.

Check the crew compliments for the modern carrier and the starship, then get back to me on that one. The starship Enterprise has about 1/8th the crew of the carrier, and a little bit more internal volume.

The NuEnterprise is nothing more than a penis-joke at its official size, made by people who don't realize how big 1000' long really is and what all could fit in there and quite-literally by people who didn't know that 'feet' and 'meters' were two different lengths.

I'm aware of the difference in crew complements. The portion of the modern Enterprise's volume that is used for crew living spaces is significantly less than the portion of the TOS Enterprise's volume that is taken up by the ship's nacelles - never mind that the TOS Enterprise does require room for roughly 450 crew persons.

The crew spaces that we see on the TOS Enterprise are themselves noticeably large (Uhura's cabin is larger than anyone's but the captain's aboard the carrier; it was larger than my 18-person compartment), to say nothing of the ship's broad corridors (this passageway would be unusually large aboard the real Enterprise; passageways along these lines are much more common). Even phaser control and the bridge are luxuriously large. The modern Enterprise, vast as it is, is desperate for space.

You're forgetting the third dimension. The saucer has a huge amount of floor space because it has multiple decks. How many decks have berthing on CVN-65?

 

[Cicero]

^ The answer to that would be somewhat complicated. CVN-65 has a number of partial decks, some of which include berthing. It also has widely dispersed berthing areas; some areas house hundreds of sailors, some only a few, surrounded by machinery, shop spaces, etc.

Regardless, I was considering the third dimension.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Or they had a bigger budget, built bigger sets, shot in a gigantic brewery and made the ship big enough to fit it all in, unlike Voyager's magic shuttlebay, the TMP Enterprise's rec deck, the Enterprise-D's ten-forward or even the TOS Enterprise's bridge.

Do you really want to nit-pick based on set sizes, scales, etc? It's been done to death, but to say that NuTrek anywhere remotely resembles technical accuracy is a joke - one that even JJ Abrams himself made.

My point was that Trek's technical accuracy has always been a sham - so getting wound up at it seems a little pointless.

 

[Vance]

The crew spaces that we see on the TOS Enterprise are themselves noticeably large (Uhura's cabin is larger than anyone's but the captain's aboard the carrier; it was larger than my 18-person compartment), to say nothing of the ship's broad corridors (this passageway would be unusually large aboard the real Enterprise; passageways along these lines are much more common). Even phaser control and the bridge are luxuriously large. The modern Enterprise, vast as it is, is desperate for space.

Keep in mind that we only see officer's quarters in TOS, and don't see the crew quarters (which are six-bunked and more like a college dorm's) until TUC. Yes, the carrier Enterprise is cramped and tight, but if you remove 4/5th of the crew and get rid of the fighter hangars and flight deck (but leave the helipad and garages), suddenly it gets a lot more spacious.

The NCC-1701 is a very spacious ship, and can be. There's no need to magnify the overall size by 27 to house the same number of crew to make the NuNCC-1701 work.

 

[Vance]

My point was that Trek's technical accuracy has always been a sham - so getting wound up at it seems a little pointless.

Then can you kindly recuse yourself from this forum from now on? The rest of us actually like talking, and bitching, about Trek's technical details.

 

[F. King Daniel]

My point was that Trek's technical accuracy has always been a sham - so getting wound up at it seems a little pointless.

Then can you kindly recuse yourself from this forum from now on? The rest of us actually like talking, and bitching, about Trek's technical details.

I enjoy it too - I just don't lose sight of the foundation those details are built on, and thus have a more flexible approach to new artists and producers taking things in a slightly different direction.