• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Ship sizes: ALL LIES! (big pics)

Well, nitpicking is fine, but some of us get downright rude about it, as though someone had raped their childhood. :)
 
YES YES YES!! This ship is so big it could poop out Picard's E and crush Battlestar Galactica. I love it and it's logical!!

Now if they could only make her a little bigger, add some belly to the skinny secondary hull. Push the connecting dorsal forward abit so the secondary hull sits further back like the TOS E



You rarely get an agreed-upon size by finding consistency in VFX shots, you get it when the designer hardwires the number into the design itself, by adding features which cannot work at any other scale. The Ent-D isn't 2108 feet long because we made a thorough analysis of TNG effects shots and determined that it was always scaled consistently next to other ships, but rather because Andrew Probert designed the miniature with such a length in mind, so it isn't really possible to rescale it lest the detailing stops making sense.

Exactly. And the details on the nuEnterprise point to a mammoth 1200m ship. At the official 725m, the bridge window is only 4' tall on the exterior, the doors either side of the shuttlebay would only fit Keenser, the shuttles wouldn't fit inside as seen etc.
Here's my post from earlier, showing that the 725m figure doesn't fit the details, but the 1200m figure does (clearly it was when that chart from the "Art Of" book was in vogue that the CG was built):
Here's the 2009 Enterprise stuff, supporting a 1200 meter size:
broke_2009Ent1.jpg


shuttlebay_scaled.jpg


Top and front shots of the Enterprise model are Tobias Richter's.

Here is the early size chart from the "Art of the Movie" book, which the CG model appears to have been actually built and detailed to. Even in the shipyard scene, where the ship model is scaled down to 1200 feet (366m), the explosed decks support the 1200m figure (which has been fudged Excelsior-style down to 725m)

But my original point is this: Why fudge at all? Why not just say Excelsior is 700-777m, the refit Enterprise ~350m, nuEnterprise 1200m, etc.? Has anyone considered that the last few technical manuals may have sold a little better if the statistics matched what was on-screen in Star Trek, especially in an age where we've got the technology to easily spot a bogus figure?

Maybe they'll modify the CG model with a bigger window at the front and different shuttlebay for the next movie. Or maybe they'll leave it, like they have with the 700-800m Excelsior all these years.:shrug:
 
Well, nitpicking is fine, but some of us get downright rude about it, as though someone had raped their childhood. :)

Exactly. I have no issue with nitpicking. In fact, I do it often myself. But to suggest that Abrams deliberately made the size inconsistent or "wrong" just to give a big FU to the fans is just silliness.
 
In the case of TNG and DS9, they were laying out shots for a tv screen, so certain concessions have to be made. Not so for a big screen movie.
Let me get this straight: you're angry with JJ Abrams for caring as much about scaling consistency as the producers of TNG and DS9?

Plus, at least in the case of TNG and DS9, whenever you tried to get figures on how big a given ship was, the vast majority of time, you got a pretty solid figure.
Unless you're looking at any ship OTHER than the enterprise. The Excelsior, the Bird of Prey, the Vorcha, DS9, the Shroomdock and even the Constellation class changed sizes several times during the series, and sometimes during the same episode.

The only real wild card is the Defiant
And also DS9 with respect to the Enterprise, the Miranda class, the Defiant, the Oberth class and the Cardassian freighter. The E-D is the most obvious example, scaled down to less than half its normal size just to fit into the upper docking pylon.

In the case of the JJPrise, we're talking about the ship varying from slightly larger than the TMP refit to bigger than the Enterprise-E, all in the course of a single film.
Arguably, it only appears at the smaller size in a single scene--the shipyard construction site--that was one of the first ones actually rendered, and even then the actual size of the ship is far from clear.

Minor point of detail also: even at 760 meters, the Enterprise would not be that much larger than the Enterprise-E, only LONGER. Volume wise, it's still only 40% as large as the Enterprise-D, and slightly smaller than the -C.

99% of the movie's viewers saw the film as a disposable popcorn flick, whose first and last foray into Star Trek was that film.
I love how you're prepared to back up your claim that you actually know what 99% of the people who saw that movie thought about it.
 
Well, nitpicking is fine, but some of us get downright rude about it, as though someone had raped their childhood. :)

Exactly. I have no issue with nitpicking. In fact, I do it often myself. But to suggest that Abrams deliberately made the size inconsistent or "wrong" just to give a big FU to the fans is just silliness.
If Abrams had intended to give a middle finger to the fans, he would have used the Kelvin's design for the Enterprise, killed off a few of the main characters (Chekov and Scotty, let's say) and had Nero destroy Earth halfway through the movie and force Starfleet HQ to be moved to Vulcan so that he could force his own preachy/transcendentalist vision of Star Trek down everyone's throats.

I mention this because I heard a rumor a few years ago that an early script of "Star Trek" looked ALOT like this.
 
Well, nitpicking is fine, but some of us get downright rude about it, as though someone had raped their childhood. :)

Exactly. I have no issue with nitpicking. In fact, I do it often myself. But to suggest that Abrams deliberately made the size inconsistent or "wrong" just to give a big FU to the fans is just silliness.

If by "fans" you mean the 99% (or more) who are Trek fans who would enjoy the show without qubbling over the minutiae of starship length then I agree, but I can see him having some scaling-discrepancy fun at the expense of the 1% (or less) of "fans" who get adamant about such things.

Of course that would suggest that he is, or was influenced by, someone who cares about scaling issues in the first place...

No, I think he probably just didn't give a shit about how big or little his JJPrise appeared to be on the big screen. He was more interested in making a movie than he was about scaling issues.
 
Consider the plight of one Geoffery Mandel, fired from the design staff because he dared to work up a graphic showing a side-by-side comparison of the original Enterprise with the JJPrise, because he was "too attached to the old ship."

Not exactly warm fuzzy feelings towards the fanbase being generated there...
 
Consider the plight of one Geoffery Mandel, fired from the design staff because he dared to work up a graphic showing a side-by-side comparison of the original Enterprise with the JJPrise, because he was "too attached to the old ship."

Not exactly warm fuzzy feelings towards the fanbase being generated there...
I'd say giving the franchise a chance to survive and exposing Trek to millions of new people was a warm and fuzzy feeling, but you're going to ignore all that because this one particular ship is too big, or whatever.

Just when will this jihad of yours be over?
 
If Abrams had intended to give a middle finger to the fans, he would have used the Kelvin's design for the Enterprise, killed off a few of the main characters (Chekov and Scotty, let's say) and had Nero destroy Earth halfway through the movie and force Starfleet HQ to be moved to Vulcan so that he could force his own preachy/transcendentalist vision of Star Trek down everyone's throats.

:lol:

Insofar as the quality of the new movie goes, that's best done in the appropriate forum. The technical specific stuff is fine here, and I'm sure that we could find plenty of stuff to nitpick about it.
 
Consider the plight of one Geoffery Mandel, fired from the design staff because he dared to work up a graphic showing a side-by-side comparison of the original Enterprise with the JJPrise, because he was "too attached to the old ship."

Not exactly warm fuzzy feelings towards the fanbase being generated there...
I'd say giving the franchise a chance to survive and exposing Trek to millions of new people was a warm and fuzzy feeling, but you're going to ignore all that because this one particular ship is too big, or whatever.

Just when will this jihad of yours be over?

When the malignant growth that is JJTrek is rejected for the aberrant mutation that it is.

Hyperbolic enough for ya? :devil:
 
I don't recall ever being on the ENT-is-not-canon bandwagon. I ripped Braga a few new ones several times, but never said the whole series needed to be junked.
 
To be fair, JJTrek is really bad, script and canon violation-wise; a lot worse than Enterprise. It would be good as a standalone movie for teens and preteens.
 
I disagree. Enterprise blatantly retconned away dozens of TOS and pre-TOS factoids accumulated over the years. STXI established an alternate history beginning on Kirk's date of birth, thereby excusing anything in the bulk of the film 25 years later.
 
To be fair, JJTrek is really bad, script and canon violation-wise; a lot worse than Enterprise. It would be good as a standalone movie for teens and preteens.

ROTFLMAO!

And that's your "fair" characterization??

I would hate to see you not pulling punches.
 
Well, assuming the ship was based around a 1,200 meter size and the view-screen window was based around that size, that's it -- it's 1,200 meters.

As for the questions regarding the TOS Enterprise. I've done some simple math and if the TOS Enterprise's corridors are 10-feet tall, instead of 8-feet as listed; this would make the ship 1.25 times larger than stated, not 1.5.

That being said, I remember there was some discussion about the intended size of the Enterprise being 947-feet or 1,080-feet: Early on the ship was supposed to be 540 feet long with a crew of 203 (this figure stayed in the pilot episode by accident); later on they doubled it. They originally had the intention of covering the navigational deflector with a dome similar to the way aircraft radar antennae are covered by nose-cones. This feature was deleted but there might have been numerous characteristics that remained that may have indicated 1,080 feet.

Regardless assuming a 947-foot listed figure increased by 1.25 would be 1,183.75; assuming the 1,080-figure, would make the ship 1,350 feet in length. For the time being I think that would be the best figure to work with. What do you guys think?
 
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top