Why the Movement Toward Smaller Starfleet Hero Ships?

[Knight Templar]

I"m asking here instead of Trek Tech because I'm not asking for an "in universe" answer.

I'm asking for a Star Trek writers and producers standpoint.

Enterprise-D was twice the length, twice the width and had about twice as many decks as the movie era Enterprise-A. And it was said to mass EIGHT times as much.

But.

On Deep Space Nine- the Defiant is tiny. This makes somewhat sense as originally, the Defiant was going to be little more than a souped up shuttlecraft. and from a production standpoint it made no sense to have a huge starship at the station that the station crew only manned part of the time.

But Voyager was only about half the size of the Enterprise-D.

And the Enterprise-E introduced for the movies is only about two thirds the size of the Galaxy class ships overall.

So, why the overall preference of producers after The Next Generation for smaller ships?

 

[MacLeod]

Perhaps from a production point they were reacting to the inuniverse situation

In universe, priorites change. From memory aside from a few border skirmishes, the era when the Galaxy Class was designed was relatively peaceful. So you had ships like the Glaxy Class being designed. Fast forward to the 2360's when the first Galaxy Class ships were coming online, and the political landscape of the Galaxy has changed. The Romulans have returned, the Borg threat etc...

So you design ships to fit your current needs.

In the case of VOY they wanted a smaller ship, having a larger ship might not have suited the stories they wanted to tell. The whole point of having a smaller ship was to make life more difficult (not that it did)

 

[F. King Daniel]

I think they just started having ships of a size to better match the sets they could afford to build. The Enterprise-D is meant to be this HUGE ship, yet we never once saw a space within anywhere close to the size of the recreation deck or cargo bay/shuttle area seen in TMP (on a ship supposedly a fraction of the Next Gen ship's size) or the various cavernous interiors seen on the Kelvin and Enterprise in STXI (which were of a similar size to the Enterprise-D)

 

[Sci]

I suspect it also has to do with a sense that a smaller ship brings with it a feeling of greater vulnerability and danger, and therefore of greater drama.

 

[MacLeod]

^In theory, perhaps Sci.

 

[C.E. Evans]

IMO, ships as big as the Galaxy-class and Sovereign-class are more the exception than the rule.

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

I've always preferred the smaller ships of the Fleet, so it doesn't bother me.

 

[Knight Templar]

I think they just started having ships of a size to better match the sets they could afford to build. The Enterprise-D is meant to be this HUGE ship, yet we never once saw a space within anywhere close to the size of the recreation deck or cargo bay/shuttle area seen in TMP (on a ship supposedly a fraction of the Next Gen ship's size) or the various cavernous interiors seen on the Kelvin and Enterprise in STXI (which were of a similar size to the Enterprise-D)

IIRC, the Voyager sets are actually larger than those for the Enterprise-D.

 

[Greg Cox]

Plus, of course, DS9 wasn't about the ship. You didn't want a ship that was going to upstage the station.

 

[CorporalClegg]

I think it's simply a manpower (numbers) game.

I mean those big ships require a lot of people, and the presumed size of Startfleet is many times the size of all the navies on Earth combined.

Sure, there's a much larger pool of potential crew people, but still...

And there's also the issue of training them. One thing the onscreen (and even non screen) Trek really never dives into is where do all those people get their training.

The shows focus mostly on officers. So where do the enlisted get their training? Are there boot camps spread across the Alpha?

Also, there seems to be an unusual (or disproportional) number of officers. There can only be so many graduates from the Academy each year. If there were too many of those large ships, they'd get gobbled up pretty quickly. That doesn't even account for all the smaller ships, star bases, stations and other outposts.

So there can only be so many of the larger ships unless there is some kind of Starfleet OCS program. But there's never really any evidence of it.

I mean the closest thing there is is Bones. Assuming he went to school at UMass. But I think even before ST09 it was suggested he went to the Academy at some point.

 

[Knight Templar]

I think it's simply a manpower (numbers) game.

I mean those big ships require a lot of people, and the presumed size of Startfleet is many times the size of all the navies on Earth combined.

Sure, there's a much larger pool of potential crew people, but still...

And there's also the issue of training them. One thing the onscreen (and even non screen) Trek really never dives into is where do all those people get their training.

The shows focus mostly on officers. So where do the enlisted get their training? Are there boot camps spread across the Alpha?

Also, there seems to be an unusual (or disproportional) number of officers. There can only be so many graduates from the Academy each year. If there were too many of those large ships, they'd get gobbled up pretty quickly. That doesn't even account for all the smaller ships, star bases, stations and other outposts.

So there can only be so many of the larger ships unless there is some kind of Starfleet OCS program. But there's never really any evidence of it.

I mean the closest thing there is is Bones. Assuming he went to school at UMass. But I think even before ST09 it was suggested he went to the Academy at some point.

Once again.

I said NOT IN UNVERSE reasons.

I'm talking about why the producers apparently want smaller ships.

 

[Greg Cox]

Once again.

I said NOT IN UNVERSE reasons.

I'm talking about why the producers apparently want smaller ships.

Because size doesn't matter?

 

[horatio83]

As far as I know the E 700m+ whereas the D is 600m+. This looks scale-wise roughly right.
About the Defiant and Voyager, well, they are not supposed to be capital ships. I don't know what else there is to say about it.

 

[Knight Templar]

As far as I know the E 700m+ whereas the D is 600m+. This looks scale-wise roughly right.
About the Defiant and Voyager, well, they are not supposed to be capital ships. I don't know what else there is to say about it.

The Sovereign class is not nearly as wide as the Galaxy class and has little more than half the number of decks.

IIRC, it was estimated to mass only 62% of the Galaxy class.

 

[horatio83]

The Nebula has nearly as much mass than the Galaxy but it is surely a tinier ship. I still do not see any general trend. The Defiant is meant to be a small and muscular warship that feels like it is about to burst out of a corset, the Voyager is supposed to be a cruiser and not a capital ship. There aren't any general preferences for small ships. Now if the successor of the Enterprise D had been shorter we could talk about such a thing but alas it isn't. It is longer and while it might not be as broad as the D it certainly does not look like a smaller ship. As it is design-wise a mixture between the Intrepid and Excelsior you can start far earlier and claim that the Excelsior is smaller than the Constitution.

 

[Knight Templar]

As it is design-wise a mixture between the Intrepid and Excelsior you can start far earlier and claim that the Excelsior is smaller than the Constitution.

the Excelsior is larger than the Constitution in all respects.

You can see that clearly in the scene together at the end of The Undiscovered Country.

 

[horatio83]

True, my mistake. I still do not see any general trends towards smaller ships though. What we saw via the Defiant and Voyager, but also already earlier with the Miranda, the Oberth, the Nebula, the Constellation and so on was simply more ship variety.

 

[The Wormhole]

The Defiant was meant to be a smaller ship, sort of a submarine in space. Voyager had to be a smaller ship in the interests of creating drama. After all, it wouldn't be too dramatic if we had a large Galaxy class stranded alone. They could hold their own against the Kazon and the Vidians and that's the end of that story. I'm guessing someone realized that making the Enterprise E larger than the D would be quite ridiculous indeed.

 

[C.E. Evans]

It was really just a case of making the Enterprise-E look more like a hot rod than the Enterprise-D.

From designer John Eaves: "I definitely wanted to have a sleeker-looking ship, like the Excelsior. I wanted it to look like it could go real fast. To me, the shapes on the D looked almost like they wouldn't be able to handle that kind of speed. So I thought, in an architectural sense, they needed to be longer and a lot more streamlined. Even though it looks smaller than the D mass-wise, it's actually a longer ship."
http://www.starshipdatalink.net/art/1701-e.html

 

[tafkats]

Once again.

I said NOT IN UNVERSE reasons.

I'm talking about why the producers apparently want smaller ships.

I'm not sure there are enough data points to make a case for that a trend. And the data points we do have are all over the place. Here's an overview, with some of the numbers being admittedly a little dubious, with the date each ship was introduced:

1966 -- Enterprise -- 430
1986 -- Enterprise A -- ??
1987 -- Enterprise D -- 1,014
1994 -- Defiant -- 50
1995 -- Voyager -- 140
1996 -- Enterprise E -- 750
2001 -- NX-01 -- 83