Starship Size Argument™ thread

[Crazy Eddie]

This. And perhaps the decks on the Vengeance are divided into various levels.

Well, wouldn't that make them separate decks?

On naval vessels, a "deck" is a major horizontal division in the ship's structure, particularly in the hull. The superstructure that sits on top of the main deck of a warship is said to be divided up into levels, while deeper in the hull you have still more decks between the main deck and the keel.

Put that another way, a "deck" is basically the horizontal version of a "bulkhead." Because we're trekkies, we like to think of "bulkhead" as a nautical term for "wall" but again, on naval vessels, this refers to specific vertical dividers that break up the hull into compartments. So an aircraft carrier gets hid amidships by a torpedo, for example, the impact point might be, say, "Between bulkheads 38 and 39, just below E-deck."

If your deck is ten meters high, you can fill that space with anything you want. Catwalks, for example, are not decks, neither are platforms, stairways, landings, bookshelves, etc. Most naval vessels use "decks" as separate floors mainly because they are small and because it's easier to keep the ship airtight if you break up the space into smaller chunks. Submarines do not always have this feature, and starships are large enough that they almost certainly don't.

The hatch Kirk and Harrison 'fly' into the Vengeance was on deck 13, which was in the centre of the engineering section.

Unless that ship has very limited decks (IE big spaces in between) then the Vengeance is the size of Voyager...

The decks do seem to be excessively tall.

That or we have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a "deck" is on a starship.

There seems, for example, to be a LOT of open vertical space on the Enterprise. We keep seeing corridors that open into spaces that have open roofs to the next level up, so that "room" is actually five-story shaft spanned by catwalks from one side to the other. I'd hazard a guess that any particular "deck" has at least four levels, which is probably a feature of how the ship was actually built: if each "deck" has an independent pressure hull, then its internal arrangement can be broken up into different floors and spaces for crew habitation, or you can fill the entire thing with machinery, cargo, water turbines and warp cores.

IOW, "Deck 13" could be as much as 38 stories down from the bridge.

 

[throwback]

The new film muddles the matter further. The Enterprise has a second shuttlebay. It has at least 72 launch tubes in the secondary hull that are located on the sides of the ship. And it has a big white blocky thing that houses a "thing" that is the reactor. And it has a multi-deck circular room with "bridges" that connect corridor segments.

 

[beamMe]

The new film muddles the matter further. The Enterprise has a second shuttlebay. It has at least 72 launch tubes in the secondary hull that are located on the sides of the ship. And it has a big white blocky thing that houses a "thing" that is the reactor. And it has a multi-deck circular room with "bridges" that connect corridor segments.

Are there actually 72 launch tubes?

 

[F. King Daniel]

You repeatedly said 350m for the new Enterprise's overall length. I gave you a little more, 366m, the stated concept design size. Now you're telling me it's not enough to fit?

Here are the figures I cited at the beginning of this thread:

- Primary hull diameter = 238 m
- Secondary hull length = 189 m
- Total length (excluding nacelles) = 343 m
- Height = 97.5 m
- Max. width of secondary hull = 45 m
- Max. height of secondary hull = 39 m (measured from base of neck)
- Width of hanger deck (at doors) = 26 m
- height of hanger doors = 8.5 m
- Bridge viewscreen / window = 8.5 m
- Round porthole window diameter = 0.6m
- Diameter of "bridge" dome = 9 m
- Bridge diameter = 18m (assuming it fills the space between the two "side" windows)

Based on the measurements I made of the diagrams you provided links for, that's what it was, assuming the hatches were 2.5m in diameter. Make them an unusual 3m, and you have a hanger deck of width 32m, and a bow-to-stern length of 410m. Still nowhere near near 725m.

Here you go:

Without a shadow of a doubt, what we saw in Star Trek and Into Darkness was far larger.

Basic perspective, as taught in high school art. I even drew a comparison.

Again, your drawings show nothing except a biased "guess" of where the wall ends to suit your argument. I think you're mistaken that they actually modeled the inside of the rooms to match what you see outside. More likely, they simply superimposed an image of rooms through the window.

They modelled rooms - you can see them during Kirk's pod ejection sequence. Tobias Richter (who studied ILM's model) said theirs had 10x the detail his model does, and his is the most detailed model he's built.

There would be room enough. As I said before, we see the deck heights in the corridor junction.

I see hallways that are about 10ft tall according to the interior shots, consistent with a typical building. What are you referencing?

The large multilevel intersection of corridors in Star Trek Into Darkness, where we can see there are none of the between-deck machinery areas you've been mentioning.

Look, I'm really not against it being "slightly" bigger than the original size. But over 700m? That's just not sensible, and is simply BIG for the sake of being "BIG!!!!"

It's big for the sake of being what we saw in the movie. That's he shuttlebay we saw. That's the window we saw. You're applying make-believe standards of what's allowed and what isn't to a work of fiction - and as I said before, even in that work of fiction we have seen three sizes of the same basic shape (Nova, Intrepid and Sovereign classes), so why is it wrong to do that to the Constitution-class?
And why on Earth would ILM say the ship is 2380'/725m if it wasn't?

 

[F. King Daniel]

I have no idea where it originated from, but I found it here (the link is in the image above as well) through Google Image Search. Strangely though, I can't find the Imageshack link on that page to track it back any further than that.

Well it's excellently detailed!

I have no idea where it originated from, but I found it here (the link is in the image above as well) through Google Image Search. Strangely though, I can't find the Imageshack link on that page to track it back any further than that.

Try here. (image link)

Yep, that's mine. Wow, I suppose I need to go back and finish that, right? Sorry, life kind of went screwy at the end of 2009.

I just wanted to pop in on this and say that my rendering is completely based on my own imagination, and this same debate that was taking place back in the summer of 2009. I had bigger (ha) plans for this image, but I've never gotten any further with it. Beyond the plan, the big thing for me was to a) show that it was conceivable that the ship was as big as they were saying it was, and b) to find a place for what all we had seen in the 2009 film.

After seeing the movie last night, I've got a whole bunch of new locations to figure out.

That looks very cool!
HERE is my take on roughly where everything is.

 

[Groknard]

"Plaza", love it! In my original diagram, I ran a big column down the primary hull (next to a turbolift shaft), I think with the intention that it was a computer core. Your image makes me realize that I've already made space for the same plaza in my schematic, hooray!

Still, my biggest challenge remains trying to figure out how Spock got to the bridge so fast in the beginning of the 2009 film

 

[Crazy Eddie]

The new film muddles the matter further. The Enterprise has a second shuttlebay. It has at least 72 launch tubes in the secondary hull that are located on the sides of the ship. And it has a big white blocky thing that houses a "thing" that is the reactor. And it has a multi-deck circular room with "bridges" that connect corridor segments.

Are there actually 72 launch tubes?

I actually got the distinct impression that Admiral Marcus had Enterprise retrofitted with the new launch tubes specifically for the Kronos mission. I mean, it wasn't a minor thing that had Scotty so pissed off that he would rather resign than authorize them being brought on board; it was literally a totally unknown weapon system that had never been used before whose exact specs nobody understood.

It would be the equivalent of an aircraft carrier having a half dozen ICBM launchers bolted to the flight deck. The Air Boss is probably gonna have a problem with this.

 

[cbspock]

I don't think there were 72 tubes, in the graphic it looked like some tubes were loaded with the second shots outside the tubes.

Where was Shuttlebay 2? Was that on the side of the hanger deck?


-Chris

 

[cbspock]

"Plaza", love it! In my original diagram, I ran a big column down the primary hull (next to a turbolift shaft), I think with the intention that it was a computer core. Your image makes me realize that I've already made space for the same plaza in my schematic, hooray!

Still, my biggest challenge remains trying to figure out how Spock got to the bridge so fast in the beginning of the 2009 film

Because turbolifts move at plot speed


-Chris

 

[Kemaiku]

It's already been put forward by at least three members here that it's a reasonable bet that there is a diagnoal heavy-g turbolift directly from the shuttlebay to the bridge for emergencies or rapid departures, when bridge/flag officers are coming about via shuttlecraft and can't wait half an hour to get up there.

And as for the tubes, when Khan scans the Enterprise, all the tubes are loaded but piles of torpedoes are waiting on the plaforms outside them that Carol is working away on earlier in the movie.

 

[throwback]

This is based on memory. When Khan beams over the torpedoes, we are shown a shot of one of the torpedoes in its launch tube being beamed out. The schematic seen at Khan's console shows the tubes lined up on either side of what would been engineering in the TMP Enterprise. We are shown the cryopods lying on the floor. Shuttlebay 2 is located forward of the main shuttlebay, on the port side.

Again, from memory, Scotty was not objecting to the launch tubes. I think the tubes were already in place. He was objecting to the fact that he couldn't scan the interior, and, as the torpedoes were powered by a fuel source, if these new weapons had an exotic mixture of fuel, that this mixture could be affected by the radiation, and that there might be an explosive reaction. When he asked the supply officer what was in the tubes, he was told that information was classified.

 

[Gepard]

Another point in favor of a huge Enterprise: in the underwater Nibiru scene, you can clearly make out the windows on the secondary hull and they're as tall as both Kirk and McCoy are when they enter the airlock.

We also get a scene set on some walkways under the senor dome on top of the saucer (former bridge dome in the Prime timeline design) and the enclosed space is easily twice the size of the TOS bridge, if not larger.

There's a good comparison between the Vengeance's saucer and the Trans America building in San Fran during the crash sequence. That should provide a solid reference point for scale once someone can get a screencap of it. (Spoiler: the Vengeance towers over it.)

 

[F. King Daniel]

Here's an HD screencap of the Vengeance's crash. A few seconds earlier we saw that the engineering hull was the size of Alcatraz island.

 

[Gepard]

Here's an HD screencap of the Vengeance's crash. A few seconds earlier we saw that the engineering hull was the size of Alcatraz island.

There's an even better angle earlier when the ship tips nearly vertical; the buildings are right in front of the saucer and you get a pretty solid comparison of height.

EDIT: Where'd that come from, any way?

 

[F. King Daniel]

^I got it from http://www.ncc1701shipyard.com. I'm guessing he got it from one of the trailers, TV spots or behind-the-scenes thingies on Youtube.

 

[Gepard]

^I got it from http://www.ncc1701shipyard.com. I'm guessing he got it from one of the trailers, TV spots or behind-the-scenes thingies on Youtube.

Through the magic of 'alternative means" this is the best capture I could get of the angle in question:

Unfortunately, the top of the frame is blurred out but I recall the TransAmerica building was entirely visible within the frame.

Looks like the saucer is about 1.5 to 2 times the length of the TransAm tower, which is itself 325 meters, or roughly the length of the Prime timeline Enterprise. That puts the saucer anywhere from 488 to 650 meters.

The nuEnterprise is, what, about the length of the Vengance's saucer? Even at 488 meters that's still bigger than the Prime version.

 

[throwback]

Idiotic question. Why didn't Khan set the ship to self-destruct, so that when it crashed into the city, the ship would explode and take out the city?

 

[WarpFactorZ]

Looks like the saucer is about 1.5 to 2 times the length of the TransAm tower, which is itself 325 meters, or roughly the length of the Prime timeline Enterprise. That puts the saucer anywhere from 488 to 650 meters.

The nuEnterprise is, what, about the length of the Vengance's saucer? Even at 488 meters that's still bigger than the Prime version.

When Khan escapes the destroyed bridge, Sulu comments "He just jumped 30m!" I assume that's the size of the gap in the primary hull. Using the new Hot Wheels images as a comparison, Vengeance's saucer would be about 450m across, and the bow-to-stern would be almost 700m (800m from bow to end of nacelles).

 

[Kpnuts]

Hope come only the saucer section is visible in the first shot, did the nacelles and secondary hull fall off?

 

[WarpFactorZ]

Hope come only the saucer section is visible in the first shot, did the nacelles and secondary hull fall off?

The saucer broke off the rest of the ship when it hit the shoreline.