Scaling the Excelsior Filming Model

[Praetor]

Did a bit of math and here's my results. Click to embiggen the image.



We begin with the 622 meter Excelsior, scaled from her window rows. Sized as-is in my file, she's 2363 px. I then scale the Enterprise refit to 2/3 Excelsior size to maintain the relative size difference first put forth at the official, smaller scale. At 1575 px, she's 415 meters long. I scaled the Miranda, TOS Enterprise to match, and for good measure throw in the four-deck saucer version of the Oberth.

Overall:
Excelsior: @ 622 meters/2363 px & 35 decks
Ent refit: @ 415 meters/1575 px & 33 decks
Miranda: @ 326 meters/1240 px & 19 decks (5 in rollbar pod)
Ent TOS: @ 408 meters/1552 px & 33 decks
Oberth: @ 260 meters/988 px & 17 decks

The classic era ships don't look bad at these sizes next to the Galaxy to me, while maintaining internal relative scaling fairly well and also making Galaxy to Excelsior and Galaxy to Oberth seem more like what we saw on TNG. It flies in the face of official convention, but that in and of itself doesn't bother me. What I wonder is, does the preponderance of evidence agree more with the above, or more with the official scaling?

Thoughts and opinions?

 

[blssdwlf]

I agree that the other ships feel bigger than their official dimensions. With the TMP Enterprise some of the scaling does get limited by the circlular docking ports but I think 415m is within reason (although I haven't tried to see how much bigger that opening is relative to a person.)

 

[Dukhat]

The classic era ships don't look bad at these sizes next to the Galaxy to me, while maintaining internal relative scaling fairly well and also making Galaxy to Excelsior and Galaxy to Oberth seem more like what we saw on TNG. It flies in the face of official convention, but that in and of itself doesn't bother me. What I wonder is, does the preponderance of evidence agree more with the above, or more with the official scaling?

Thoughts and opinions?

Actually, this scale ends up working both for the side views of the Tsiolkovsky and the Stargazer when shown flying next to the Enterprise-D.

I also have felt that the Connie was much larger than "officially" stated, and likewise the Oberth too. I'm totally fine with your interpretations here.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Thanks, King. It's kind of that thread's fault I started reconsidering all this.

If I may ask, what have you changed your mind about since then?

The new Enterprise's size. Although I'm very suspicious of the shuttlebay and engineering fitting into that secondary hull, I'm 100% convinced that the (high detail) bridge window, airlocks, deck spacings and window rows all support a 725m size.

Did a bit of math and here's my results. Click to embiggen the image.



We begin with the 622 meter Excelsior, scaled from her window rows. Sized as-is in my file, she's 2363 px. I then scale the Enterprise refit to 2/3 Excelsior size to maintain the relative size difference first put forth at the official, smaller scale. At 1575 px, she's 415 meters long. I scaled the Miranda, TOS Enterprise to match, and for good measure throw in the four-deck saucer version of the Oberth.

Overall:
Excelsior: @ 622 meters/2363 px & 35 decks
Ent refit: @ 415 meters/1575 px & 33 decks
Miranda: @ 326 meters/1240 px & 19 decks (5 in rollbar pod)
Ent TOS: @ 408 meters/1552 px & 33 decks
Oberth: @ 260 meters/988 px & 17 decks

The classic era ships don't look bad at these sizes next to the Galaxy to me, while maintaining internal relative scaling fairly well and also making Galaxy to Excelsior and Galaxy to Oberth seem more like what we saw on TNG. It flies in the face of official convention, but that in and of itself doesn't bother me. What I wonder is, does the preponderance of evidence agree more with the above, or more with the official scaling?

Thoughts and opinions?

The Reliant's saucer rim windows have always looked wrong to me. As if the modeller put one row in the centre of the rim, realized his mistake and crammed another row just underneath to better resemble the Enterprise's two-deck arrangement - only if there were two decks, the upper row would be ankle-high and the lower would be overhead.

The solution, of course, is a three or four-deck saucer rim

 

[Irishman]

True enough. Then again, some of the higher-end estimates for size would allow for two sets of deck numbers, with the set starting at the top of the dorsal reaching Deck 15 right where Kirk sucked vacuum.

The idea of the great ship twisting and turning in order to exit the dock is the one the "Starfleet designers must have had ideas of their own" argument tries to avoid. As for using another door, the ship was parked between "piers" that delineate one-quarter of the interior, one associated with the door the Enterprise used. Again, wriggling around the pier to a different door is a possibility, but of the "against Starfleet intent" category...

Personally, I'd facilitate a larger Excelsior by pretending that the Enterprise was smaller when going through the door.

Timo Saloniemi

The answer is nanotubes!

Make the door as big as is needed for each starship.

 

[Irishman]

1. I know Bill George personally. I can ask him about the intended size next time I see him.
2. As I recall, Bill was tasked to build study models for the Excelsior from concepts by others, and when he finished early he was allowed to make his own concept model for consideration. That's the one Nimoy picked.
3. That's a great theory about the doors, but it's undermined by the fact that we see the Excelsior pointed at the door the Enterprise enters and exits through. http://movies.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/tsfshd/tsfshd0608.jpg

Hey, wait! You better pick that up.

 

[Irishman]

Does anyone have any opinions on the Damn Secondary Hull Chasm?

I'd just like to point out that we don't exactly know whether it was there during the transwarp experiments yet. Since there are no stern views showing the hollow until ST6:TUC, we might speculate that the secondary hull was built "larger than it really need be" in order to accommodate machinery that was removed after the first few movies - either simply because the testing phase was over, or because the machinery had been revealed a failure.

Series production of ships with this now-useless cavity might still commence; plenty of real-world examples of such exist, such as armored vehicles designed to take useless and indeed highly detrimental lead ballast merely because an early model was supposed to accommodate a wireless or an autoloader in the space!

The photographic model features an interesting greeblie in there, but this is virtually never seen. NCC-2000 features a blue "forcefield" glow, but this is unique to that individual vessel. And then there are the differences introduced in the "Flashback" model and the CGI models. Plenty enough excuse to think that the class was constantly being tinkered with, and that engineers well saw the utility of a "useless" expansion space.

Timo Saloniemi

I think you're onto something here, and I'll just piggy-back on it:

Maybe finding utility for this chasm (following the failure of the transwarp project) became a pet project of an engineer or two at SFC. Maybe pulling the original machinery/computers was time-consuming, and the affected Starships remained in service while it was ongoing. Maybe some of the ships had it turned into an open - and extremely well-lit - machinery bay. Maybe some others had it turned into extra bay for ancillary craft, with ONLY forcefield doors (no hardshell doors as it was not intended to be a shirtsleeve environment). There were probably what, 6-10 of this ships built at the TSFS/TUC size? Hell, maybe ship Captains of affected ships had input, and some wanted additional defensive capability, so they got uprated shielding components there, whereas others asked for and got beefier aft/amidship phaser/photon emplacements there.

Further, maybe some of the affected ships had the "chasm" closed off behind bulkheads, but we just don't see them.

Also, I haven't heard yet, but Praetor, this question is for you: are we assuming that the ship class from the TSFS and TUC is the same class as ALL the TNG ships?

 

[Mytran]

Did a bit of math and here's my results. Click to embiggen the image.



We begin with the 622 meter Excelsior, scaled from her window rows. Sized as-is in my file, she's 2363 px. I then scale the Enterprise refit to 2/3 Excelsior size to maintain the relative size difference first put forth at the official, smaller scale. At 1575 px, she's 415 meters long. I scaled the Miranda, TOS Enterprise to match, and for good measure throw in the four-deck saucer version of the Oberth.

Overall:
Excelsior: @ 622 meters/2363 px & 35 decks
Ent refit: @ 415 meters/1575 px & 33 decks
Miranda: @ 326 meters/1240 px & 19 decks (5 in rollbar pod)
Ent TOS: @ 408 meters/1552 px & 33 decks
Oberth: @ 260 meters/988 px & 17 decks

Having the ships be closer in size doesn't look bad at all - more cohesive as a group.

What peeks my interest in particular is (of course) the size of the TOS Enterprise. Recent developments over in the Shuttlebay Pic thread has caused me to rethink how the shuttlebay (as depicted on the show by the 122' scale model) fits into the vessel and how that in turn can lead to recalculating the likely length of the old girl.

For instance (going by the info in the above mentioned thread) if the allocated space behind the pylons is 89' on a 947' ship then expanding it to fit in the 122' shuttlebay miniature will give a ship of 1298'. However, SHAW's work suggests that model as assembled has even less space than that, leading to a vessel of 1450' or more!

So basically, I am just curious as to how you arrived at your own conclusions, and a ship length of 408 metres (1338 feet)

 

[Tallguy]

Recent developments over in the Shuttlebay Pic thread has caused me to rethink how the shuttlebay (as depicted on the show by the 122' scale model) fits into the vessel and how that in turn can lead to recalculating the likely length of the old girl.

Which thread is this? Also: 122 feet! Where did they keep this thing?

 

[Mytran]

Of course! Here is the thread and where it starts to get interesting http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=34793&page=10

It goes without saying that I'm taking the scale of the Hangar Deck (and the accompanying shuttlecraft) as intended, hence the 122' length. I'm also assuming that the support structure for the pylons continue through the secondary hull, instead of the "glued on pylons" approach that seems to be the case for many deck plans - although I can see the attraction for this: be it from magic glue or just really advanced 23rd Century engineering techniques, this latter approach certainly frees up interior space - hence Blsswlf's 1084' length ship complete with a completely show-accurate shuttlebay: http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?p=8645425#post8645425

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

Tangentially, a buddy of mine gave me the new Hot Wheels Excelsior as a birthday gift this week. I quickly searched through my collection of Trek models and toys, and the Furuta Voyager model (assuming 344 meters) comes out at roughly to scale with the Excelsior at 467 meters, or even outside-ish at 511 meters. Still, putting them side by side just shows off how big and voluminous the Intrepid class is compared to the Excelsior; Voyager's 150 crew must each have their own tennis court at that size...

Speaking of which, there is no TV-evidence statement of an Excelsior's crew compliment, do our local experts know how many non-canon estimations there have been? AFAIK the only ones I can think of are the FASA RPG crew count of 800 or so. A DS9 episode states that the USS Grissom had 1250 people aboard when she went down, and the TNG Encyclopedia states that she was an Excelsior class ship, though no onscreen evidence of this was ever seen. Any others?

Mark

 

[F. King Daniel]

Star Station Aurora's old USS Excelsior Ingram-Class Plans postulated a 590.6m Excelsior with a crew of 565 (and a top speed of warp 17!)

 

[The Librarian]

Star Station Aurora's old USS Excelsior Ingram-Class Plans postulated a 590.6m Excelsior with a crew of 565 (and a top speed of warp 17!)

Yeah, but while a nice looking ship the Ingram looks almost nothing like the Excelsior save the general shape of the engineering hull. Why they called it the USS Excelsior is beyond me.

 

[Tallguy]

Star Station Aurora's old USS Excelsior Ingram-Class Plans postulated a 590.6m Excelsior with a crew of 565 (and a top speed of warp 17!)

Yeah, but while a nice looking ship the Ingram looks almost nothing like the Excelsior save the general shape of the engineering hull. Why they called it the USS Excelsior is beyond me.

Because fans wanted Excelsior plans and Todd hated the Excelsior. So he did his own take on the ship.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Really? I'd always assumed they were made after one or two viewings of Search for Spock and with no reference pics.

 

[Robert Comsol]

^^ Actually this had been my first impression, too, once I had purchased these blueprints via mail-order.

There is another and very prominent case where the blueprint artist stated in interviews that he made alterations because he disagreed (though personally I thought that was just the excuse of not having collected more reference materials in the first place).

Bob

 

[Tallguy]

^^ Actually this had been my first impression, too, once I had purchased these blueprints via mail-order.

There is another and very prominent case where the blueprint artist stated in interviews that he made alterations because he disagreed (though personally I thought that was just the excuse of not having collected more reference materials in the first place).

Bob

Franz something or other, yes?

 

[Robert Comsol]

Yes

(BTW, I love your TOS Enterprise VFX screencap compilation at Trekcore!)

Bob

 

[Praetor]

Sorry I've been MIA, folks, work has been kicking my ass.

So basically, I am just curious as to how you arrived at your own conclusions, and a ship length of 408 metres (1338 feet)

I agree it does feel pretty good.

But, my approach was nothing so official, I'm afraid. After I laid out the decks on the refit, I copy/pasted into a new layer and adjusted the outline of the TOS ship to closely match the refit saucer's diameter in a plausible way. Then, I adjusted where the decks fell to where it to where it looked like it made sense.

I'm open to more precise figures, but I feel like the size I've picked for the refit is fairly locked down. I'm still likely to do these alternate sizes for fun... but I'm also still rather dubious as to how official I consider them. I've been re-working my old TOS cutaway on the side, and made a few clever decisions that I'll showcase sometime soon. Suffice it to say, the notion of Excelsior pioneering the integrated SIF has had a great bearing on what I"m doing with the older ships.

Star Station Aurora's old USS Excelsior Ingram-Class Plans postulated a 590.6m Excelsior with a crew of 565 (and a top speed of warp 17!)

Yeah, but while a nice looking ship the Ingram looks almost nothing like the Excelsior save the general shape of the engineering hull. Why they called it the USS Excelsior is beyond me.

Because fans wanted Excelsior plans and Todd hated the Excelsior. So he did his own take on the ship.

I had no idea that was how that happened. Fascinating.

 

[QuinnTV]

Of course! Here is the thread and where it starts to get interesting http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=34793&page=10

Wow. I had totally missed that thread. Glad you linked it here. I went to the first post....and right down the rabbit hole.